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It's the most wonderful time of the year. I'm looking forward to reading everyone's lists and a massive thank you as always to Rarity for putting in significant time and effort into running this thread and to VG for helping her! In keeping with my most treasured GOTY thread traditions I'll be posting my list like a day out from the deadline as I frantically try and play through a bunch of games that have been on my 'check this out' list all year. Mode 7 fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Dec 11, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 10:42
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It's an extremely cool and good list, thank you for posting it. I'm one of those people waiting for 1.0 on World of Horror because with the volume of games I play if I start playing it now I'll never, ever find the time to go back to it when it does eventually update.
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Dec 13, 2022 00:16
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I'm playing games as fast as possible to lock my list down but drat, too many fantastic games this year and too little time. Some of these are going to inevitably wind up in my Honorable Mentions category. along with Elden Ring 
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Dec 22, 2022 06:17
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Tulip posted:I guess I’ve managed to make people cringe by my low-cost solution to making gold from lead that takes 3000 cycles, but mostly its just enchanting and pure. Not for the faint of heart: https://i.imgur.com/pzDY1tz.mp4 This is violence and I love it.
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Dec 26, 2022 08:23
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I'll probably elaborate a bit more on it in my GOTY writeup but I'm surprised at the virulent reaction Neon White's writing seems to elicit from people and have to wonder if this is folks first exposure to visual novel styled writing and character archetypes? I don't think that the plot they tell with those archetypes is particularly novel or engaging, but the general moment to moment writing doesn't seem any worse than say, the Danganronpa series or A.I.
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Dec 27, 2022 14:45
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Rarity posted:I see we've reached the 'everyone rushing to finish their homework in the morning before class' stage of the thread Hey now, I've never written this amount of words for any study I've ever done. So many words. Too many words. 
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Dec 30, 2022 10:03
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It's been a wonderful year for gaming, though my record keeping this year for what I played was way, way worse than my efforts last year. I suspect there's inevitably going to be some smaller, neater experiences that I've left out because I've forgotten them, my memory is like a leaky bucket and the leaks are getting worse moment by moment. I have written way too many words about these games that I enjoyed. How many words? Enough that I've needed to split this over two posts so I don't hit the drat character limit. For Rarity's sanity, and for those of you who don't want to read my word vomit and just want to see what I'm ultimately voting for, here's just the Top 10 list: #10 - The Case of the Golden Idol #9 - Pokemon Violet #8 - Vampire Survivors #7 - Neon White #6 - A Dance of Fire and Ice #5 - Norco #4 - Citizen Sleeper #3 - Pentiment #2 - Return to Monkey Island #1 - Sifu If ye be stout of constitution and brave of heart, read on. Maybe take water breaks. THE HONORABLE MENTIONS #18. Best Shitpost In Video Game Form - Trombone Champ Can an entire game be a shitpost? Yes. Can that shitpost be very fun to play through? Also yes. The real magic is when the modding community gets a hold of it, leading to things like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWJMNYpRikE As someone commented on the video - I don't know why, but I just assumed that they'd be able to play it perfectly. Of course not. #17. Best Game I Was Heavily Invested In For Two Months And Will Probably Never Touch Again - Marvel Snap Marvel Snap got its hooks into me hard. I was initially sceptical about the design of the game. A F2P Marvel-branded card game, utilising the lane/location based mechanics of card games like Smash Up, Gwent or Battleline/Schotten-totten. Nothing I read about the game in the earliest days of its beta seemed particularly engaging, not even the titular Snap cube that acted like the doubling cube in Backgammon, allowing you to take advantage of a strong position to try and milk additional points from your opponent - or bluff them into thinking you had a strong position in the first place. Slowly though, on gaming blogs, YouTube channels I watch and podcasts that I listen to, I started to hear whispers - that Marvel Snap was good, actually. So I grabbed it on my phone and started going through the tutorial. I came up for air two months later. I was playing multiple games daily, theorycrafting decks in my downtime, and any time that I couldn't play Marvel Snap I was hoping that I would have another 5 minutes to knock out a game of Marvel Snap. There's so much satisfying polish in this game. The interface, card animations and card sounds are all fanastic, even if they have all likely been designed to hook your brain into eventually whaling out on this free to play game. Deck size being so dramatically limited makes deck building simple and engaging even for an idiot like me. The drip feed of the first pool of cards comes at a satisfying rate. There's dailies, a battle pass, the usual stuff that Make Number Go Up while you play the game. The matches being so short and so frictionless to jump into means that any time you have a moment to kill, you can quickly be in a game of Marvel Snap. Three events coincided that broke the game's grip on me. First, I moved from the first card pool into the second, and the drip of new cards began to slow. The cracks in the free to play formula began to show as I understood the grinding I'd have to start doing. Either I was going to have to start playing games with decks of all my cheap common cards so that I could level them up so that I could earn new cards at any sort of speed, or I was going to have to resign myself to the fact that playing the deck I enjoyed playing meant that my progress would be significantly slower. The second thing was the devs revealed their monetisation for the game. The prices are beyond predatory and are absolutely ludicrous. It's also a bit grim that they boast that the microtransactions are 'only cosmetic' while glossing over the fact that the way that you boost your level - which is how you unlock new cards - is through the accumulation of these cosmetics. You can't have your cake and eat it too, Second Dinner, gently caress off. The final thing was that I got COVID for the second time (yay!) and was so ill that I couldn't play for a week. By the time I was well enough to game again, whatever hold the game had on me was gone. It ate a signficant amount of my gaming time this year, and I feel to not mention it would be doing it a disservice. There's a lot to like here, I just wish it wasn't a F2P game. #16. Best Games I Haven't Been Able To Finish In Time - River City Girls 2 / Roadwarden / Live A Live I've been enjoying all three of these but even if I had found the time to get all of them finished I'm not sure whether they would have cracked my top 10. Live A Live is a remake of a SNES RPG that I first played the Aeon Genesis fan translation of, back in the heady days of PC emulation where you still had to toggle graphics layers on and off to get through parts of Chrono Trigger because transparencies didn't work. It's a fantastic, compact little RPG with an interesting battle system, great music, and interesting and varied playstyles in each chapter that made it stand out from it's contemporaries. This remake seems extremely solid so far and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes that 90s era of classic JRPGs but hasn't given this one a shot. I'm only through the first two bosses in River City Girls 2 but it feels like a smoother, more polished refinement of the River City Girls formula, though possibly a bit more like River City Girls 1.5 than a fully fledged sequel. That said, the changes they've made have both eased a few of the more painful design points from the original game and improved the combat flow - air combos own. Marian owns. I can't recommend this on any other platform other than PC - for god only knows what reason, the game released locked to 30fps on every platform. The PC Steam version has a beta branch that patches it properly up to 60fps that immediately makes it feel better. Roadwarden is a very cool text based RPG game set on the ignored frontier of a fantasy world. As a Roadwarden your job is to travel the region for 40 days, and while you have an overall mission from your superiors back in the capital, you're given an extremely free hand on how you approach that and whatever else it may be that you want to accomplish out here. This feels very much like a digitised gamebook in the style of Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf. You'll travel around a map spending time as a resource, conscious of both the dangers of being caught out after nightfall and the need for decent shelter. Interactions with characters and monsters have random chance elements that can be improved or bypassed with your character background or certain items you might find on your quest. I'm still in the early game so I'm not sure how this is all going to pan out or how I'll feel about it once it concludes, but I'm enjoying the ride so far. #15. Best Game I'm Not Sure I Actually Liked Very Much - Immortality I don't think Immortality is a very good video game. I think it was an interesting experience that I'd still recommend people try. I also think it has artistic merits, it's just unfortunate that they aren't in the 'game' component or it, or in the game's overarching meta-plot. The latest FMV game from Sam Barlow, you are tasked with delving into the supplied footage to discover the story of what happened to the reclusive actress Marissa Marcel, who starred in three seperate films that were never released. The footage is a mixture of scenes from the three films, interspersed with behind the scenes footage and interviews of the cast and crew, and the player navigates through means of a match cut - click on an item in the scene, and you'll be jumped to another clip that contains a similar item/shot/person. Playing with this mechanic is initially very rewarding. You slowly piece together the plots of the three films through accumulation of their on-screen footage, and as you gather the behind the scenes material you begin to understand more about these character's relationships to each other. Rapidly, however, the limitations of the match cut feature start to show themselves - it's very hard to chase down a narrative lead when you don't have much agency over where a match cut is going to take you. Revealing new clips can become to feel arbitrary and grindy, and at its worst can lead to behaviour like just rotely clicking the clapperboard over and over to try and find new scenes. The second gameplay wrinkle, and I'm going to try and write about this as vaguely as I can so as not to spoil the experience for people who might like to engage with this with a clean slate, is that there's a meta-plot that ties together the three movies and the ultimate mystery of What Happened To Marissa Marcel. The mechanic to trigger this meta-plot can end up feeling extremely fiddly, to the point that even once I understood both the 'tell' the game gives you that there's additional material to be found and the method of doing so that I still ended up struggling to trigger what I knew was there. Where these two frustrations (the directionless or the match cut and the fiddliness of advancing the meta-plot) met for me was the game's ending/credits roll, which seems to have competing theories online as to what triggers it, whether it's obtaining a certain amount of the meta-plot or a certain amount of overall clips. Either way, I found myself in the painful position of knowing drat well what the mystery was, what had happened, and had zero lingering questions - but I couldn't trigger the ending. I had to sit there grinding away extra footage until after viewing a random piece it just triggered. An extremely wet fart of an ending. I suppose it could have easily gone the other way - I've seen commentary online from folks who had barely any idea what was going on and then had the ending trigger before they had much context to actually understand what they were watching. I think in some ways that would have been a better experience for me, I would have been more engaged digging into the rest of the footage if I still had mysteries to answer. Although perhaps not, because I think beyond any and all questions of progression and interface, the biggest thing dragging Immortality down is that it's big meta-plot and the questions it raises about art, fame, the relationship between artist and art and the search for immortality through art.... falls extremely short of any of these lofty goals. It's trite. It's dull. It has nothing original or interesting to say and the 'twist' of the game is utterly cliche and made my eyes roll so hard they tried to escape my head. Character relationships that feel like they would be interesting space to explore are immediately undercut once you understand what's actually going on. So if I didn't like the gameplay, or the plot, why exactly is this on my honorable mentions at all? The real amazing thing about this game for me is that the team behind it shot three partial movies, emulating different genres, and emulating being shot in different time periods. There is so much footage, and so much work that has gone into that footage, producing three interesting movies that I would 100% check out if they were real things that existed. So much of this rests on the shoulders of Manon Gage, whose phenomenal performance not only as Marissa Marcel but as Marissa Marcel playing numerous different roles is the utter highlight of the game for me. The Game Awards don't matter in any conceivable way but she was completely snubbed for the Best Performance award, regardless. The rest of the cast can be a little more hit and miss, though I would say generally lean towards hit, and the faults with the acting involved in the meta-plot are failures of writing, not of performance. These films were very clearly made by people who loved film as a medium and they did an exceptional job with them - it's just a shame they felt the need to awkwardly package it inside a mediocre video game to deliver it. #14. Best Retro Game Collection - Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection The Atari 50 collection sets the standard that I'd love to see all retro compilations hit going forward. It's not the collection of games itself, though with a total of 103 games from across Atari's history there's certainly a ton to dive into for any fans of the company. It's not the emulation quality or features which certainly seem fine. It's the way in which these games have been presented. Atari 50: The Annivesary Collection is, essentially, an interactive digital coffee table book about the history of Atari. When you load it up, you're greeted by a menu screen of chapter titles covering different eras of Atari's history. Select one of these and you'll be taken to a chronological timeline that you can scroll through, containing not only the games but a wealth of production material, clips and interviews with former Atari staff as well as current game developers who were inspired by Atari titles. This is what I want out of retro game collections. Anyone can slap a package of ROMs together and charge for the privilege. Hell, the games themselves are (almost) trivial, in that I can emulate them without any real issue so they're not super likely to drive my purchasing decisions to begin with. Let's be honest, I'm realistically not going to spend much time playing, say, Atari 2600 games for more than five minutes. What keeps me reading through this collection and playing the games contained within it is knowing the context in which these games existed; the history of the company and the people behind them, the stories those people have to tell, and the legacy that those games leave behind in terms of the new generation they inspire - that is the interesting part of video gaming history. Also now I can play Tempest 2000 on my Switch so frankly it was worth it just for that. #13. Best Nostalgia Bait That I Am 1000% Swallowing - TMNT: Shredder's Revenge This year saw an absolute explosion of beat 'em up releases to the point that I can name SIX released this year that I just didn't have time to get around to, which is frankly ridiculous. I've made no secret of my love for this oft unfairly maligned dead genre. Alright, mostly unfairly maligned, there's a lot of crap in the genre, both historically and in terms of more recent endeavours. What I prize in beat 'em ups is mechanically deep gameplay, varied characters and movesets, smooth controls and a general lack of cheap, unavoidable damage bullshit. Streets of Rage 4, for example, is the perfect modern representation of what I want out of the genre. That's uh, never really what Konami's licensed beat 'em ups offered back in the late 80s and early 90s, however. Konami's beat em ups are fast paced with bright, colourful sprites, gorgeous animation and kickass music. Managing waves of enemies, although an important genre staple regardless of developer, seems to take on a frantic pace in Konami's beat 'em ups thanks to a generally low time to kill for basic enemies. You don't need much combo depth when your standard opponent goes down in two or three hits. The best of Konami's efforts here was Turtles in Time, particularly the SNES port TMNT IV: Turtles in Time which I would rent every time my cousin came into town for some of the best couch co-op gameplay on the SNES. TMNT Shredder's Revenge strongly channels nostalgia for the original TMNT arcade game as well as Turtles in Time. How much nostalgia are we talking here? They got the voice actors for the original 1987 Turtles to do voice work for the game. I would have happily played a game that was just 'more Turtles in Time' and while Shredder's Revenge succeeds magnificently at capturing the core gameplay from those games - right down to the inclusion of Sewer Surfin'-esque autoscroller stages - it also does the important work of refining and updating those mechanics with small adjustments and tweaks for modern players. Difficulty levels! Special attacks that don't chew through your health! Online multiplayer! You can actually finally play as April O'Neil, and also she owns! This is a stunningly beautiful game, with so much care and attention to detail shown in both the character and background art, jam packed full of fun and funny moments and cute little details to Turtles history and lore. The soundtrack by Tee Lopes is catchy, memorable and upbeat, a perfect complement to the frenetic onscreen action. I cleared the story mode when it came out, then promptly bumped the difficulty up and ran through arcade mode for good measure. And yet... and yet. If there's a fatal flaw for this game, it's that it hasn't implemented one modernisation that would have given this game more longevity. There's a (fairly simple) scoring system but there's no real ranking system. Being able to shoot for S ranks on stages would have made me much more inclined to revisit it after my trips through the game, but unfortunately without that I feel like I've seen all I need to see from it. At least until my cousin has a spare afternoon to come over and sit down, and we can just lose ourselves in nostalgia and being kids again. #12. Best Low Stakes Relaxing Gaming Experience - Kirby and the Forgotten Land Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a perfect distillation of The Kirby Formula into 3D, and exactly the kind of smooth, pleasant, frictionless platformer experience that Nintendo excels at designing. I've always loved Kirby games with Kirby's Super Star being one of my most played SNES games as a kid. Kirby games have mostly settled into a design pattern of 'easier main mode, hard content locked in the postgame', though there's been a bit of a trend in recent releases for that easy main mode to be a little too easy to the point where it becomes bland and uninspiring. KATFL avoids this a little by having both selectable difficulty levels (Wild Mode is the 'normal' difficulty, giving you less health and throwing a few more enemies at you than the easy mode) and plenty of optional objectives that are not required to beat the game but also require a bit more skill and/or exploration than just simply completing the levels. Series mainstays like the Colosseum mode - a boss-rush mode that traditionally makes up some of the hardest content in the games - is available a lot quicker than many other Kirby titles allow. A set of post-game levels unlocks after the credits roll, there are time attack challenges on the Treasure Quest stages, and a True Final boss behind it all if you're willing to put the time and effort in to get to it. Or you can just chill out and play through the utterly gorgeous, almost diorama-like levels that the game has to offer, that's fine too. There's a lot to drink in here, with lots of beautiful detail in the level environments. The game is such a delight to play, Kirby's movement is responsive and snappy and his moveset, even the flying, translates well to a 3D playspace. The powers are fun and varied, though I do miss the bigger movesets for each power of games like Kirby's Super Star. Evolving them is a fun twist as well, though the power increases for doing so and the aesthetic benefits of doing so both vary wildly. KATFL isn't going to set the world on fire with a radical new interpretation of the Kirby formula, but it's a wonderful refinement of that style and will put a smile on your face all the way through. #11. Best Game That's Just Not For Me - Elden Ring Hoo boy. Souls games are always something that have interested me that I've bounced off every time I've tried them. I tried Dark Souls 2 and it just utterly failed to grab me in any appreciable way. Later down the road I had a PS4 and so I tried Bloodborne which had received rave critical reviews and again, bounced off hard. When Sekiro was released, much of the press surrounding it talked about how it wasn't your typical Souls game. Not wanting to drop the full game price, I pirated it and played for two hours or so and.... was intrigued by the combat. Enough so that I decided to add Sekiro to my wishlist to keep an eye on it for when it went on sale, and as time rolled on I got caught up playing other games. In the lead up to Elden Ring's release, a lot of the same discussions began to surface about how this might be the on-ramp that let people who had previously struggled with the Souls formula join the party and discover the joy of them. I'd argue very strongly that it succeeded. I didn't finish Elden Ring, but I sunk 25 hours in it and for the first time I get it. I get the joy that people get from these games, the careful exploration, the heightened sense of danger and mystery around each corner, the wonderful reward of feeling your ability at the game grow and being able to clown on enemies that an hour ago were gruelling encounters. FromSoft have made a phenomenal game here, the scale of creating an open world of this size is absolutely breathtaking. I'm in a love/hate relationship with it. It's too big for me. There's too much. The way my brain works struggles so mightily with the sheer level of complete and utter freedom that Elden Ring hands you from moment one. I managed to get as far as I did by having friends, forum posts and YouTube videos that helped me map out some clearer short term goals. And I'm going to always remember the sheer pride I felt when taking down Margit for the first time.... but I can't finish this, and I can't see myself sinking the 80 extra hours into it that I'd need to go further in the game. There's little things that really irk me - the smithing stones upgrade mechanic feels really bad, to me. Diving into a 'higher level' area and coming out with a Smithing Stone [4] doesn't help if I desperately need a Smithing Stone [3]. That's a very minor complain overall, though. I think it's mostly an iterative game rather than an innovative one, standing on the shoulders of what FromSoft has built in their past titles. I don't actually think the freedom of Elden Ring's open world is overly revolutionary - it's just that we haven't had CRPGs released with worlds like that in a very, very long time. I'm hopeful with the success of Elden Ring that other devs will reconsider their approach to open world design and break further from the Ubisoft formula. It's been 8 months since I last played Elden Ring, but I find myself thinking about it frequently recently. Maybe some of that is hearing so many GOTY discussions where people have talked through their experiences with it. I've found myself watching lore videos, random snippets of gameplay and thinking that perhaps, one day, I might find myself back in the Lands Between. But there's something else I need to do first. Elden Ring's true gift to me is solidifying for me that I think Sekiro might be exactly what I'm looking for in FromSoft's catalogue. I've bought it in the Steam sale and installed it, and come 2023 I'm going to dive in. So that's it, there's my Honorable Mentions done. Join me in the Top 10 a little later (I'm still finishing up my write up for my Game of the Year) where I at least break up my rambling with some screenshots. Mode 7 fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 02:46
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My honorable mentions are a little upthread, here we go as we dive into the remainder. THE TOP 10 #10. Best Temporary Fix To Ease The Pain Of Not Having More Obra Dinn - The Case of the Golden Idol  I'm going to spend the rest of my gaming life chasing the high I got from playing through Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn in the same year. I've hungrily devoured a number of mystery games since chasing the feeling that those two games gave me and although I've had some fun diversions (shoutout to Tim Sheinman's game Family, a sleuthing game where you're piecing together the history of fake 80s bands and musicians), nothing has really scratched that itch. The Case of the Golden Idol is the closest that I've come. The game presents you with a series of (very) sparsely animated screens of pixel art screens, allowing you to click around to inspect items and characters and read books and notes contained in the game world. As you explore you'll find words that can be clicked on that function as explicit clues, being added to your inventory, for lack of a better word. Once you've collected the clues and analysed the scenes in front of you, it's time to solve it by filling the blanks in a description of what has happened here, who has died, and how.  The 'how' can sometimes be a bit more puzzling than is depicted here This fill-in-the-blank mystery mechanic is both Case of the Golden Idol's biggest strength and biggest weakness. Having a case outline provided, even with the details missing, gives you a starting point to begin to dig in to the mystery. While you might think having all the words from a scene might render actually solving the mystery trivial, the game also relies on a lot of implicit deduction by looking at the scenes in front of you and reasoning out which person belongs in which slot. Some of the words won't be used at all and are there as red herrings, further aiding the feeling of sleuthing your way to a solution.  Each stage will ask something additional besides 'what happened' and 'who was here'. In this case, you need to work out who was playing in each round of cards. In some ways this mitigates the brute forcing that playing Obra Dinn can push you towards. Because that game solves everything in threes, a common strategy can be to lock in two identities that you know for sure and then take a wild stab at a third. Golden Idol's scroll system provides both a more rigid structure and let's you know when you have collected all words in a level, making it much easier to sit back with all the pieces in front of you and put the scenario together. I found the game a bit too easy because of it, outside of a few small moments. One that springs to mind is the dinner plan at one of the murders, which gave me a lot of trouble because I was too focused on what I knew about the participants rather than looking at what the scene was actually showing me. You don't exist diagetically in this world the way you do in Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds and perhaps that's why I'm much cooler on it than either of those games. This distance lends the game a very analogue feel, like it could almost have been released as a pen and paper product. It could certainly be very easily adapted to one. I enjoyed my time with Golden Idol and while it won't loom large in my memory the way that Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds do I'll always be delighted to see more games like it. #09. Best Poorly Performing Mess Of A Game - Pokemon Scarlet/Violet  If you had told me at the start of 2022 that a Pokemon game would make me GOTY list I would have laughed at you incredulously. Pokemon games have been providing increasingly rapidly diminishing returns for me with Gen V being the last high point that I was really on board for. I thought that the games just weren't for me any longer, that my tastes had moved away from them or perhaps that I was just burnt out on the safe, stale, glacial pace of the series. Even the whispers that Pokemon Legends Arceus was something new and different couldn't convince me to try it out. In the pre-release lead up to Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, my initial impression was 'that looks like it runs like garbage'. People started to get their hands on copies early and so many of them repeated the same two things. "Yes, it runs like absolute loving dogshit, just a trash fire of a game." and "This is one of the best Pokemon games ever made." Like a world weary con artist pulled back into the game for one last heist, I picked up a copy at launch and booted it up to see if there was anything left in the series for me. At time of writing I'm about 15 Pokemon away from completing the Pokedex, a feat I haven't accomplished since Pokemon Platinum. This game has managed to lock in two things that I think elevate it to one of the best Pokemon games ever made. Firstly, it has made the process of exploring the world to find new Pokemon entertaining and rewarding in and of itself. Once you get through the first hour or so of the game, it opens up and lets you roam about as you please, giving you multiple different plotlines to pursue and a mount to speed your traversal up. Pokemon are visible in the world rather than hidden encounters, making the world feel a lot better populated and making it easier at a glance to see both the types of Pokemon available in an area as well as make a beeline for something you haven't seen yet. The opening areas of the game are saturated with a number of different types of Pokemon as well, shaking up the old dichotomy of the starting area having this generation's normal/flying bird, normal rodent, and two-evo bug type and nothing else. This loop of heading into a new area and voraciously hoovering up every Pokemon I could get my mitts on carried me headlong through the entire game and never stopped being fun.  Look at Maushold. Look at it! What a drat fine Pokemon. The second thing the game does right is the writing. It's not going to win awards, but it's far above any of the other Pokemon games and great at giving you engaging characters to interact with right out the gate. Nemona is my favourite rival that games have ever given you, because 'neighbour girl who loves Pokemon battling like Goku loves fighting' is a very, very good archetype. Director Clavell is a delight throughout the game, even if I did rapidly age into a pile of bones and dust because I had to go look up what the gently caress cheugy meant. Arven is a tremendous dork and I mean that affectionately, and he and Penny's sniping interactions with each other in the conclusion of the game's main plot are perfect. Rounding this out are the teachers at your school which serves as something of a central hub for the game and the gym leaders and Elite Four members who are all given actual personalities.  Larry is a mood. And Larry, who is now my favourite gym leader, hands down. 'Favourite gym leader' was not ever something I thought I'd have opinions on. None of this even starts to mention the competitive battling element which is far more accessible than ever before. I've played some ranked doubles battles with a rental team and had a blast! I hope this game gets DLC the way the prior generation did, because I would love for a little bit more of this game once I get that Pokedex finalised. If you're like me and have been out of love with Pokemon for a long time, come back and give this one a shot. Yes, it's a janky, ugly, poorly performing mess - and that doesn't matter in the slightest. #08. Best "Just One More Round Then I'll Write My GOTY List" - Vampire Survivors  I picked up Vampire Survivors when it first came out in early access because it was dirt cheap and there was some good buzz about it in the new releases thread. I played around ten hours of it, loved it, and moved on with other games throughout the year. Turns out the dev has been busy while I was paying attention to other things because the amount of content that has been crammed into this, and I cannot stress this enough, unbelievably low priced game is staggering. The game is very simple. Pick a character. Pick a map. Your character fires their weapons automatically, you move them around the infinitely scrolling map taking out waves of enemies and picking up the exp they drop in the form of gems. When you level up, you power up one of your existing weapons or grab a new one or a passive power. Bigger enemies drop chests that will level up one - or if lucky, several - of your existing weapons. Survive for 30 minutes to clear the stage. There are strategies to try, secrets to unlock, achievements to shoot for, challenges to engage with if you want them. Or you can just lose yourself in the reflexive dodging of enemies and let your brain enjoy the soothing waves of Number Go Up. The game is available for a pittance and has also been released on mobiles for free with entirely optional ad support.  It is very hard to show in screenshots why this is so addictive. My friend grabbed me the DLC as a birthday present. Installing it seemed to wipe my save file in the process so I had to start from scratch. I did not care in the slightest. I thought Marvel Snap had its hooks in me? Marvel Snap is like a little baby compared to Vampire Survivors. The core loop in this game is dopamine hits given raw form. The programmer formerly worked in the casino industry and yeah, you can tell. Whether it's the build in power of your character until your storm of bullets is demolishing hordes of enemies, the satisfying jangle of picking up experience gems, or the blatantly slot-machine-esque reels spinning opening a weapon upgrade chest, every moment of the gameplay loop feels enticing. There are games on my list this year that pushed my skills and reactions to their limit. There are games that left me thinking about them long after I finished playing them, or that had story turns that caused me to gasp out loud. Vampire Survivor isn't like any of those games. Vampire Survivor is what I played to just relax and bliss out in the comfort of a simple game for a little while. Sometimes, that's enough. #07. Best Game For Freaks - Neon White  Developer Ben Esposito said of this game "In 2018, I released Donut County, a wholesome game for kids and adults alike. After that, I decided that my next game will not be for kids or adults. It'll be a game for freaks." Guess I'm a freak then. A genre blend of anime-as-gently caress visual novel and movement based FPS speedrunning, in Neon White you play White, an amnesiac former assassin trying to earn redemption in heaven by clearing out demons infesting areas of it as fast as possible, alongside a cast of other sinners who seem to both know your identity and have a relationship to you. That might sound like a supremely dumb anime story and yeah, it is! Between anime I've watched and visual novels I've played I think maybe I'm just immune to this sort of writing at this point? There's been a lot of criticism of Neon White's writing and visual novel elements. I mentioned upthread that the writing here doesn't feel particularly egregious to me, it's no more cringe than Danganronpa or A.I. - though depending on what you think of those games I suppose I might be damning it all the more.  There are enough belts in these character designs to satisfy even Nomura. It doesn't matter though, the visual novel elements are just window dressing for the gameplay of the game and you can skip them with absolutely no consequences whatsoever. You're here for the gameplay, and the gameplay is perfection. Levels are short, sweet and have a straightforward goal. Get from the start to the end, killing every demon in the level on the way, and do it as fast as possible. Weapons are given to you in the form of cards, you can hold two types of cards at a time and up to three of each of those types. Left click fires them like a weapon and they vanish once the ammo is expended. Right clicking instantly discards the card and triggers its movement ability. This is where Neon White gets absolutely delicious. Your pistol is a double jump. Your rifle is a straight line dash. Your submachine gun is a ground pound. On and on the game introduces you to a selection of weapons and asks you to incorporate it into your playstyle, each of their discard abilities frictionlessly enhancing your toolbox of traversal options. You can't ignore their primary fire either though, the solution to fast times on several of the levels is to know when to just shoot something along the way, or how to balance shots and powers so that you get everything you need out of a single card. This is such a wonderfully simple concept and it's elevated to greatness by the insight system - as you replay the level you earn ranks of insight that begins to give you things like a speedrun ghost of your last playthrough, or a hint for a shortcut in the level itself - and by the design of the levels themselves. This game has the best level design in anything I've seen all year, I can only imagine the challenge that it must have been tuning these. Level architecture can be sparse and sprawling, tightly packed and dense, or wildly transitioning between these two extremes but it's always wonderfully clear and legible. There was never a point in my time with Neon White where I wasn't sure where it was that I needed to go. The signposting within these level designs, whether it's by leading geometry elements like ramps and windows or whether it's the placement of weapon pickups and demons, is immaculate.  This gif was yoinked from the Neon White thread here on SA and is what sold me on trying the game. Although I watch speedrunning I've never been good at it myself and definitely haven't ever had much success with advanced FPS movement techniques like rocket jumping. This game excels at teaching you how to play it as you go, however, to the point that by the end even my slow as hell gold medal times made me feel like absolute badass. The levels start straightforward and slowly build in complexity as the game progresses, stringing together different concepts that the game has taught you and asking you to execute them flawlessly and above all else, quickly. What could have been a clunky or frustrating experience is avoided by the ability to instantly restart at any point. It takes only half a second to be launching back into the level from the start again for another, hopefully more successful run. More than the inbuilt medal ranking system, the best motivation for improvement for me came from the social scoreboards that show you the times of others on your friends list. This was a late entry on to my GOTY list and I'm so glad that I gave it a shot. #06. Best Game I Don't Think I Have The Skills To Finish - A Dance of Fire and Ice  I think the last rhythm game that I got massively, massively into was Elite Beat Agents on the DS, a game that I still remember with a deep fondness to this day. Approachable and with fantastic theming, the game sank its hooks into me in a way that few rhythm games have ever managed. I embarked on some discovery this year, sparked by playing a bunch of Taiko no Tatsujin at a local arcade, trying out a number of different rhythm games to see if anything could ignite that same interest in me. A Dance of Fire and Ice is what came the closest. Incredibly elegantly designed, ADOFAI is a single button rhythm game where you control two orbs that spin around each other, proceeding along a track made out of the beats of the song. You press a button in time with the beat in order to move along the track, and if you're too far off the beat, you die instantly. While that sounds incredibly punishing, it's mitigated by a few factors. First, levels/songs are quite short, and longer ones do have some checkpointing so that you don't need to go from the very beginning while you're trying to progress. Secondly, because the track you move along is also the note chart, and the twists and turns of the track determine the timing that you need to hit the button on, I also found these charts super readable. Finally, the game does a fantastic job of introducing concepts to you gradually. Each world consists of a number of short 'snippet' levels that introduce a concept and test you on it, with the final level of the world being an actual song that challenges you to string together everything that you've just learned. At this point just linking a video example of one of my favourite levels (that I still can't beat, by the way, I'm just having a great time banging my head against it) might be an easier way of showing how the game works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5oC39ybi0I I don't know that I'll ever manage to finish the last couple of tracks in ADOFAI, let alone the Neo Cosmos DLC that was released this year that ramps up to some absolutely insane levels, and plays around with the fundamenetal formula of the game. That doesn't matter, though, the process of slowly grinding my way through successive tracks has been an incredible journey. The base game is like $5 at the moment on Steam, it's also available on Android/iOS, and if you're still on the fence you can try an online demo version over on itch.io here. It was also a part of the Bundle for Ukraine so a lot of you may already own it and just haven't gotten around to trying it yet! Very much the 'more people should try this game out' recommendation off my list besides my GOTY pick. #05. Best Evocation Of Nostalgia For A Place I've Never Been - Norco  Norco is a point and click adventure game that aesthetically and stylistically borrows heavily from first person adventure games like Snatcher. It blends weird fiction, near-future cyberpunk and Southern Gothic narrative into an exploration of topics ranging from the demolition of communities by the forces of parasitic capitalism, the nature of belief and spirituality, and the radicalisation of disenfranchised youth.  Norco's pixel art has some moments of haunting industrial beauty... You play as Kay, returning to the town of Norco, Louisiana after the death of your mother from cancer and subsequent disappearance of your brother. As you chase down leads as to what might have happened to your brother with the aid of your family's security robot, you reflect on your own childhood in this place and how it shaped your parents, your brother and yourself. Before too long this narrative will interweave as sequences where you play as Kay's mother Catherine, exploring her final days as she participates in gig economy work to try and help pay the exhorbitant cost of her medical care while chasing down a mystery of her own. Everything culminates in a grand union of what feels like a waking Gothic nightmare as the weird fiction and cyberpunk dystopian elements come crashing together into a suitably bleak ending. The end of the game is abrupt, nasty and not great about providing a sense of closure to the story being told here. I wouldn't have it any other way, it suits the genre and the atmosphere that Norco is channeling perfectly. Norco's gameplay does feature some light puzzle solving, and even some extremely rudimentary and simplistic combat encounters, but most of the puzzle design is simply taking an item from one location to another and is rarely arduous or monotonous in nature. I think enough of my interest was captured by the writing alone that this could have been a more visual novel styled experience, but the puzzle elements never feel like they're intruding over the top of the narrative.  Everybody like Lucky. I like Lucky. This has been a fantastic year for narrative games. Norco's prose can tend towards being languid and overflowery in places and not all of the comedic tonal shifts peppered in its writing land, so I ended up ranking it lower than a couple of the other games I played this year. I can't stress enough however that if you like narrative adventure games, I think this is an essential game to play from this year alongside Citizen Sleeper and Pentiment. The game has such an incredible sense of place in its writing. I've never been to Norco, Louisiana, but I've spent a lot of time in small, rural towns. I've known people who inhabit those towns who are reflections of the characters in Norco, and I've seen the impact of the decision of large corporations on those small communities. Everything written here feels incredibly true to life. It's a short game, clocking in at around 5 hours for a playthrough, and it's on Game Pass - check it out. For anyone who already played the game as well, I discovered while collecting my thoughts for this writeup that the devs have released what they've termed a 'lore app' for Norco called Ditch Whit, containing a bit more material relating to the game's lore and ending. You can find it here over at their itch.io page. #04. Best Surviving Under Capitalism Simulator - Citizen Sleeper  The hopeful, optimistic counterpoint to Norco's grimy cynicism. In Citizen Sleeper you play a Sleeper, an artificially constructed body implanted with an imprint of a debtor's memories, built to work as a slave to pay off their debt. You escape and arrive at the Eye, a space station desperately ekeing out an existence on the fringes, a refuge for the lost, the downtrodden and those with something to hide. Legally, you're considered corporate property, not a person, and without the proprietary drugs that your corporate owners provide your body is beginning to decay. How do you survive? Who do you trust? Ultimately, if you are able to seize a life for yourself, what do you want that life to look like? The game has gorgeous art by comic artist Guillaume Singelin and a soft, mellow and frequently haunting OST by Amos Roddy. Although the art is mostly focused on character portraits and much of the detailed description of the Eye is given through text, it and the excellent music help paint a vivid depiction of the Eye as a fragile light in the darkness, even as you navigate it from the zoomed out remove of an overworld map. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn-Qinpb5R8 Matsutake, from the Citizen Sleeper OST. My favourite track on the album. The real star of Citizen Sleeper however, is the tight bond between it's narrative and mechanics in the form of its incredibly smart dice allocation system inspired by tabletop roleplaying games. When you wake up, you roll a number of dice. The number of dice you roll is dependent on the condition your body is in - the more dire your situation, the fewer dice you'll have to work with. Completing tasks around the station, whether it be performing odd jobs for cash or advancing goals for yourself or other characters that you've encountered, will require you to allocate dice to them. Some tasks require numbers in certain ranges, others will ask for specific numbers, but many are random chances that are more favourable towards you the higher the number of the die that you allocate.  This game has a style and a vibe that I am utterly in love with. Very quickly as you begin the game you'll work out some extremely urgent priorities. First, your body is falling apart. You need medicine to stave off the decay, and that medicine isn't cheap. Secondly, you're being hunted by a bounty hunter determined to haul you back to your corporate owners for a payday, and you need to work out how to deal with it. Adding to this pressure, many tasks have a timing component that operates on a 'clock' system, where a circular gauge increments either through your successes or failures or simply by the passage of time. Successful completion of these clocks brings rewards and new opportunities, failing these clocks by running out of time or failing too often may saddle you with additional problems, and your position is precarious as it is. This mechanical heart underpins Citizen Sleeper's great character writing. As you explore the station you will meet a number of characters and find opportunities to build relationships with them. Norco shows the gaping hole left in an individual, a family and a community by the ravages of capitalism but doesn't have much to say on how to persist under it, or offer solutions for change. Citizen Sleeper at its core posits that the connections we forge with each other are the way forward, that opening ourselves to the people around us and working together is how we build lives for ourselves. But that has to be balanced with the relentless pressures of those same lives. You have four dice today, and you need two of them already to make sure you can afford medicine tomorrow, or you're going to drop to only three of them. How do you spend those last two die? Can you spare the time to help a friend renovate their bar when that bounty hunter is only two days off your trail?  Also, there's a cat. This balancing act works wonderfully for the first two thirds of the game. Unfortunately, by the last third of the game I'd advanced my Sleeper's skills enough that maintaining my overall condition was trivial. This immediately lifted any sense of pressure on me, and while I was still happy exploring the branches of the narrative because I thoroughly enjoyed both the world and the characters in it, I found myself missing the tight mechanical and narrative pairing that had pulled me so dramatically into the game at it's start. The other unfortunate blemish on my experience was that Citizen Sleeper has multiple endings, essentially giving you various 'off ramps' from the story as you unlock the requirements to take them, and the conditions for the ending I was chasing took me a while to unlock. So long in fact that I had pretty much exhausted the rest of the game's content in getting there, in a way that had begun to feel artificial. None of this, or some occasional mild narrative hiccups caused by the non-linearity possible in the game, was enough to dampen my enjoyment of the time I spent in this world. The developers have started adding some additional content post-launch, but given that I felt that the story of my Sleeper had concluded in a place that I was happy with, I'm not sure I'll want to come back to experience it. But I still find myself thinking about my playthrough, about the friendships that I forged and the ones that turned sour and bitter. About the choices that I didn't make, the paths I didn't walk and the fine tightrope walk of the early game where just managing to feed myself for the day felt like a massive accomplishment. I think I'll still be thinking about the game for some time to come. #03. Best Narrative Game In A Year Of Incredible Narrative Games - Pentiment Norco was my #3 game of this year until I played Citizen Sleeper. Citizen Sleeper was my #3 game of this year until I played Pentiment . As Andreas Maler, journeyman artist in 16th century Bavaria, work on your masterpiece illustration for an illuminated manuscript and get to know the colourful characters inhabiting the village of Tassing - and it's accompanying abbey of Kiersau! Exchange gossip with the peasants around the village, flirt with the nuns, correct the stuffy sacristan on their faulty usage of the word decimate, share meals with the people you have befriended and their families. And when a visiting nobleman turns up dead, work out which of those people you want to throw to the wolves to be executed. And do it quickly. Justice arrives swiftly, and if you don't have a persuasive case, the powers that be will execute your friend and mentor just to make the problem go away. Hope you're confident in your answer, because there are going to be repercussions from it all the way to the ending of the game. I can't sugar coat it, the gameplay of Pentiment consists of walking around, talking to people, and occasionally undergoing skill checks informed by your characters backgrounds, things you may or may not have discovered, and things you may or may not have said to people. If you don't like reading - and a lot of reading at that - you are going to struggle with Pentiment. Also at this point you probably hate me because we're something like 9140 words into my GOTY list and I'm still not done, and I don't apologise for it. Please play Pentiment anyway. Thankfully, easing the burden of all that reading is a unique art-style based on medieval illuminated manuscripts and early printed woodcuts. It's easy on the eyes, characters are distinct and memorable at a glance, and you'll rapidly get a good feel for the layout of Tassing, Kiersau and their surrounds. There's an absolute ton of delightful little touches all themed as though the game itself is an illuminated manuscript. Loading transitions are accompanied by page turns. Words that may be unfamiliar are highlighted, clicking on them zooms back out from the screen a little to reveal the surrounding book, showing ever changing marginalia that acts as an explanatory glossary. The same thing can be done with character names to display an image of their face, allowing you to refresh your memory of who's who around town and the abbey.  Come for the glossary, stay for the weird little beasties. You don't have time to do everything you'll want to do in Pentiment. While you can generally walk around and talk to a large number of people, sooner or later you will likely find multiple activities that will require a chunk of time out of your day to complete. Do you sneak into the abbey to inspect the corpse post-mortem? Do you have lunch with one of the peasant families in the village in the hope that they can tell you more about the feuds running through the town? You'll only have time to do one, and the clock is counting down rapidly before you'll be out of time to investigate altogether. One of the greatest magic tricks that Pentiment pulls over and over is giving you the feeling that if you just had one more day, or one more moment, you might have found that extra, definitive piece of evidence you needed to understand everything. But you're 90% sure you know the culprit. Or at least like, 70%. 60% at worst. Right?  This is going to turn out great for everyone involved. I don't think it's chance that three of my favourite narrative games this year have all had a hyper-local focus showing the impact of internal and external forces on communities. This is apparently my narrative catnip and I'd be good with more games exploring this pretty much forever. In Pentiment's case, the game spans 25 years of history which means that as you play through the game, unravelling its multiple mysteries, you get to see the impact of the actions of both yourself and others. Characters age, some of them die, and their surviving relatives grieve. Some people are trapped in the same cycles as their parents. Some manage to find a way to break out of them. Throughout its narrative Pentiment engages with a number of different themes. The nature of faith; the strength and comfort that it provides people, and what happens when people lose it. The impact and lasting effects of art and the role of the artist in its creation, a subject that it certainly covers much more adeptly than, say, Immortality. History, and the past, and the way that it can become malleable in the retelling or distorted depending on who is writing it. None of them feel underbaked or underserved by the text and while discovering the answers to the central mystery of Pentiment is certainly enough to keep you playing through the end of the game the real reward for me was simply to see the way Tassing and its inhabitants - and the player character, too - changed over time while being forged in a crucible of societal upheaval. I moused over the wrong spoiler in the Pentiment thread and had an extremely large part of the main mystery spoiled for me early - I cannot stress enough how little it mattered. It was never the point, and the journey there still had moments that left me slack-jawed in surprise. I'll be doing more playthroughs of Pentiment in 2023, wanting to see how things unfold as I make different choices and drinking in more of the historical detail. It's prompted me to add some books to my nonfiction reading list about this period of history, too. #02. Best Game That I Never Thought Would Exist And Is Everything I Wanted - Return to Monkey Island  I play through The Secret of Monkey Island at least once every year. It's one of my favourite ever made and was extremely formative for me, leading to a love of the adventure game genre that persists to this day. I'm also deeply fond of Monkey Island 2, and The Curse of Monkey Island, both of which are incredibly good games even though nothing can quite replicate the original for me. Tales of Monkey Island is enjoyable as well! And Escape from Monkey Island..... uh, well it has some okay moments in it. After the lukewarm reception that Tales of Monkey Island received and the collapse of Telltale Games, I figured that was pretty much it for Monkey Island. The rights were tied up with Disney who had shown no inclination to do anything with them. An then on April Fools, Ron Gilbert announced that he was going to make another Monkey Island game. Three days later he dropped a teaser trailer confirming it was real. He and Dave Grossman would be making a new Monkey Island game and that it would be releasing later in the year. I teared up a little seeing the teaser trailer, I won't lie. The point that I'm making here is that I really, really love the Monkey Island series. There's no chance in hell that I could even pretend to analyse this game objectively. Playing once again as Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate, you'll travel the Caribbean in search of an answer to the biggest question of them all. What actually is the Secret of Monkey Island, anyway? With a new game comes a new art style, one that generated so much backlash from lovely people when it was revealed that Gilbert shut off the comments on his blog and said he'd no longer share any insights into the development of it because people were being so abusive. The internet is wonderful sometimes. Gilbert later explained his reluctance to do the game in pixel art and have it be seen as a throwback or retro game because of it, and I think it was a good decision. The storybook aesthetic suits the story that Return to Monkey Island is telling, and looks great in motion. The audio is phenomenal too; between returning composers Michael Land, Clint Bajakian and Peter McConnell as well as the returning voice acting cast headed up by Dominic Aramato as Guybrush (though sadly without Earl Boen as LeChuck as he's now retired), the game sounds like a Monkey Island game through and through.  It's Wally! Hi Wally! While the gameplay is your standard point and click fare, Return to Monkey Island has done some fantastic modernisation however that makes it emminently approachable even if you don't have much of a history with these kinds of games. You can select your puzzle difficulty at the start of the adventure, and Guybrush carries a hint book on him at all times that can give you a series of nudges if you're stuck on how to get through a particular puzzle. I didn't need it, because my gaming skills are maximum, but it's a smart and sensible thing to include. The writing is the game remains light, whimsical and genuinely funny as always - the result of Guybrush's quest to get a mop makes me laugh just remembering it. The game's plot acts unmistakably as a conclusion of everything that has come before it in the series. I think inevitably a number of people are probably going to be dissapointed by the nature of it and the lack of definitive answers that it provides, but that hardly comes out of nowhere. A number of folks warn Guybrush over the course of his journey that discovering the Secret of Monkey Island might ultimately prove unsatisfying and unfulfilling when it's something he's spent his life chasing. Guybrush however is desperate to recapture what he feels is the fading glory of his youthful adventures, and presses on heedless of the cost to himself or those around him. The comparison is easy to draw between his journey and the metatexual one of the challenge that lies ahead of two designers returning to this game series 31 years later, carrying the weight of fan expectations that have built up over this time. This comparison is made explicit by a very heartfelt letter from the developers to the players that unlocks once you complete the game, and again I teared up a little from reading it. This isn't Ron Gilbert's sequel to Monkey Island 2. How could it ever possibly be? It's been 31 years, and he and Dave Grossman are different people than they were back then. Time waits for nobody. It is, however, a wonderful conclusion to the series. Getting to revisit the world of Monkey Island felt like coming home and seeing old friends again.  No notes. I love this game so much. When I write my GOTY lists, what I'm usually trying to do is communicate why I felt so strongly about this game, the things that I think are it's greatest strengths or at least most interesting points, all carefully calcuated so that you might go 'huh I'll go play that too.' Not Return of Monkey Island. I don't care if you play this or not. This was a game made just for me, and it was perfect. #01. Game of the Year - Sifu  It was kind of weird picking up Sifu on the 8th of February, playing it for an hour and immediately just knowing deep in my bones and soul that this was going to be my Game of the Year and very likely nothing was going to top it. I'm going to guess the sensation is not unfamiliar to a number of you who played Elden Ring. Sifu is a playable kung fu film. Your father is murdered by a group of his students who seek to harness the mystical powers that he guards. You are left for dead, saved by a magical talisman that you were holding at the time of your death. After spending 8 years training and researching your targets, you begin to embark on your quest for revenge. Your mystical talisman grants you multiple 'lives' to work with, but at a cost - you age every time you die, the more times you die in rapid succession the quicker you age up, and the older you get the less health you have but the more damage you do, turning you into a glass cannon. Once you reach age 70, your next death is permanent. Combat in Sifu is fast and punishing. Groups of enemies will fan out to surround you and cut off retreat options, and taking hits will rapidly see your health bar plummet. Dodging attacks is almost always the better option than just blocking them, and as you become proficient at the game you end up choreographing your own cinematic fight scenes, dodging and weaving around your adversaries as you snatch up improvised weapons, lunging out at one or two enemies to give yourself breathing room before delivering an instant-kill strike against a third whom you've staggered. https://i.imgur.com/E1CC3vQ.mp4 Is there ever a game where catching a weapon and tossing it back feels bad? No. The game definitely doesn't pull its punches - you'll die, and die a lot, as you work through its levels. And if none of the regular enemies do you in, learning the boss patterns certainly will. The second boss of the game, Sean, was somewhat of an infamous stumbling block for a number of players to the point where he was tuned down a little bit. Even after the balancing, he can still kill you extremely quickly if you misread an attack. The levels and environments are beautiful, with each stage taking you through a 'normal' environment - an apartment block, a night club, an art gallery, a corporate tower - before twisting and transitioning into a magical space. The greenhouse in the apartment block becomes a forest. The night club becomes an ancient, burning city. The peak of this is the art gallery where you find yourself transitioning between shifting paintings and exhibits as you approach the boss - one of my favourite visual designs for a level this year. https://i.imgur.com/0nBUZHj.mp4 Part of the latter half of the incredible art gallery level There's some inherent flaws to Sifu's quasi-roguelike design that, coupled with it's extremely uncompromising 'git gud or die' design philosophy, some people are going to find frustrating. Shortcuts are unlockable in each level, reducing replay time as you make progress through both the level and the game, as the keys for some of these shortcuts will be found in other levels. They come at a cost however - each level has shrines that allow you to gain passive bonuses like extra health, and if you're skipping fights you're skipping XP. New moves can only be learnt on death and only last for a run, unless you buy them a total of five times at which point they're permanent unlocks. I have played this game inside and out and this still feels like a messy, unsatisfying and difficult to explain system. If you persist though, if you stick it out, the rewards are absolutely transcendent. There's been a kung fu cinema training montage going on this entire time and it turns out that it's you getting good at the game. Suddenly, fights that you were struggling through you breeze through in moments. Boss fights that were frantic, scrappy affairs become you systemically picking apart the holes in your powerful opponents defence. Once you make it to the end of the game, you're given two immediate challenges - replaying to get the true ending, requiring you to add an extra layer of difficulty to the already challenging boss fights by sparing your opponents, and trying to complete a run at a lower age. For the record I first limped past the finish line at 67 which was cutting it pretty drat close. It's interesting reflecting on my top 10 as I finally write up my entry for the Game of the Year. There's definitely a strong narrative / adventure game bias, but I don't think it's a mistake that along with Sifu two other games here are A Dance of Fire and Ice and Neon White, both of which are games that reward mastery of their gameplay with wonderfully rewarding and transporting flow state experiences. I get that a game like this can be a hard sell. Developers Sloclap have tried to make it a little easier to gel with through post-launch updates - there's a little better tutorialisation that was added to the game after launch though it's still weak compared to the way that something like Neon White teaches you its concepts. They've done balance adjustments and passes on a number of pain points, and added both an easier difficulty to allow people to find their footing with the game as well as higher difficulties for those who have mastered what the game has to throw at them. I hope that it can encourage more people to take the plunge. Simply, I think this is one of the greatest beat 'em up games ever made, and it's my Game of the Year.
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Dec 31, 2022 04:07
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I've never been able to game while high but I keep trying and one day I'm going to find the right game. I should try Vampire Survivors...
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Dec 31, 2022 09:52
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:(there are two other games that weren't on anyone's lists but I know I need to play) Now I'm curious. What are the two outliers? Edit: You already answered, nevermind!
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Jan 2, 2023 01:20
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We played Spirou as part of the Game Boy Game Club over in Retro Games. It's not a great game but the OST slaps - composer Alberto Gonzalez was a wizard at getting cool music out of the GB and GBC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRZ-J6krc_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9uu2Uj-Bs Mode 7 fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Jan 2, 2023 |
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Jan 2, 2023 06:32
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haveblue posted:I have no idea what its name is but I love the track that plays in Violet’s sidequests It's called Rigged Game. Violet's angry growl at 2:07 always made me jump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVfiWU5oAck One of Violet's sidequests also lead to one of my favourite jokes at the player's expense from this year that wasn't Elden Ring trap design: 
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Jan 4, 2023 04:56
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Rarity posted:Woke up this morning and the sky looks a little brighter, the birds are singing a little louder, the world seems a little sweeter. Feels like it's GOTY day Gonna stay up late and 
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Jan 7, 2023 09:15
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*banging knife and fork on the table* Sifu! Sifu!
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Jan 7, 2023 14:04
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Very surprised TMNT Shredder's Revenge didn't make the cut, and very excited to see how the list shakes out from here.
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Jan 7, 2023 15:20
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Escobarbarian posted:For the record, my prediction for the top 5 (I don’t know the results Rarity gave me the spreadsheet with the top 75 cut out) are Elden Ring, Triangle Strategy, Xenoblade 3, Pentiment, Vampire Survivors (dunno about the order except the #1 of course) My prediction would be fairly similar but replace Triangle Strategy with God of War: Ragnarok
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Jan 7, 2023 15:22
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I wish I played Perfect Tides last year, but I've added it to my already staggering backlog to try and get through it at some point this year.
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Jan 7, 2023 15:34
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As much as I'd love to stay up for the rest of the countdown, it's already approaching 1:30am here in Aus so I'm bowing out. Thank you Rarity and VG for all your efforts in making this the most wonderful thread every year, looking forward to catching up on the results after some sleep!
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Jan 7, 2023 15:49
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I wish Sifu had ranked higher but I know that it being tied to the Epic store is a complete nonstarter for a number of people. I'd hope its release on Steam (edit: And Xbox!) this year will prompt more people to give it a shot but realistically it's been out for PS4 and 5/Switch and that didn't seem to move the needle so I'm unsure how much Steam is going to help. I'm surprised to see such a gap between Norco and Citizen Sleeper, and to see Citizen Sleeper come in as low as it did. Norco was obviously more of an indie pick this year than I had thought and I think perhaps my impression of how well it had penetrated general gaming consciousness was just a reflection of most of the gaming sources I follow gushing over it because they're generally into those kinds of weird narrative adventures already. The biggest surprise out of the list for me though was God of War Ragnarok clocking in at #8. I think this might have been the opposite effect - gaming outlets have been shouting to the heavens about this game non-stop and so I had assumed it was going into the Top 5 at least. The fact that it's a Sony exclusive probably dampens its mass appeal though. At any rate, any and all of my grumpiness at my other favourite games coming in so low is more than made up for by Pentiment being #2 - clearly I'd underestimated it! Thanks once again to Rarity and VG for running the thread, to all the posters who listed their best games this year whether they were short one-liners or massive effort posts, and to the cool statsgoons doing analysis after the fact. Edit: Corrected platforms! Mode 7 fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jan 8, 2023 |
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Jan 8, 2023 01:34
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Oh wow, I thought it had an Xbox release already. I wonder if this means it'll turn up on Game Pass. It seems like a good candidate for it. Edit: It does appear to be coming to Game Pass, cool!
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Jan 8, 2023 01:41
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I finished my first playthrough of Roadwarden last night and I wish I'd managed to finish it up in December because if I had it absolutely would have gone into my top 10. Ah well.
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Jan 9, 2023 00:33
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rope kid posted:Thanks, goons. Thoons. Listening to the interview with Rob Zacny that you, Dr. Kern, and Dr. Black did for Waypoint right now and it's good stuff (your own prior interview with Rob was also great). Thanks for Pentiment, it's a drat special game.
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Jan 9, 2023 02:33
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