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I love these threads. Thank you so much for running it this year, VG. I think this year more than any other I've really just embraced my love of gaming. I haven't spent as much of this year watching TV series or movies, but as of December 28th when I started to finalise this list I've finished 56 games this year, and played countless others that I couldn't hope to remember or list if I tried. I plan next year to keep even more comprehensive notes, though - solidifying this into a locked down list has been a pain. For the purposes of my Game of the Year list, I have two criteria I use. First, the game needs to have released in 2023; I'll occasionally tweak 'release date' to suit my purposes by counting a substantial DLC release or significant port/remake as making the game eligible if it came out this year, but generally I'm trying to limit my focus to the games of the year that was. Second, I need to have either finished the game or else played a significant enough amount that I feel like I have a firm grasp on it. I've got a wandering attention span and I'm generally inclined these days to just drop games that I'm done with whether I've seen the end or not, but I also don't want to just throw out snap judgements of stuff that I played for an hour and never touched again. I've had to split this list in two to fit the character limit. Goddamn. Here's my spoilered list for VG to make things simple, otherwise read on for my full thoughts. 10 - Bomb Rush Cyberfunk 9 - Cocoon 8 - Humanity 7 - A Highland Song 6 - Venba 5 - Hi-Fi Rush 4 - Street Fighter 6 3 - Against the Storm 2 - Baldur's Gate 3 1 - The Making of Karateka #10 Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (PC, Switch, PS4/XB1, PS5/XSX)  The Sega Dreamcast is up there with the SNES for my favourite home console of all time. Coming off the Nintendo 64 which had left me pretty cold and sent me mostly back to PC gaming, the Dreamcast was a blast of fresh air, and one that I knew I had to get my hands on the first time I saw the intro for Sonic Adventure playing on a TV at my local Electronics Boutique. The early trifecta of games that cemented my love for the machine were Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur, and Jet Set Radio. I'd never seen, played or heard anything quite like it. The cel shaded art style, eclectic soundtrack of funk, hip hop, and EDM, and combination of Tony Hawk-esque skating movement and time attack exploration of the game's contained but large and varied areas while evading police pursuit absolutely blew me away. The death of the Dreamcast saw me migrate to the original Xbox, which given Sega's partnership with Microsoft and a number of their studios producing exclusives for the console felt very much like a 'Dreamcast 2'. This included Jet Set Radio Future, a refinement of the formula that simplified the graffiti tagging mechanics and removed the time limits but expanded the size of the levels, interconnecting multiple areas and changing the focus from evading the police to more direct encounters. The first game lives a little larger in my memory than it's sequel, though I'll happily admit that I think the sequel is the better game of the two mechanically. And then that was it, aside from a mobile spinoff that never saw release outside of Japan, a GBA port of the original (that I haven't played yet, but it's likely going to show up soon in the Game Boy Game Club I run over in Retro Games), and a HD re-release of the first game, the series was just... done. The fanbase was far from dead of course, plenty of people all across the internet are happy to sing praises of the JSR series from on high, and there's been no shortage of fan creations out there, from fanart and fanfiction to musical output. Big shoutouts to both Jet Set Radio Live, an internet radio station serving up both the original game OSTs (including Bomb Rush Cyberfunk!) alongside remixes and curated playlists themed around the in-game gangs, and to 2 Mello's excellent tribute albums Memories of Tokyo-to and Sounds of Tokyo-To Future. Dinosaur Games apparently produced a pitch for a sequel called Jet Set Radio Evolution that wowed Sony executives but was turned down by Atlus. It wasn't until 2020 when Dutch developers Team Reptile announced their game Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio with a soundtrack featuring Hideki Naganuma that seemed from the very first trailer to nail the visual style and even more importantly the sound of JSR. I've spent so much of this write up talking about what came before Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to emphasize just how high my hopes were for this game going into it. Aside from the initial teaser and a release date announcement trailer I'd studiously avoided looking into anything more about the development of the game, not willing to let myself get my hopes up or get too invested. The game was delayed in 2022 and rescheduled for a release this year, and with this year being so jam packed with incredible releases it wasn't until quite late into it that I finally got myself a copy of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and booted it up. I had so many questions - JSR and JSRF were early 00s games. Did I even really want to play a game in that style anymore? Would I still find any joy to be had here decades on, or was this something best left in the past? It certainly nailed the look and the sound, but how was the gameplay going to feel? From the moment I landed on my first grind, a big grin started to spread across my face. They did it. They loving did it. This is a Jet Set Radio spiritual successor in every sense of the word, an unapologetic loveletter to JSR and JSRF. It blends elements from both together, retaining the original games slightly more involved graffiti system and (eventually) regular police pursuit, blending it with JSRF's sprawling interconnected environments and verticality. It is so, so satisfying to proceed through each of its levels, seeing spots ripe for your gang tags and crafting on the fly how to make it up there. If I go up this rail, leap across this gap here and then chain wallrides here and here... Perfection. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk introduces its own wrinkles into the formula, the jetpacks that your characters wear acting as both a boost and a double jump that expands your mobility, and there's a shallow combat system that sees you actively combatting police forces rather than just skating around them or occasionally tagging them. The combat is definitely the glaring weak spot in the game - one boss fight in particular the 1v1 vs DJ Cyber lead to me look up what the hell the game was asking me to do as it wasn't remotely clear. The combat makes up a small portion of the game overall though, a blemish but not a dealbreaker and I appreciate the attempt at trying something different even if I don't think it was particularly successful. For good and for bad, for better and for worse, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is exactly the successor it wants to be. This is the only game on my list that I can't recommend without caveats - not to say it's a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it a transformative or innovative one. For people like me however who have desperately been waiting for another installment in the Jet Set Radio series, here is Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. Sega has since announced a new game in the franchise, one of several IPs that they're rebooting - it's my hope they find something unique and interesting to do with it, but if they need a starting point there are far worse places they could look for inspiration than here. #9 Cocoon (PC, Switch, PS4/XB1, PS5/XSX)  It's been a pretty good year for puzzle games this year, I think, with a number of releases that got very close to being on my final top ten list like Viewfinder and Chants of Sennaar. Ultimately, Viewfinder I found too easy, never really taking full advantage of its absolutely incredible mechanic. Chants of Sennaar was dragged down by some frustrating puzzle design and ill-fitting mandatory stealth sections. Although it isn't necessarily without its flaws either, the pristine polish of Cocoon is what elevates it for me. You begin the game in control of a little orb-carrying insect, your purpose relatively unclear in a world that eschews dialogue or any form of written storytelling. The central mechanic of the game though quickly becomes clear - the little red orb that you can carry around is its own self contained world that you can dive into and out of, both solving puzzles and progressing within it and transporting it around in the wider world when out of it. Already a cool enough concept, when you stumble across a second green orb and understand that it too is a second world that you can dive in and out of, the possibility space expands even further.  Then you pick up the red orb and dive into the green orb and now you are carrying the red orb around inside the green orb and your brain starts to have a very satisfying "wait, oh poo poo" moment as the central recursion mechanics of the game become crystal clear. Each orb that you carry has its own ability - the red orb reveals hidden pathways, the green orb switches certain columns between transparent and solid, and so on. Eventually, you'll be managing multiple orbs each with a different power, weaving them in and out of each other in a fantastic brain dance of recursive puzzle solving. The sheer amount of possibilities that this presents would be overwhelming, but Cocoon's developers Geometric Interactive have used fantastic environmental and puzzle design to ensure that your progress is always appropriately gated. There is always a single puzzle or challenge in front of you, and you have the tools that you need to solve it. While some might feel that this dampens the exploratory nature of the game - you're more or less progressing through a linear path of these puzzles - it does a lot to avoid player frustration. You're never left stumbling through the environment trying to work out whether or not you have the ability to solve a given puzzle and you're never left wandering around backtracking wondering if you've missed something. The puzzle difficulty feels well tuned too. The puzzles aren't overly difficult, but do produce an extremely satisfying number of "aha" moments when everything just clicks, and some of the later interactions between orb powers and layers of recursion are very, very cool. The game's presentation much like it's puzzle design is similarly polished to a mirror sheen. Each world you explore feels vivid and distinctive, populated by all manner of weird biological and biomechanical bits and pieces. Environmental art design is always clear and distinct - I never found myself questioning where it was or wasn't possible to go or what was or was not part of a puzzle or otherwise interactable. The music is provided by lush, ambient, dreamlike synths that suit the tone perfectly. The story is intriguing as well and I'm sure has lead to no short amount of speculation around the internet as to what it all means - your immediate purpose is incredibly unclear, but it will rapidly become obvious through the game's storytelling that a particular set of forces are working in opposition to you, and the final reveal once you do achieve your ultimate goal is a satisfying capstone. I mentioned at the top of the writeups that Cocoon wasn't without its flaws. The first is its boss battles - although there aren't too many, these have a baffling approach where taking a single hit will see you catapulted out of the boss arena and needed to redo the fight from scratch. It's a baffling misstep given the approachability and tight design of the rest of the game, and while they fit into the game significantly better than something like Chants of Sennaar's stealth segments I'd still question as to whether or not they were really necessarily. Secondarily, though I don't think quite as bad, there are a few moments late in the game that see you having to execute some press-the-button-at-precisely-the-right-time segments to proceed. I never encountered an issue with these personally but like with the boss fights, players who were expecting a chill puzzle experience might be offput that Cocoon is now suddenly demanding action game reflexes from them. Neither of these flaws were anywhere near significant enough, for me at least, to derail my enjoyment of the game, but I'd feel remiss to not mention them. While not my favourite puzzle game that I played this year, I'd have zero qualms in recommending Cocoon to just about everyone, even those who might not necessarily find themselves drawn to 'puzzle' games. The world of Cocoon was a delight to visit, and I'm very excited to see what the team at Geometric Interactive produce next. #8 Humanity (PC, PS4, PS5, PCVR, PSVR)  Humanity is the latest game from Japanese studio Enhance Games, headed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi and behind the remasters of Rez and Lumines - Rez Infinite in 2016 and Lumines: Remastered in 2018 - as well as 2018's incredible synesthetic experience Tetris Effect. That alone was enough to put it on my radar, and when the early critical rumblings were coming back positive I bumped it up to the top of my list of games to play. In a year that's seen some very cool visual experiences, Humanity stands far and away as the most out and out visually arresting game that I've played this year, perhaps even more so given that I played it in VR. As a glowing ethereal Shiba Inu, you are initially given a simple task by a floating, glowing orb. The People will come through the door, in an endless stream - your job is to guide them, seeing them safely to the exit door at the other end of the level. To do so, you can lay down commands that The People will follow, initially starting with the simplest command of all - changing the direction that they're walking in. The game is reminiscent of a (good) 3D version of Lemmings (sorry, Lemmings 3D) and the initial puzzles focus on you guiding the stream of people via a series of commands across, around and through the floating environments that you find yourself in. But don't worry, the glowing orb helpfully informs you, if you should make a mistake with your guidance and send a stream of people mindlessly plunging into the void, they'll simple blip out of existence and eventually find themselves walking back through the door. The game helpfully keeps track of just how many of The People you've sent plunging into oblivion. The stages themselves are fairly sparse and brutalist, with grey concrete structures floating in a blue sky void filled with soft clouds, all of this plain set dressing only serving to accentuate the start of the show - the bright, multicoloured walking mass of The People, moving, running, leaping and swimming in their endless streams. There's a liquidity to them; Humanity's puzzles, at least to start with, could be easily replicated if you were just diverting a flow of water through various paths, but there's something intricately interesting in watching this giant mass of people wind throughout a level. Puzzle solutions aren't just satisfying because you've solved the level, often the end result that you've created as you watch The People move to their goal feels almost like an art piece, streams of humanity crossing over each other and forming waves, swirls and arcs. This is particularly stunning in VR, though no less engaging playing in flatscreen. If you have a VR headset, I'd certainly recommend playing Humanity on it, but if you don't you're by no means getting a lesser experience.  You'll also encounter Goldies - golden giants that must be collected by having The People pass through them. The Goldies will then obediently walk along with your stream of humanity, but unlike them if they plunge into the abyss they're lost forever unless you retry the level. You'll need to rescue certain amounts to unlock more stages, but as you accumulate more and more of them you'll also unlock a bunch of cosmetics that allow you to customise The People to your liking. It's important to remember as well that in many stages The People begin walking whether you're ready or not, and you'll frequently find yourself racing ahead of them to preventatively divert them away from a Goldie lest they immediate lead it straight to its doom. The game grants more and more commands to you over time, though never an overwhelming amount, as well as throwing other wrinkles in the formula your way. A series of levels themed around Fate for example tasks you with putting down your entire command sequence before you start the flow of time and release The People, with these levels taking on more of a programming puzzler feel. In the late game, with the introduction of some additional mechanics, Humanity begins to undergo somewhat of a genre shift from a Lemmings based puzzler to what ends up almost feeling like an RTS game. Puzzles shift to rely on more direct control of small clusters of The People, you'll often find yourself racing around frantically at a much higher pace and trying to micromanage groups. It also introduces a small degree of outcome randomness that can lead to frustration - there's one particular level that I had worked out the solution for, but due to a small factor that could have been a minor mistake in my timing or positioning, the approach didn't work. So I discounted that and tried endless other variations, until finally in frustration having to look up a video. This was the only level in the game I looked up the solution for, and I 100%ed the game, so I won't pretend I'm not a tiny little bit bitter about that. That individual moment of frustration though pales against the rest of a game as a whole though. I haven't touched on the plot of the game because I'm not even sure where I'd begin, other than to say that the writing and the level theming go hand in hand very well, and that the final stage of the game and the resulting conclusion feels suitably epic and satisfying for a game of this scale. The haunting, almost discordant central theme to the game worms its way into my brain still and likely will continue to do so for some time, and when I hear that music and close my eyes, I can still see glorious, sparkling rivers of The People soaring, twirling, floating and - more often than not - plunging in waterfalls into the void. #7 A Highland Song (PC, Switch)  If you're familiar with some of inkle's previous work - 80 Days and Overboard! specifically - you may already know what you're getting with A Highland Song. A well written game with multiple, branching, layered pathways through the game with nested secrets and rewards to discover if you're willing to take the time to plumb its depths. The big departure here though is that where inkle's previous outings have been (for the most part) heavily text based, the central mechanic of A Highland Song is clambering through the peaks and valleys of the Scottish highlands like a 2D Breath of the Wild. Fifteen year old Moira McKinnon has never seen the sea, but when she receives a letter from her Uncle Hamish telling her to come to his lighthouse by Beltane, she makes up her mind to run away from home. Playing as Moria, your task is simple - make your way to the lighthouse in just five days. This is far trickier than it initially sounds, however - Moira has mapped out the first paths through the hills from her bedroom window, but very quickly after that it will be down to you to find a way forward. A Highland Song's main gameplay loop is simple - explore a highland hill, finding items or encountering other people as you go and ascend to the peak. Once at the peak the map will zoom right out and allow you to plan a path forward as best you can. Sometimes (hopefully) you've found a map that will clue you in on a shortcut - by contrasting the map to the local natural features you can pinpoint the shortcut location. Other times you may be left wandering down the other side of the peak hoping for a trail marker somewhere that will let you progress on.  Exploring in the game is deeply satisfying as every corner of a hill usually has something of note there, whether it might be an item or a chance encounter with a character, or a map that might become relevant a few hills later. It's a gorgeous world to get lost in too, the multilayered hills made up of individual 'slices' of paths with a vivid 'painted' art style. As you make your way through the highlands, Moira shares recollections of letters between her and her Uncle that provide the local myths and legends around the various hills and occasionally hints on how to progress, or what a given hill might be called. The voice acting in the game is extremely well done and Moira is a charming character. I quickly found myself wincing any time I'd inadvertently take a path too fast and send her off a cliff - sorry about your ankle, Moira. The music is also a highlight, a mix of atmospheric and ambient pieces by composer Laurence Chapman and energetic, upbeat pieces by Scottish folk bands Talisk and Fourth Moon. These play out during the game's sprinting sequences where Moira gets space to run across part of the highlands, turning the game into a rhythm game briefly. There's a real joy in these moments watching the landscape fly past as Moira runs with the sounds of a song like Talisk's "Echo" in your ears. What feels most astonishing to me about the game is how you genuinely can become lost. On my first playthrough, I explored my way through a dark cave that turned out to be a lot bigger on the inside than I was expected. When I emerged blinking into the sunlight on the other end it suddenly hit me - I had no idea where I was in relation to the peak I had just left, and no idea what the name of the peak I was on was. There wasn't much else for me to do but pick my way upwards to try and find the summit so I could look around and work out where the hell I'd gotten to. The game has survival elements as well - nothing complex, but Moira can take damage if you fall or stumble which can most commonly occur from taking a too big drop. The quality of shelter you can find at night is important too; Moira will need to sleep eventually and sleeping in rough conditions will lower her maximum health. Rain, cold wind and snow will all start to take its toll as well - you can very quickly find yourself in a rough spot as mistakes compound on each other. These systems and the ever-present passing of time give some further friction to A Highland Song's gameplay. The trip to the next pass will take several hours, by the time you arrive there it will likely be nightfall. Do you keep pushing forward to squeeze some extra progress in the day, knowing that there may not be suitable shelter anywhere close on the other side of the pass? Or do you make your way back down this peak a little where there was a cottage shelter where you know you could get a good night's sleep? I'll say up front that the time limit both is and isn't a concern. The game features multiple endings, and even those where you arrive after Beltane are 'good' endings - my first successful completion I arrived a single day after Beltane and the ending gave me enough hints as to what the true ending might be if I make it by Beltane that I'm determined to get a better run through. This is aided by two things - first, A Highland song is a breezy game - 3 hours is about the length I'd say for a playthrough. Second, it has a New Game Plus mode where maps and items that you've found stay with you on restart, letting you slowly build up your knowledge of the hills and make faster and faster progress the more you explore. There's so much to dive into and discover here, with a 100 map fragments scattered through the hills. Lost things, echoes and memories to discover, and achievements for those who want to go above and beyond - naming every peak correctly and leaving an appropriate blessing at the top of them. I've loved my time in A Highland Song so far and I can't wait to keep exploring more. #6 Venba (PC, Switch, XB1, XBSX, PS5)  I've seen and heard Venba described as "this years Unpacking" which is not a bad comparison. On the outside looking in, it's not that Venba doesn't seem appealing per se - billing itself as a 'short narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom, who immigates to Canada with her family in the 1980s', Venba's opening pitch is enough to grab attention for sure, but I think it's not until you play Venba that, much like Unpacking, you get to see so much of the nuance of the narrative on offer here and see what makes it special. What is a narrative cooking game, anyway, you may ask? Predominantly, it's a visual novel as you may have guessed, but one punctuated with short puzzle sequences themed around cooking incredible looking Tamil cusine (playing this game made me incredible hungry). You're armed with your mother's recipe book, but it's well loved and rather worn, meaning that sometimes you don't quite have all the steps that you need. You'll need to intuit the correct sequence of steps required to cook a dish. Failure is inconsequential - you can just endlessly retry - and there's a built in hint system to help guide you in the right direction should you ever feel stuck. Venba is first and foremost telling a story, not aiming to challenge you.  So what sets this apart from the myriad of other visual novels? It's a short experience, I'd say clocking in around 1 to 2 hours depending on how fast you read, but it crams so much into that time about culture and immigration, family and family relationships, what it means for a child to grow up between two cultures and how they navigate that, and what it means for the parent to watch their child go through this process. I'm not an immigrant, I can't say I have lived experience of the myriad of topics related to this that Venba touches on such as discrimination and racism, the fear of living your own culture and just wanting to fit in. I'm also not a parent and can't speak to those experiences, raising a child and fearing for what the future may hold for them. But I can say this; the writing in Venba is beautiful and poignant. A scene where Venba and her son walk through a park in the evening searching - if you've played it, you know the scene I mean - had me on the edge of my seat. The ending of the game itself moved me to tears. The game covers large amounts of time but at the same time is never overly explanatory - it isn't afraid to simply leave gaps for the player to intuit what has happened in the meantime. There's so many little touches in the game, the way the characters move and react to each other, the contrast between a character's internal thoughts - voicelines for you to select - and what they actually say. There's a particular sequence late in the game that acts as sort of a cooking power fantasy, both letting you cook up a storm but also showing the development of the character's cooking ability - you are no longer hesitantly following recipes, now you just cook. Also, the soundtrack of Tamil inspired music absolutely owns. Venba is short, well written and deeply touching. It's one of my favourite bite sized experiences this year, and is also available on Game Pass. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading, see you in the next post.
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#5 Hi-Fi Rush (PC, XSX)  The shadowdrop surprise of the year, and what a fantastic surprise it was. A rhythm-based character action game from the studio that brought you.... erm, The Evil Within series? As incongruous as that might sound, Hi-Fi Rush is a fantastic synthesis of disparate elements that comes together to form an amazing whole. You play a Chai, self proclaimed future rock star and the biggest goddamned himbo of 2023. After undergoing experimental surgery, Chai winds up with his music player embedded in his chest giving him visual synesthesia and the ability to kick rear end in perfect time with the music. An ability he needs almost immediately as he gets branded as a defect by the company responsible for his surgery, and Chai's initial efforts to escape send him tumbling headlong into a wide-reaching conspiracy at the heart of Vandelay Technologies and it's sinister CEO Kale Vandelay. This game is an absolute treat, pulling players headlong into its world with a mixture of rich cel-shaded visuals (something I've long had a fondness for thanks to Jet Set Radio), awesome soundtrack - both the licensed and original, unlicensed music here is great - and genuinely funny writing. Hi-Fi Rush is an out and out comedy game, with bumbling airhead Chai and his frequently exasperated found family of allies having some great back and forth moments. This extends into the cast of robots scattered throughout Vandelay Technologies as well, from noir pastiche HR investigators to lazy and incompetent janitors, to the array of security robots who serve as the games main roster of enemies. This bright colourful chaos of a world and all its elements combines together with a character action combat system that rewards players for fighting to the beat, visually displayed on screen thanks to the adorable cat robot 808 but also by so much of the environment around you. As you string together combos, the finishers will also provide visual cues to sync up with the audio. When you're in the zone, going with the beat, the sounds of you smacking around robots punctuating the soundtrack as you leap, dodge, twirl and tear through everything in your way, this is when Hi-Fi Rush is at its absolute best, inducing a rhythmic flow state. Between combat encounters, you'll engage in mostly fine 3D platforming and exploration with the occasional moment of frustration as the camera decides to align itself perfectly in a way that makes judging a jump a complete pain in the rear end. Writing about all this is tricky, so here, let me just show you. This is from fairly late in the game but shows off so much of what I love about this game - it might be my favourite single moment in a game from this year. Moving from the idiot cartoon slapstick straight into a mass combat, with Invaders Must Die dropping? Perfect. (Disclaimer: I really like this song. If you don't like this song I guess this probably won't hit as well. It's a pretty great fight sequence though.) Also this video shows someone who is significantly better at this game than I am, which is nice to see as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrXHMEymHkY There's probably some preconceptions as to what sort of player will enjoy Hi-Fi Rush - if you find yourself interested but worried about either the complexity of the action combat gameplay or if you think you might have been born without any sense of rhythm whatsoever, there's a number of intelligent accessibility options included. Apart from options for colourblindness, there's also some extra rhythm visualisation options available - changing both the way that 808 displays the beat pulse but also you can just turn on a visual beat across the bottom of the screen. It's also possible to tweak the gameplay whether by dropping the difficulty or setting up auto action mode that still requires you to execute moves to the beat, but Chai will choose varied and appropriate moves for the situation. There's also some more traditional rhythm-game-y sequences that can be set to only rely on a single button press should you be finding the multiple button sequences too difficult. While the accessibility options aren't exhaustive, it's welcome to see them included at all. I'm never going to see all the content the game has to offer. Besides the collectables scattered throughout the stages, there's secrets scattered throughout the levels to encourage replay once you've unlocked abilities later in the game that will let you go back and open new areas, and a survival mode battle tower and accompanying challenges that are beyond my fairly meager rhythm and action game abilities - but I was able to clear the game on Easy and if I can do it, so can you! With all that said, Hi-Fi Rush still won't be for everyone - but if the video above looks at all entertaining to you, it's available on Game Pass and I'd encourage you to give a try. #4 Street Fighter 6 (PC, PS4, PS5, XSX)  Steam reliably informs me that I've spent more than 200 hours playing Street Fighter 6 this year, making it probably the single title I've sunk the most time into in 2023 by far. Fighting games are always a hard sell. If you've never found a fighting game that clicked with you, never had the moment of understanding where the basic concepts of fighting games start to lock themselves into your brain and muscle memory, they can often look deeply intimidating. It's easy to think that you'd never be able to learn how to play fighting games, so why bother? I mean hell, I spent 200 hours playing Street Fighter 6, am I really going to try and tell you that this fighting game is somehow the gateway into fighting games that you've always been missing? Yes. Street Fighter 6 does so much right to try and onboard newcomers to the genre. The single player World Tour mode lets you take a create-a-character avatar through the world of Street Fighter, cobbling together a moveset based on a character style and customisable iconic moves from the whole cast. Want to be Dhalsim but with a Hadouken and Blanka's Blanka Ball technique? You can! Throughout the World Tour, missions, challenges and minigames work to introduce basic fighting game fundamentals to the player - how to anti air, how to punish whiffs or unsafe moves etc. None of this is enough to sell Street Fighter 6 on alone, I'd never suggest someone buy it just for the single player content, but as a way to get a new player onboarded it's fantastic. Additionally, SF6 has introduced the Modern Control scheme. This aims to ease the burden of learning how to play fighting games by simplifying the classic 6 button control scheme down to 4, adding auto-combos and mapping special moves to direction and special button combos reminiscent of Smash Bros. Arguments rage online about how competitively viable this is for differing members of the cast, but it's important to remember that none of this should matter to a new player. What it does instead is let them skip immediately to the fun part of fighting games, fighting against other people and getting to pull off cool stuff. If you decide later that you want to learn classic controls then cool, that's still going to be there for you later and it will still be difficult, but you'll be armed with game experience at this point that will hopefully make for an easier transition. This all sits upon a rock solid foundation of core mechanics, the Drive Gauge system being so much more interesting than Street Fighter 5's V-Skill and V-Trigger systems. Character variety is decently spread for this point in the game's lifespan, and I'm excited to see how the game develops even further over time with balance adjustments and new DLC characters. The game looks and sounds great, the rollback netcode is some of the best that I've ever experienced, and I'm hopeful that the upcoming Tekken 8 has even half of the polish and approachability of this game. Fighting game is something so great. Come and see why. #3 Against the Storm (PC)  For best immersion for this post, have the rain falling outside and listen to this wonderful piece from the game's OST. Every year, I wait until pretty much the last minute before I assemble my list. It's the 31st of December in Australia while I write this, I've been writing on and off all day and I really need to get this wrapped up as I need to leave soon to head to a New Year's Eve party. It feels like every year though, I stumble onto a game in mid to late December that absolutely blows me away and forces me to drastically re-evaluate the position of everything on my list. This year, Against the Storm was that game. How good is Against the Storm? Good enough that upon learning that the Xbox Game Pass version had an issue where it would delete your saves (thanks to Microsoft's batshit handling of cloud saves), I bought the game on Steam again to start over. The prospect of starting over didn't bug me, and I likely would have bought a copy somewhere regardless just to give the devs money. That's how good Against the Storm is. Against the Storm is a roguelite city builder, a concept that at first read doesn't seem like it should work. How do you square hallmarks of the roguelite genre (itself a pretty drat nebulous term at this point but that's a debate for another thread) like procedurally generated or run based gameplay and metaprogression systems with a city builder - traditionally slow, thoughtful games around meticulously crafting your perfect model city? As it turns out, you do it by removing the endgame parts of a city builder that traditionally bore me to tears and instead just focus on the interesting initial stages of trying to carve out some form of viable settlement.  The old world was washed away by the Blightstorm, and now the last bastion of civilization is the Smoldering City, kept standing against the ravages of the cyclical Blightstorm through the grace of the Scorched Queen. You play as one of her Viceroys, charged with venturing out into the hostile wilderness to establish settlements. These are not enduring cities to stand the test of time, however, so much as pinpoints of light in the darkness to funnel resources back to the residents of the Smolder City. When the Blightstorm hits, everyone will return to the City for shelter as the world is washed away, and the cycle begins anew.. When you begin a settlement, you're dumped into the middle of a forest with a few villagers, some basic supplies and a Hearth, a burning fire at the heart of your settlement to be. Your task is simple - max out your Reputation bar and you've achieved victory, leaving your settlement behind as you proceed to the next further out in the wilderness. The Scorched Queen is not a patient monarch however, and her Impatience grows with every passing moment. Take too long, or make certain decisions that invoke her Majesty's ire, and her Impatience will max out and you will be recalled in shame. That's not the only danger you face however; if your Hearth ever runs out of fuel, your settlement likewise will be extinguished. The forest is alive and actively resists your imperialist incursions, growing more and more hostile with each passing year and the more that your woodcutters fell trees to provide for your need with resources and fuel. Storm, the harshest of the game's weather seasons, can be so miserable that your villagers abandon your settlement. Forest glades hide resources you'll desperately need, but the large ones that yield the most resources come with accompanying problems to match, and if you're not able to act fast and find a solution when they arise, it's often your villagers who will pay the price. So begins a race against time, harvesting resources from your surroundings, building production chains and advanced goods that contribute to the Resolve of the fantasy races that make up your settlement, all of whom have different specialities and needs. Reputation can be gained by fulfilling the Queen's orders - objectives relating to production, trade or exploration - and by pushing your villagers Resolve above certain thresholds at which point they'll begin to generate Reputation for you over time. It's a fantastic balancing act, and where the run based gameplay of Against the Storm starts to become clear. The game takes place across multiple biomes, each of which has different bonuses, maluses and resources that may be more available or more scarce. You only receive a small subset of production buildings on each run, so part of the puzzle is identifying what you need and what you have available to produce. The game quickly adds a trade system - an absolute lifeline that can be the difference between victory and defeat and also a viable path to victory in its own right - and rainpunk, capturing and using the magical rainfall of the forest to empower your production buildings at the risk of Blightrot cysts forming that you'll need to manage - too much corruption from the cysts spreading unchecked and your villagers will start to die. This short, encapsulated balancing act is what makes Against the Storm so wonderful to me, even playing as I am still very much in the early part of the game and playing on the second of many, many available difficulties. Each run is an interlocking puzzle of environmental conditions and resource and building availability that is a delight to unravel. There's no stability, no period until perhaps right before I'm about to win where I feel like I'm just running through the motions waiting for victory. This precariousness is its own sort of fun as well; I only need this settlement to do well enough to hit max Reputation right here and right now, my solution to doing that doesn't have to be sustainable! Off and away to the next settlement I go! As you proceed through cycles the metaprogression elements become clear - surrounding the Smoldering City are various Seals, acting as almost...boss stages... if you can say that about a city builder, where you'll need to satisfy a number of stiff challenges in order to successfully close off that Seal. If you succeed, the amount of time you have before the Blighstorm arrives begins to increase. Combined with upgrades from the Smoldering City that allow you to embark further and with more resources to hand, you can rapidly find yourself making progress further and further away from the City, the difficulty slowly increasing as you get further away (or you can simply increase it yourself at any point you're comfortable with, obtaining more rewards from your successful settlement as a result). There's no ending, and very little story taking place here. Although some of the world lore is hinted at in little snippets, the overall theme of the game is that what you are striving for is impermanent, though necessary to allow the next generation to survive the cycle. It's a melancholy tone, reinforced by the oppressive though often visually striking biomes you find yourself in from dense fairytale woodland to sprawling mushroom forests and the quiet, sorrowful, ambient nature of the soundtrack. I'd love to know more about this world, how people live in, how they deal with this perpetual cycle of a world destroying storm. I guess what I'm saying is sign me up for a narrative game set in this same world (give it to the developer who made Roadwarden, I think he'd nail it). I'm early in my journey with this wonderful game and there's a lot ahead of me, but this has bar none been my biggest surprise of the year. Even if you don't like city builders, give this one a shot. #2 Baldur's Gate 3 (PC, PS5, XSX)  Down, down, down by the river.... Frankly given how long I spent in the character creator for Baldur's Gate 3, I'm glad there was such a beautiful song to accompany me. Some friends and I all started playing BG3 around the same time and one of the first comments that we all made talking about it was "hey, drat, that chargen music is real nice, right?" I haven't read this thread yet. I'm going to take my time and luxuriate in it after I get my list posted, and I'll go through and read absolutely every single one. But I don't need to have read it to know that so much ink will have been spilled at this point about the qualities of Baldur's Gate 3. How do I begin to possibly do justice to something so utterly staggering in scope? I can tell you the impact it had on me, certainly - I voraciously devoured the game in unstoppable fashion from Act 1 all the way through to the start of Act 3 before finally taking a break for a while because otherwise I was just going to be playing this, all year, forever. I could tell you that I don't think any CRPG has so thoroughly and pervasively occupied my attention since the KOTOR games. Not to suggest that there aren't better CRPGs that have come out since then, but... I have ADHD. Sinking large amounts of time into sprawling games like CRPGs and JRPGs is always a dicey proposition for me. My brain craves variety and novelty, and as much as I love a game after I've poured like 70 hours into it, it's hard for anything to feel fresh. I'll often take a break, feeling burnt out and that will be it - I'll never be able to pick that game up again, I'll just move on to other things. So maybe I can just say that after 70 hours of BG3, having taken a pretty large break from it after hitting early Act 3, I'm looking forward to diving back into it and finishing it off. I grew up playing the original Baldur's Gate, though never remotely came close to finishing it - it was a pretty tricky game to grok and I didn't really have prior CRPG experience at the time, and was only 12 years old. I had much more success with Neverwinter Nights as controlling a single character and a hireling felt much more approachable to me than managing an entire party. I've tried revisiting the Infinity engine games as an adult and not had much more luck either. Real Time With Pause combat, beloved as it is for so many people, is a massive turn off to me. Hearing that Baldur's Gate 3 was coming out from the studio behind Divinity Original Sin 2, a game that one of my friends repeatedly kept suggesting to me that I would love ("Yeah I'll get around to it", I said, mentally filing it on my near infinite list of games that I will one day 'get to') and that it would have tactical turn based combat peaked my interest, but otherwise I didn't follow the development much. I went into the game pretty much blind, devoid of expectations, and was utterly captivated. From the early stages of Act I, the level of interactivity and reactivity in both the combat and non-combat encounters shot to the forefront. Everything just clicked for me in a way that so many crunchy tactical games never do. Normally in RPGs I hit a point where I start dreading combat encounters - in Baldur's Gate 3, I find myself looking forward to them. The writing had me hooked as well - the opening premise for the game was compelling, and the more I learned the more interested I was in seeing where all this was going. I was interested in the lives and the backstories of almost all of my party members, and also Gale and Wyll were there too I guess. My appreciation for what Larian had pulled off only grew greater when I started comparing notes with my friends, and reading other goons experiences in the BG3 thread. Act 2 only solidified all this even further, with so many interlinking plot threads and moments of reactivity unfolding and all culminating in a climax to the Act which quite frankly if the entire game had just ended there and there was no Act 3, I would have been completed satisfied. Hitting Act 3, getting the major story reveals that occur as you arrive in Baldur's Gate, and then slowly becoming aware of the frankly intimidating scale of the city itself... it was breathtaking (and my signal to take a break because....phew, it's like an entire second game occurring right after the entire first game that I've just played.) I don't have the industry insight or the words in me at the moment to take a stab at writing about what Baldur's Gate 3 "means" for CRPGs in general or for AAA roleplaying games more generally. But I can tell you that I absolutely, unreservedly love it and that, even without having finished the game, I think this might be one of the single finest video games ever made. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but for a game this incredible that succeeds so well in both what it aspires to be and what it is, I think saying anything less is selling it short. #1 The Making of Karateka (PC, Switch, XB1, PS4, XSX, PS5)  I've been writing for far too long today and I know I'm not going to find all the words I want to extol The Making of Karateka so let me just start with this. The Making of Karateka is the most important video game released this year, for what it represents as a path forward for the way we engage with, understand and appreciate video game history. If you play one thing from my list, one single game, please, please play this one Most of the video game industry, as a rule, doesn't give a poo poo about the history of video games or making that history available for archival, let alone for public access. A study published this year by the Video Game History Foundation reveals that 87% of classic video games released in the United States are completely unavailable. Major video game corporations are famously secretive, barely willing to reveal sales numbers let alone any actual insight into how the games that they create are produced. Hell, 2023 has certainly shown that major corporations also don't give much of a poo poo about the people who make them, as we've seen the industry racked with layoff after layoff from short sighted decisions chasing profit at a human cost. So much of the work of recording this history and preserving this information falls onto the shoulders of people trying to do their best to stem the loss of information against an industry directly hostile to them, whether that be organisations like the VGHF to amateur game historians on YouTube or software pirates archiving reams of games that companies have no interest in making available. The Making of Karateka is, as its namesake suggests, the story of Jordan Mechner creating the cinematic action game Karateka - an early 8-bit title for the Apple II with enormous influence on too many videogame creators to list. Karateka stood out for its stunning use of rotoscoped animation, along with borrowing cues from the visual and audio language of cinema. These things are absolutely commonplace now, but saw some of their earliest expressions in Karateka. The Making of Karateka presents this story in the form of an interactive museum exhibit, curated timelines laying out Mechner's earliest experiments in replicating arcade games, through several prototypes of Karateka and then finally to the release of the game itself and the most iconic of its ports to other systems. Littered throughout are artifacts that serve to tell this story - excerpts from Mechner's own journals and design documents, correspondence between Mechner and Broderbund who would go on to publish the game, video interviews with Mechner, his father Francis who served as the composer for the game (sidenote: the interactions between him and Jordan and his unwavering support of his sons interests are the most utterly touching part of the documentary footage), and industry figures that helped bring Karateka to life or who drew on it as a source of inspiration for their own games. My personal highlight of these is the original footage that would form the basis for the main characters animations, presented to allow you to slowly layer over the rough tracings and then the final game sprites in differing layers of transparency to understand exactly how the footage was converted into the game. Along this timeline as well you'll find a number of games to explore - some of Mechner's earliest games, then multiple different versions of Karateka. As a bonus, Digital Eclipse have included modernised remakes of both Karateka and one of Mechner's earlier action games called Deathbounce. The various games are emulated well and contain a number of different tweaks to make them more acccessible to a modern audience, letting you give yourself infinite lives or remap controls to whatever suits you. Even knowing how important the game Karateka is to video game history, would I recommend someone today go back and try and play it? Absolutely not, you'd probably find it a miserable experience unless you knew what you were getting into. Would I recommend that you play this game instead and then use the understanding of the context that Karateka exists in to play through the game with insight and appreciation that you absolutely wouldn't have had going in cold? Unreservedly.  Digital Eclipse has, between their Atari 50 collection and this first entry of what they're calling their Gold Master Series, made a wonderful case for what video game history can be. Games are an interactive medium above all else; why not use that interactivity to their advantage, to communicate and better understand and chronicle the context that they exist in? If you've never heard of Karateka, that's all the more reason to play this game. I believe that video games can be more than just entertainment, I believe that video games can be important, that they can shape society and pop culture, that they can affect people emotionally, that the work that people do in producing them has value. The history of games, of how they were made and the people who made them is important too. As we look forward to 2024, to amazing new releases and hopefully the betterment of conditions for those involved in creating them, we should also be casting an eye backward to understand and appreciate what makes this medium so special. Thank you, each and every one of you who post on the Games forum for making this my favourite space to hang out and talk about games. Wishing you all a safe and prosperous 2024 to come, and a wonderful New Year's Eve. Play The Making of Karateka. Thank you, and good night.
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Dec 31, 2023 07:38
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SlothBear posted:Yes, top games added to my wishlist thanks to this thread: 
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Jan 2, 2024 00:09
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The 7th Guest posted:people should at least play the Vividlope demo so they can see why i enjoy it so much (or question my taste) I'll vouch for Vividlope as well, I haven't gotten around to the full game but I did play and thoroughly enjoy the demo - it's just a delight of a game and feels like it would have been right at home on the Dreamcast.
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Jan 7, 2024 08:53
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I wish I could stay up to enjoy the countdown but alas, I have to sleep. Excited to get to wake up to the final results though!
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Jan 13, 2024 14:47
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:Going to give the Special Award to Game with Highest Average Score that was mentioned by more than one person to The Making of Karateka 
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Jan 13, 2024 22:05
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Thank you to everyone for your lists, and thank you VG for all your work!
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Jan 13, 2024 22:13
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Doing my part.
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Jan 18, 2024 00:59
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Nice.
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Jan 18, 2024 02:26
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