|
Ineffiable posted:I hope you guys don't mind but Polygon did a top 50 and I think it's well worth a read saw that lies of p was all the way down at number 49, immediately closed tab
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2023 22:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 10:30 |
|
|
Oh man 2023 has just been insane for games. By February I realised this, and I have just been more and more vindicated as the year went on. I know this list is meant to be games you played this year, but I feel the need to fill it exclusively with games from this year because there's so many good ones. 10:ARMORED CORE 6: THE FIRES OF RUBICON: I haven't actually finished this one, I got distracted by other games and I need to get back to it. It absolutely kicks rear end though, I love spending time fiddling around to make the prettiest robots with the nicest colour schemes and then getting into pitched battle with other, much larger robots with the screen so full of missiles that I cannot see. Gorgeous visuals, great music, great vibes. 9: Jedi Knight: Survivor: What can I say? It's just a fun Star Wars game. It's colourful and bright and adventurey with fun NPCs and well designed kind of Sekiro-ish combat. Giving you more weapon options is a great improvement on the first game (especially when I discovered the greatsword lightsaber form) along with the universe feeling much less lonely by letting Cal have some friends beyond just those in your ship. Would be a GotY contender in a normal year. 8: Final Fantasy XVI: Some of the greatest over the top spectacle I have ever seen in a game. Interesting characters and one of the best performances I have ever seen from a voice actor in the form of Ben Starr as Clive (lmao) Rosfield. Has some pacing issues especially towards the end, and I wish it had more RPG elements beyond lovely "number goes up" gear. Still, a great Final Fantasy-rear end Final Fantasy. 7: Slay the Princess: I never thought I'd put a visual novel in a list like this, but this one is just amazing. In my time playing through it, it called to mind: The Stanley Parable, Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, Omori, FFXIV, Doki Doki Literature Club, Lovecraftian horror in general, Junji Ito, Alan Wake, Corpse Bride. The writing is spooky when it wants to be and hilarious when it wants to be and the two voice actors playing so many different versions of the same characters are phenomenal. 6: Remnant 2: I don't really like looter shooters. I don't like improving your gear being based off low drop chance RNG bullshit. Thankfully Remnant solves this problem by having all your cool weapons and armour either be guaranteed drops from bosses (often multiple different drops based on how you kill it) or by finding secrets and solving puzzles. I found hidden passages in two different dungeons which gave me keys, which unlocked a door in a hidden area in the overworld for that zone and gave me a pulse rifle. I found a hidden door in an Indiana Jones rear end dungeon and the resulting area had another hidden door, and that resulting area had another hidden door and then I had to go through a trap gauntlet and got a cool-rear end suit of armour. I found a dungeon the final encounter was a board game match against a fae construct with a bow as my reward for winning, and my co-op partner realised that every time I moved a piece in the board it opened and closed doors in the dungeon so I continued playing - no longer to win, but to arrange the pieces so she could access treasure chambers while not opening myself up to losing the board game because that would reset the board and close the doors I painstakingly opened. At one point my partner died so I ran into the death fog around the edge of the overworld because I didn't realise that there was an infinite use homeward bone (okay it kills you, but if you don't drop anything it's a homeward bone) and happened to run into the exact right spot to find a hidden suit of armour in the fog. Thinking something is up, I returned after respawning to investigate further and found a secret class, which was so much fun to play as that I used it for the entire rest of my playtime! Also the gunfeel is excellent, the weapon variety is top notch, the class system allows for some crazy builds (you can equip any two classes you have unlocked at a time but your main bonus perk is decided by which of them is your "main" class) and the bosses are great. Remnant 2 is fantastic and it broke my heart when my GotY came out late in the year and I was forced to push it out of my top 5. 5. Pizza Tower: Now we're in the territory of games that most years would be an easy slam dunk GotY but are denied that position because despite how amazing there are, there's even better ones. In February, two absolutely phenomenal games came out near-simultaneously. Both absolutely perfect at doing what they do. Firstly we have Pizza Tower, which mixes Wario energy with Sonic speed while having better level design and flow than either and an aesthetic which mixes old Nickelodeon cartoons and MSPaint. You charge around at top speed through fun levels with some of the best pixel animation I have ever seen in my life and some surprisingly engaging and fun boss fights. The game has a ton of replayability too. The levels are designed so on your first runthrough you can carefully scour it for each and every little secret and then have a frantic mad dash for the exit when you trigger the self destruct, but once you've done that there you can chase the elusive P-rank by clearing the entire level, finding all the secrets and doing a second lap of the escape run all without breaking your combo once. It's a difficult and harrowing experience but when you achieve the flow state of Pizza Tower movement, it feels so good and landing that P-rank is a powerful dopamine rush. Highly recommend checking out speedrun videos of a few levels so you can see how the levels enable a skilled player to just fly through them. 4. Hi-Fi RUSH: The second of the two bangers the year started with. There's been a few of these "do actions only on the beat" games coming out, like Crypt of the Necrodancer, BPM: Bullets Per Minute and Metal: Hellsinger but Hi-Fi RUSH is the first one of those I've played where it didn't feel like it had to compromise complexity to be playable with the rhythm elements. You have many combos to learn that all have different roles in the combat, summonable allies to juggle that counter specific armour types, special attacks that cost a guage you build up and all the while you need to keep to the rhythm of the absolutely bangin music. It has a delightful musical score, some really clever use of licensed music (special mention to Invaders Must Die and Whirring) and a full alternate soundtrack with unlicensed original songs for streamer-safe mode that is legitimately on par with the licensed stuff for the most part. The writing is also really simultaneously dumb and clever and incredibly funny with charming characters. I lost count of the number of times it made me laugh out loud without ever feeling like it was relying on Marvel-ish quips. Even the unvoiced text logs or conversations you find while wandering around are really funny. And not only do the comedic beats land, the emotional ones do too. The story and characters aren't complicated but they are really engaging. Also I'm not normally a big fan of dumbass protagonists, but Chai is an utter delight. 3. Lies of P: As soon as I played the demo of this game, I knew it was going to be something special and I was right. This is the best soulslike that is not made by From Software. This is a better souls game than at least one of From Software's actual soulsborne games (which are all excellent, I just rank this one higher than Dark Souls 3). This is the first time I have played a soulslike that actually truly nails the gamefeel of a Souls game. The boss design is phenomenal, the music is great (especially the unlockable records). The story is intriguing, though not as mysterious as From's oeuvre and the world is a ton of fun. It also includes a lot of interesting new additions to the formula, like your final charge of estus refilling as you deal damage or mid-combat weapon repairs during downtime between traded blows. The greatest feature is the fact that any non-boss weapon has two components (blade and handle) and you can interchangably swap these around. I spent most of the game using a serrated saw blade attached to a rocket powered glaive handle and it absolutely kicked rear end. One thing I appreciate is that there is not a single hint of irony involved in the ridiculous concept. Yes, this is a Soulslike where you play as Pinnochio and your level up waifu is the Blue Fairy and most of the boss fights and NPCs are in some way references to Carlo Collodi's "The Adventures of Pinnochio" - with one nod to Disney in the form of the Talking Cricket being named Gemini. And it just treats this entirely seriously without feeling the need to make fun of itself. It has confidence in itself and the story it is telling and it is all the stronger for it. Also worth noting is that it has some of the best boss fights I have ever encountered in a Souls game. I once saw a negative review complaining past the one third mark every single boss is a multiple healthbar monstrosity and all I could think was  yes please, this is what I come to the genre for. Special mention goes to King of Puppets, Laxasia the Complete, Archbishop Andreus, Nameless Pu- oh wait I'm just going to end up reciting the full list of boss fights because they're all so good.2. Baldur's Gate 3: This is probably going to win all the GotY awards. It is the best RPG I have ever played. It is also the most RPG I have ever played. There is so much of this game and they add a little (or a lot) more with every patch. This is a game where no two runs are alike, everyone will see some different scenes because it is not designed for you to see everything in one run. This game is an adventure, and your story is yours. The party members are all great (except Halsin who is really boring) with honourable mention to my personal favourite Jaheira, making a reappearance from BG1-2. Random bits of dialogue make me laugh out loud on the regular, especially thanks to the phenomenal voicework and almost every line of dialogue being mocapped to give life to even the most inconsequential exchanges. The story is interesting and almost every quest is in some way linked to the greater whole in ways you wouldn't expect early on. When me and my girlfriend were playing together, there were points where we were just going OOH OOH OOH as we connected seemingly unrelated dots on our imaginary conspiracy board. Larian's phenomenal encounter design makes the battles a treat as well, despite being hampered by the not-great 5th edition of D&D. There is no trash fights, and now that this game has inspired me to play BG1-2 I really feel the tedium of beating down a dozen of trash encounters for every interesting one. Don't get me wrong, they're great games but Larian's encounter design just shines especially in comparison to them. This is the game that reawakened my CRPG brainworms, which have been long dormant since the Pillars of Eternity series died. 1. Alan Wake 2: Is Baldur's Gate 3 a better game? Probably. But Alan Wake 2 is a game I love more. It has been thirteen years coming, a game that finnish developer Sam Lake (and his company Remedy) have been trying to make for over a decade and he has spent the entire time cooking. The game is filled with so much love. From the characters to the writing to the visuals to the stupid live-action sections that Remedy squeezes into literally everything they touch. The gunplay is mediocre but I don't care because the atmosphere and the vibes of the game are absolutely impeccable. I also love that unlike Alan Wake 1 which used licensed music for its end of chapter screen, AW2 has an original song for every chapter including one by Poe who hasn't made a song since the year 2000. Also like every Remedy game since AW1 (except for Quantum Break), it has a musical setpiece (actually two) and it is fantastic. God I love this game. I love this self-indulgent masturbatory mess. This is a game where there is a scene in which Alan Wake goes onto a talk show in a spooky nether realm and meets Sam Lake (portrayed by Sam Lake), who in-universe is the actor who provides the face for Alex Casey, who is actually Max Payne with the serial numbers filed off (also portrayed by Sam Lake, though voiced by Max Payne's VA James MacAffrey), who also exists as a real person in the real world who coincidentally also looks exactly like Sam Lake and is voiced by James MacAffrey (rest in peace you absolute legend) because he is also just Max Payne with the serial numbers filed off.  Oh and my favourite band Poets of the Fall did three original songs (under the name Old Gods of Asgard, a fictional in-universe band) for the game and they are all sick. Also, if I was including games that didn't come out in 2023 but I played for the first time, I would probably put Bloodborne at number 3.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2023 21:47
|
|
|
Alan Wake 2 owns so hard that even its opening menu grabbed me.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2023 01:40
|
|
|
Shinji2015 posted:As stacked as this year was, I'm kinda glad it's not out yet. I don't know if I would have gotten around to it if it were I would have had to choose whether to shove Hi-Fi RUSH or Pizza Tower out of my top 5 and how the gently caress do you make that choice
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2023 04:36
|
|
|
Kerrzhe posted:there are lots of games that are much better than elden ring none of them are zelda
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2023 10:08
|
|
|
Issaries posted:Top 10 Alan Wake 2 Jiffs: no simultaneous coffee sip, this list is invalid
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2024 20:51
|
|
|
I'd still vote alan wake 2
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2024 21:28
|
|
|
DalaranJ posted:Looking forward to Ron Gilbert's upcoming deduction game, "The Case of Money Island" I mean the very first Golden Idol case made me think of Monkey Island basically instantly
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2024 07:44
|
|
|
veni veni veni posted:I have no problem with people liking it. I have a problem with people pretending like I am crazy for pointing out something super obvious that is 100% true just because they like a game. I don't know why finding something off putting for being very derivative is such a hot take around here. lol Also Alan Wake 2 got robbed these results are clearly faked!!!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2024 19:12
|
|
|
drat FF16 made it into the top three?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2024 19:16
|
|
|
Wait no I'm a dumbass it went earlier
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2024 19:17
|
|
|
Grapplejack posted:pizza tower got robbed. fuckin goons are too goddamned old to play good games now, it's why everything is an RPG now!!!!! This but also hi fi rush
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 02:00
|
|
|
Lies of P has a few great twists on the genre staples, things like your final estus charge being refillable allowing you to cling to life with skillful play or the absolutely brilliant weapon assembly system making the already great weapon variety become absolutely phenomenal.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 03:46
|
|
|
rise of the golden idol should feature peter battley, the most powerful failson of all time
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2024 03:12
|
|
|
quote:SirSamVimes Yeah that checks out. Never heard of Mad Rat Dead or Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, will check em out.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2024 04:26
|
|
|
ban this poster for pushing the page
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2024 04:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 10:30 |
|
|
Levin posted:Welp, guess we have to keep this party going until we hit 169 at least, Rarity start cracking the whip. 169 is meaningless, we'd have to push for at least 420
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2024 06:31
|
|