Games of the Year 2024

This was the year that I went full-in on OLED. After two years of using a productivity laptop with a Samsung RGB AMOLED as my daily driver, the screen uniformity was better than any brand new LCD or CRT screen I've ever owned so any residual fears about recent OLEDs being very susceptible to burn-in evaporated. My ageing Poco F1 got swapped out for something modern (and a bit less "premium", as even very cheap phones in 2024 are more than I need) and I did the obvious European "give me the best desktop monitor you have" (USians got a better deal on the flat variant MSI model) with that Alienware 32" 4K240 based on a 2024 QD-OLED panel. What this means for gaming is that I had a lot of HDR-preferable games in my backlog to work through and a 1000 nits, extremely high refresh rate VRR monitor with perfect blacks to work through them with. This, combined with a lot of extremely worthwhile epic-length RPGs being released this year, has somewhat limited how much of the 2024 output I've had time to complete or even sample. All that being said, I still found plenty of new games worth talking about.


    Game of the Year:

Balatro

Once again, someone has found a great new run-based card game broken down into a sequence of challenge battles and a slowly developing deck (here primarily played via building out a set of Jokers that act as modifiers on the potential scores of hands you can submit using the cards you draw from a full deck). While every battle involves beating a score, the range of modifiers on each round give personality to each encounter and also the added layer of RNG to how you're building your current deck's optimal play style. Within the first 20 minutes, you should understand exactly why this game has taken the world by storm.


    Ongoing Game of the Year:

Zenless Zone Zero

It's been a great year for massive RPGs. Too many to play. But the ones I have felt offer the most compelling, funny, interesting, exciting stories and gameplay in 2024 are ones that seem to get instantly discounted from the conversation by a lot of gamers.

At some point, I stopped playing competitive multiplayer games - no more Battlefield, Unreal Tournament, or Counter-Strike sessions; no RTS games taking an entire hour of a LAN to play through; and certainly no MOBAs draining your very soul. Especially in an era of online skill-based matchmaking and everything going F2P, there has never been a better time to play these games but I'm old and have given up trying. Without this glue to hold us together, the co-op/comp-stomp teams have also mainly fallen away too. And yet, I have played hundreds of hours online in the last year, in games that are also absolutely not MMOs in any meaningful sense - several of them do not even offer any multiplayer sessions, even just in the scale of a random 3-4 player quick-match co-op experience. These new not-MMOs have grown mainly out of F2P gacha/gashapon RPGs expanding beyond their East Asian phone roots.

What we have now are some of both the most expansive and biggest budget RPGs on the market ($100-200m projects that certainly count as AAA; equalling anything out of Microsoft, EA, or the likes), seamlessly played online, and monetised via loot boxes primarily for new characters every roughly three weeks (along with a battle pass upgrade subscription familiar to anyone who has played a modern multiplayer game). Fourteen years ago, I was complaining about paid tokens to unlock content in the base game of a $60 premium product. At the time I was playing Genshin Impact (intensely, for about six weeks), I considered the way these games were monetised as discounting them from the running for my top list. But in an era where every multiplayer game is constantly trying to sell me premium skins, I have softened significantly on the way these huge RPGs pay for themselves - which is just selling limited-run loot boxes to unlock the DLC characters that come with free new content every few weeks.

This is really where F2P MMOs have gone, for me. Less focus on anything like coordinated online raids, replaced with what is usually several end-game rotating challenges and at least one rogue-lite mode. Take the narrative content like bosses and add modifiers to keep it fresh. And that works best when your combat feels real good - which is where ZZZ excels. This is fast-paced stylish character action like you'd find in a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, here refined around a three member party with quick swapping to launch combos and initiate parry counters (fighting game style). Not only does it feel so much better than Genshin (making it hard to go back) but the removal of a healer type forces action to be a lot more energetic. Honkai: Star Rail, being a turn based RPG, manages to differentiate itself (ideal for a quick session on your phone; also probably Hoyo's strongest narrative arcs - it's taken me about 250 hours this year to go from the tutorial area to the current episodic chapters and most of that has been pretty great) and Wuthering Waves definitely also gets closer to ZZZ, even if they do have healer classes (I think keeping it to a three player team rather than the four of Genshin also helps with rotations).

In contrast to many BioWare games or many other premium RPGs with paid DLCs that conclude the story, I've also never been asked to pay more to get the rest of a narrative beat in the ones I've played and their rapid rate of new content would make any traditional MMO blush. The cost of entry is almost entirely in how big these games are - the Hoyo model is a new point release every six weeks, adding two phases of new content that come with one new character per phase. Much of that is permanent rather than time-limited events, slowly building out the mini-games and storyline of the RPG. If you want to get the new character, you either have to be there for the phase or wait for a rerun of the banner but there are plenty of opportunities to collect several core teams without this and you also get a lot of free loot box unlocks during normal play. You absolutely do not have to pay to unlock anything unless you want to unlock everything (insert image of how many thousands of dollars of DLC a Sims, train sim, or Paradox game accumulates or even just the Fortnite store or any other multiplayer skin store).

Honourable Mentions: Honkai: Star Rail; Wuthering Waves.


    Remake of the Year:

Persona 3 Reload

The first MegaTen game I ever completed was Persona 3: FES on the PS2, the complete edition that rolled in a rather disappointing extra chapter to the end of the excellent base game. I had played other SMT before that but it never hooked me to the point I'd finished these often grind-heavy titles. Since then, I've played most games in the various series even if often a few years after release but P3 still ranks very highly for me. I even replayed the PSP port (which was the "current" way to play this game on modern systems before this remake) at the start of the year, terrible AI upscaled images and all.

What Reload offers that the PSP port could never get close to is a genuinely expanded version of the gameplay systems, while still retaining most of the narrative content that came before it, as you remember it (some of the PSP exclusives, like the female protagonist route, did not make it over). All backed with the modern UI style you expect from the Persona team who last worked on the P5 series of games. The characters are a highlight of the rendering and the (3D once more) backgrounds from the PS2 version are mostly upgraded, even if some of the lighting choices remove the dark corners of the original - almost certainly done to try and make the game look closer to drawn anime but I don't think it actually works that well. Atlus are masters of making odd technical choices and this game is no different, but at least a lot of it looks generally excellent if you ignore the (SSAO etc) horrors that a graphics debugger may uncover (never look under the hood of Metaphor if you want to sleep at night). Wish the TAA was better but also you can brute-force quite a lot here and it sure beats… forgetting to ship any AA solution at all until a post-launch MLAA patch.

Elsewhere Capcom continue to iterate on their old franchises and bring them up to the modern era and Bloober Team have hit their stride with a very difficult remake of Silent Hill 2.

Honourable Mentions: Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster; Silent Hill 2 (2024).


    Metroidvania of the Year:

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

I'm not sure I really loved this genre until the spate of "wide linear" games took the formula into 3D (Tomb Raider 2013 was a very important release, without which we may not have even gotten the newer God of War games at all, but also we need to appreciate how Metroid Prime led the way) and taught me why this stuff is so much fun. Previously, especially with those early games, I had felt the mandatory backtracking was a lot of busywork and this was long before you could look online to avoid becoming lost. Graphics were also limited enough that a lot of areas looked the same and lacked the individual touch that provides environmental storytelling today.

Things have been going very well for the resurgence of Metroidvania games in recent years that are replicating what made those older games work and adding new quality of life features to make it even easier to love them. The Lost Crown even offers cloud-sync'd annotated photos that allow you to track stuff you've seen and want to return to later even if you're playing between different platforms. And this year we got a mix of new games and fleshing out the re-releases of old games that are not so easy to play unless you still had an old handheld around.

Honourable Mentions: Nine Sols; Castlevania Dominus Collection.


    Briticism of the Year:

Thank Goodness You're Here!

A minimal adventure game (the verbs are pretty limited here) that's all about the joke and that joke is Britain. As with most comedy, this one will rely on if that lands with you. As someone who grew up in Britain more than anywhere else, I found more than enough to like about this absurd romp through a fictional Northern town, crafted in Yorkshire.

Honourable Mentions: this is not a place of honour.


    Retro Games of the Year:

UFO 50

Fifty games, all new but designed to feel like the exploration of the back catalogue of an old console (which never existed). I think this pick is actually a lot more divisive than something like the remakes Nightdive are pumping out because if you don't really play to completion older games then you'll probably spend ten minutes on a lot of these and not even touch the rest but a lot of the games offered here are full games with hours of gameplay. To really dig into everything being offered here then you probably want to be someone who semi-regularly goes back to play all the way through retro games.

Honourable Mentions: Everything from Nightdive Studios.


    Surprise of the Year:

Indika

This is probably going to be the first major release (their actual first release was a VR-only title some years earlier) of an up and coming Spanish studio. There is a confidence to this adventure game that indicates hopefully big things for the future, despite some rough edges. It's also a nicely skewed but comprehendable tale, where you're never quite sure what the limits of the fairytale world are in which this story of religious devotion plays out.

Additional Commentary

Dragon Age: The Veilguard: Given I (re)played them in 2019, this series was at least fresher in my mind than for many. After a decade in the dark for BioWare, this does at least answer the question of if they can still put out solid games (even just technically). The cartoon characters here really work, along with cutting edge hair rendering and excellent noise patterns all over the place. Going back from trying to ape Skyrim has also helped cut the sprawling open zones back down to the scale of earlier maps in the series, along with a lot of callbacks to DA2 - feels like a lot of the team were possibly hired after becoming fans of that game and wanted to bring it back into the fold more strongly, even with this being a direct sequel to DAI. (I almost promoted it to the list above - a few more good character moments would have sealed the deal.)

Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic: This hit 1.0 this year so it's a suitable time to say that if you ever wondered how the bricks get to the building sites in SimCity, to actually allow the houses to be built, this is the game for you!

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes: I really liked Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (and the Suikoden series) so you would think expanding that world to rekindle the old series, led by the Suikoden creator before he passed away, would be a pretty easy win. And yet, I just couldn't muster the energy to keep playing this. I might circle back around to it in 2025 to give it another chance.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II: Seems to lose the actual spark of an interesting idea that the first game has for the narrative and also doesn't do anything to expand the mechanics. If you play it, it's just about the visuals.

Another Crab's Treasure: Really wanted to like this but I don't think the "fun" atmosphere really matches the mechanics that well. Reminded me of all the worst of old action platformer games that loved to kill you with a smile.

Tales of Kenzera: ZAU: Given the EA backing, this seemed to have a rather disappointing budget behind it. I'm sure the action is good enough for many but I didn't get that far as there were better Metroidvanias on offer even without going into my backlog.

Pacific Drive: I think I went into this expecting more of a narrative game and less of a rogue-lite. What I really liked about survival-crafting games like Subnautica was uncovering the story and, with what I played of this, I just never quite got there.


If I see credits soon… Ara: History Untold; Call of Duty: Black Ops 6; Frostpunk 2; Harold Halibut; Indiana Jones and the Great Circle; Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess; Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth; Little Kitty, Big City; Metal Slug Tactics; Open Roads; Still Wakes the Deep. (then I may move some to the above list and write about them more)

I know you called this a 1.0 release: Dragon's Dogma 2; Metaphor: ReFantazio; MS Flight Sim 2024; STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl; Star Wars: Outlaws. (but I will check back during 2025 to see how patching has gone)

Credits still distant: 1000 x Resist; Age of Mythology: Retold; Black Myth: Wukong; Caves of Qud; Creatures of Ava; Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake; EA Sports College Football 25; Expeditions: A MudRunner Game; Fear the Spotlight; Granblue Fantasy: Relink; GreedFall 2: The Dying World; Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 and 2 Remastered; Life Is Strange: Double Exposure; Lorelei and the Laser Eyes; Manor Lords; Mouthwashing; Path of Exile 2; Rise of the Golden Idol; Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance; Slitterhead; Space Marine 2; Star Ocean: The Second Story R; Tactical Breach Wizards; Unicorn Overlord.

I still don't own a PS5: Astro Bot; Final Fantasy VII Rebirth; Stellar Blade. (and at this point, if it doesn't come to PC, this is something to think about on PS6)

Games of the Year 2023

For those of us who work in the tech / game dev sector, it's been a brutal year of layoffs and companies falling over (which possibly potends thousands more job losses to come soon). For those of us playing games, there has been something for just about everyone and a lot of huge AAA releases that missed their original dates arriving all at once. Not all of them great but we'll get into that in my round-up of the new games I found notable in 2023.

So without further ado, let's look at the twelfth annual rundown of games I wanted to talk about during award season.

Alan Wake 2

With a path-traced renderer on PC fed via a skinned meshlet geometry system that extends all the way to foliage sway, this is arguably the very state of the art in real-time rendering. Nothing matches the DLSS 3.5 ray-reconstructed version of Bright Falls and the less solidly existent locations you visit in Alan Wake 2. Before we even consider how the elements of filmed acted footage (which we once called FMV) are layered on top of the scene in a notable step up from the use of that technique in Control.

Remedy have grown a lot since the original Alan Wake was an attempt to make an open world action game riffing on horror elements you might find in the writing of Stephen King (in the same way the Max Payne games have a clear reference point; or even a game from Rockstar, who own the rights to Max Payne). A game long-delayed that ended up stripping the experience back to linear sections, including some rather long driving sequences that clearly would have felt somewhat different in a much more open game. They return thirteen years later as a far more confident studio, with Control DLC acting as a soft pilot for Alan Wake 2 and the establishment of a shared world for the games they still have the rights for (while Max Payne morphs somewhat to become Alex Casey).

The result is a game that iterates on the strengths of Control's narrative while moving away from a focus on combat and into the real survival horror genre. You will shoot things (after burning away their shield of darkness) here but that is not what you spend most of your time doing. A lot more time is spent between combat in puzzles and navigation. The themes of Alan Wake return, but covered as if that first game was only a rough draft and the scope of conversation grows from Twin Peaks to encompass a lot more modern prestige TV. Unfortunately it's a game where I think the less you know going in beyond basic genre convention, the better, so that's all you'll get from me. It's a gripping ride even outside of the world-leading technical and artistic talent on show, even if I'm one of the few people who doesn't love all of their facial animation work (I thought it was budget limitations but apparently this game was definitely AAA so maybe it's an artistic choice).

Baldur's Gate 3

Another studio who are on my list of recent big hitters built on a long relationship to their complete body of work. I remember going to a publisher's regional offices for some press event for Divine Divinity, the rather "we would also like to make some Infinity Engine WRPGs please" origin of Larian's own universe. That series really found their own in the Divinity: Original Sin games, with the first one being a very funny RPG that gets what fantasy can play with while the second game ramps up the emotional weight of the stories they tackled. Some of the best RPGing this decade, at least once patched up for their complete editions (which is why you've only seen them mentioned in passing in these GotY lists before - I was late to the party).

And, after asking the licence holder for a go at making their own DnD RPG, possibly even taking over one of the classic WRPG series, Larian finally used those Original Sin games to persuade Hasbro to lend them Baldur's Gate. Six years of development later, half of which included the public Early Access release of the first act, and it's finally here and winning GotY awards left and right. A digital version of 5th Edition rules where Larian have tried to account for a lot of player action permutations and respond, "yes, and…"

What results is one of the deepest RPG campaigns you can walk through without the assistance of an actual human GM able to spin out new content on the fly. You cannot do everything but the Original Sin penchant for letting you teleport or physics-sim your way through various encounters has been expanded in every way imaginable here. It's a 100 hour RPG that is more than enough to satisfy a craving for epic tales filled with interesting characters but it's also so varied that you will come back to this several times to feel out the variety of what might be, all backed by combat that is a tactical delight.

Lies of P

I went into this game (well, the demo of the first area they released early) not expecting much. How many FromSoft-like titles have we seen trying to be a new Bloodborne or Dark Souls without latching onto what makes some of those games special? And yet, despite the extremely stock Unreal Engine 4 technical construction, what has resulted is both a very accomplished game in that sub-genre with their own spin on lore combined with by far the most technically solid gameplay experience you could want.

While it may be doing nothing unusual beyond the stock UE4 toolkit, the game is competently put together so you will be able to enjoy a very high and stable framerate while the camera doesn't destroy itself on nearby geometry (so leading you to death - my great complaint about Bloodborne, even if you fixed the frankly unacceptable framerate). When available, I play FromSoft titles on PC and like them for the WRPG-inspired games they are but it's rare you get a particularly great PC port, but here we have a game that just works on every platform.

In a very broad retelling of Pinocchio in a future late-Victorian setting (it's not steampunk but the automatons are there you might associate with that), you must carve your way through a hub and spokes world where shortcuts inside each spoke are regularly unlocked as you progress and xp is not permanently lost when you die (as happens in games that force you back to an earlier save) but rather is dropped for you to chase back to (yes, it's very one of those games). The story keeps you going (with a light smattering of side content and barely explained quest chains), the level design really knows what it's doing, and all the upgrades and equipment unlocks feed into a nice character progression. A very satisfying experience.

Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

Finally, we got a Like a Dragon / Yakuza game onto the main list again. Of all the game I've played, going all the way back to my Japanese import copies of the first two games on PS2, this is the most condensed. An action DLC to the turn-based game of Like a Dragon (7) that grew out into a standalone product. This tells the story of how Kiryu got from the end of 6, into that section in 7, and is set up for how he will return in 8 (releasing early 2024).

If you're remembering how this series works (releasing something new most years ever since 2005), you will be unsurprised to hear that we have a lot of reuse of the city block areas already established (as this happens broadly simultaneously with 7) with a brand new set of mechanics to keep you playing through a new story filled with characters old and new. Your new best friend, Akame, almost steals the show but there's a lot of good stuff to go around (nod to Hanawa as another great new character).

With everything being slightly more compact than in previous entries (even the previous entries that were relatively shorter and avoided multiple protagonists), it's easy to run through this and get a feel for the sort of humour and story-telling this series is known for. It's possibly not an easy point to jump into the story compared to Zero but I do wonder if someone could muddle through here and then dive back into the archive. There isn't anything radically different if you haven't enjoyed the series before but if you want more Like a Dragon, this is great.

Cocoon

From the very first trailer, the hook was obvious: each marble is an entire world you can enter and move around in. Find the suitable pool and put a marble on the platform and you can jump inside. Or just use a marble as a weight to activate a switch or use the color-coded ability it has, like revealing hidden platforms. While you're inside a world, another type of jump-pad will help you get back out to that pool. But with every world being a complete area in itself, you can likely also find another pool within the marble world, and if you still have another marble on you, you can keep jumping deeper.

The striking visuals, economical while avoiding falling into the "pastel indie" aesthetic that it would seem close to, carve out very different worlds inside each type or marble, ensuring you don't get too lost. Although some of the fun is unwrapping exactly what you need to do next to progress - like many puzzle games you can look at what is available to you and understand why every single element is where it is and so what you are intended to do next. It's all very clear with an incremental pace of introducing new elements that slowly build up. Between various sections you also have to fight slightly more action-focused boss battles, although they are still within the puzzle limits and so will not be overly demanding on precision movement.

Short, well paced, visually interesting, and always ready to give praise for solving the puzzles.

Resident Evil 4 (2023)

I actually prepared for this remake by doing another deep dive into this series (I just didn't blog about it, unlike some previous series replays). From Zero to RE6 (my first time playing that last game - it's far too long rather than actually being so much worse than RE5), using HD or REmake editions along the way and including both Revelations games. Most of the games being rather short (when you know what you're doing) makes it easily doable, and my appreciation for RE3make has grown with time, even if I stand by my original position that it could have been great with more direction in updating it. The second port (by QLOC) of Resident Evil 4 to PC (with community mods to bring it further into line with the GC original while retaining "HD" textures) is my preferred way to play the original, a game I didn't think looked good on the PS2 port or played well until the Wii controls.

With Resident Evil 4 fresh in my memory, static lighting (if any, in some scenes; which can feel like it's nothing but a flat ambient component and maybe the vertex lighting of your flashlight) and all, I dived into RE4make to find another excellent update of a classic. The visuals, once patched, are going past what RE3make did with only a few areas where I wish they'd go further (RE Engine doesn't really make good use of ray-tracing, and SSR is, when used, about as bad as it can look to create detailed glossy reflections). This is a retelling of the classic campaign and DLC Ada journey, done somewhat less overtly campy and yet still very much not playing it straight.

A major departure is making the combat almost feel modern. Rather than having to plant your feet to aim, giving the game a very measured cautious movement, the RE4make pushes you to be nimble on your feet and really switch up from melee to range to avoidance. This is divisive but I maintain that Resident Evil 4 was always more of an action game than pure survival horror so given how far they went making RE3make into an action game, this change was to be expected. It just means we get a brand new game that feels totally different to play than the original - more games is betterer. And this game is excellent on its own terms.

  Honourable mentions:

Jusant

Interesting choice to push UE5's very high geometric density (with amazing LoD transitions) and advanced global illumination in a world almost devoid of textures, outside of some artistic flourishes and broad gradients. This climbing game is a great vertical exploration journey; a real mood.

Atomic Heart

Soviet Bioshock. It's been a long time since we last saw an actual Bioshock game and I'm happy for others to give it a new spin while we wait for 2K to reboot the series under new hands and also wait forever for whatever Levine is up to. We are talking all the way to a lighthouse appearing towards the end of the game so the references cannot get much more direct.

What I really like about this spin is they pushed for an open-world approach to the overworld hub in a way that goes beyond the connected spaces seen in the Bioshock games. Then you have the mix of puzzles, superpowers, and guns to keep you moving forward and exploring every inch of the constrained mission sections and overworld. Apparently the English voice tracks aren't great, but I recommend you play in the original language as you'll be reading a lot of soviet style posters with subtitles anyway.

System Shock (2023)

It's been a good decade for remakes and they're not slowing down. This rebuilding of the very hard to play System Shock 1 manages to update what absolutely needs it while also not touching a lot that could have been sanded away by a more thorough remake. At worst, this makes it interesting and at best it elevates the source material to a new level. Going through development Hell, this project has taken a very long time to finally find where it wants to land on remaking vs replacing and, just like the retro-future visuals, it decides that actually it wants to both be very modern (with every UE4 effect you have come to expect) while also being a pixelated blocky world with lower texel density than most games and a very clear style to that choice. Luckily, it all works and makes a System Shock you can play in 2023 without hating the interface, something no mod or update before has totally managed.

Planet of Lana

Referencing Another World, this is a side-scrolling setting where nothing quite makes sense but you're going to unravel some mysteries and do it via a lot of puzzling in a brisk and quite visually pleasing little puzzle platformer. We've had a lot of that in the last 15 years (did this current push start with Limbo or is Braid a better start date?) but this one knows how to run an evocative text-less story without looking like a copy of a copy.

RoboCop: Rogue City

This came out of nowhere. A licensed game from a developer who does that kind of work, only this time someone has clearly been playing some of those first-person RPGs before detailing out the semi-open gameplay they wanted to build into each hub area. I'm actually going to reference back to Deus Ex here as a grimy world where you get a main mission but are also expected to walk through a lot of hub areas and discover a lot more to keep you occupied between finding somewhat more linear mission sections. On top of the very solid gameplay, the world they've built in Unreal Engine 5 uses all the new tricks in the toolbox to lavish destructible detail into every corner, just don't look too closely at the animating faces as the budget only goes so far.

Venba

What a lovely little game about immigrant families, cooking, and finding how to belong. There is a bit of freeform cooking, where you are not under any real time pressure but just have to play with the ingredients to work out the correct recipe (if you're not already familiar with these dishes) but most of this game is about enjoying where the story goes as a young family grow up and deal with the challenges of moving half way around the world.

Persona 5 Tactica

I finally played the Royal expansion to Persona 5 this year (given the original game was 90 hours and the expansion requires a full replay of all that content and a new conclusion, it was always going to be some years before I got to this) so the story was fresh in my mind as I dived into this tactics spin-off, sorta set towards the later parts of that main game (but really, they don't do a lot to justify how this would actually have all crammed into that time period so it would almost be better to think of it as an alternative fork for those characters you know so well).

The translation of the turn-based RPG into a grid-based tactics title works well, with a lot of movement freedom and move chains to build puzzles out of (the campaign mixes more standard missions with side puzzle encounters). But what you're all really here for is teens being put through the emotional wringer while asking questions about how we deserve to be governed and how those in charge are all trash. And, like many other Persona side-story content, this one really hits the mark. So if you want to go back to the Phantom Thieves and spend a few more hours with them, you can't do better than this.

The Expanse: A Telltale Series

I love the show, the books, the cast, and I'm pretty happy with what Deck Nine have been putting out in recent years (Life is Strange stories where the queer subtext is text). So I was really happy to see this manage to tell a decent short back-story using enough of the original cast to get you into the mood (I assume Jared Harris, after Chernobyl, Foundation, etc is a rather expensive casting and so why they had to use a different actor).

Steamworld Build

Above the ground you're playing a quite simple Anno-like, building up production chains from raw material to designer goods to keep your population happy and allow you to upgrade their buildings and access new tiers of workers and products. Under the ground, this game offers a mining game (not totally unlike a Dungeon Keeper) with all the combat with critters reserved for subterranean levels (rather than the open seas of Anno). There's not a lot here but if you want an indie Anno without the multiplayer, then this will satisfy your urges.

Beacon Pines (2022)

If I'd played this last year when it came out, it would have ranked highly on my top list. I managed to hoover it up this year and what an absolutely delightful tale, told via a branching path in which you eventually explore all paths to fill in the full story.

Chained Echoes (2022)

As with the above, this would have ranked highly if I'd played it in the launch year so I'm making sure to give it some credit with the honourable mentions. This is a large 16-bit style JRPG with just as much to say about what people should be worrying about in the fake middle ages filled with magic and war. The combat system (on foot and in flying mechs) and levelling systems are quite fresh, to hold it all together.

  Not making my top lists (despite personal anticipation or being a big hit with others):

Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom - I said what I said. Adding 2015's Besiege (or a dozen other indie games that have been doing this for years) to BotW hasn't improved my views on the new series significantly.

Any of the big Microsoft titles for 2023 - The Forza Motorsport (2023) reboot really tested my patience in working out what was up with the settings menu and why I was getting such an inconsistent result from the in-game benchmark run-to-run, and this is before we discuss the broken progression system that locked car tweaking behind several hours of play despite some cars needing upgrades in a very different order to others; Starfield has basically nothing to get me going, from a settings menu missing basic options like calibrating the brightness from the broken mess it shipped with (unable, in most scenes, to generate values under 1 nit) to a thousand fractured open zones with nothing to do in them and so mandatory fast-travel for most movement around the universe; and Redfall… well, what a mess. Studios whose work I have very much enjoyed in the past but even looking past technical issues galore, these do not seem like solid foundations on which to build experiences for me.

Metroid Prime: Remastered - Somehow the new assets didn't hit as hard with me after all these years because I've been playing all the community updated versions of my original copies with proper mouse-look and so on. Contrast this to how RE4make reinvents the entire game. Maybe this is a me problem, but the community have shepherded this series far better than Nintendo have and this remastering of the game with new assets doesn't quite rank putting into a list above.

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty - It just didn't hit with me; negative enthusiasm from hour one. I might go back round to this in 2024 and give it another go but it didn't immediately grab me (I'll pencil it in on one of my lists at the end of these articles).

Dead Space (2023) - This remake almost made it to the list above, despite some very funky technical issues (Vanishing keycards? Broken textures?) and lack of ongoing support for PC but in the end, I didn't play enough of it to put it on the list above because I kept stopping with the thought that maybe everything would be fixed in subsequent patches. This is an issue I've had with quite a few major games this year on PC (which is becoming my only current gaming platform as I have neither current-gen consoles [expected to outlast a new console launch in 2024] nor a current phone [Snapdragon 845 was great in 2018 but it's been some years now]). The atmosphere of this remake almost overcomes all of the above and yet… what if they'd used RT (or a SDF fallback, a la Lumen in UE5) for the reflections to remove all the grainy noise on metal surfaces or did some GI to get a touch of bounce lighting into those dark crevices rather than rendering them in Doom 3 black?

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - Is this going to get fixed (on PC, where animations do not play back correctly)? How did they release the second game with as many bugs and issues as the first game (which was only really fixed by a next-gen port to what are now the current consoles)? I feel like if you, months after release, have to rip the entire RT rendering system out of your 60fps mode on current gen consoles to try to recover a stable framerate, something went very wrong in the management of this software project. And the first game was all about loving what was being offered here despite the technical issues so why was this game so much more ambitious when they clearly couldn't manage that jump within the budget. I'd love to hear the story of who meddled in this to cause this outcome (which really is tarring the reputation of Respawn as a more reliable pair of hands within EA - who within EA is left because you'll notice it's been a very very long time since I could mention BioWare on these year-end roundups).

Wild Hearts - Another EA published title that didn't seem to launch well on PC. Show me a sixty second stretch of gameplay and I'll show you 100ms stutters. At least the Dead Space traversal stutter as it loads new areas is somewhat predictable (now they patched out several other launch issues). This is apparently a fun Monster Hunter like and yet I'm unlikely to ever find out for myself if they don't patch this on PC.

The Lamplighters League - Oooft! Didn't launch well so look again in 2024? But it doesn't sound great given that HBS was put up for sale by the publisher immediately after launch. Paradox have somehow squandered the FASA Interactive linenage and a team hot off a trilogy of great Shadowrun RPGs and the amazing Battletech game. Apparently they slashed up to 80% of the staff months before this game was released so it went through final polish on a skeleton crew.

Cities: Skylines 2 - A trash fire launch again courtesy of Paradox publishing. My experience was a totally busted settings menu where you had to fight to get anything close to a playable game, despite quite poor visuals. Once you got into the actual simulation, major sections seemed totally broken, like garbage not working at all, an infinite thirst just for low density housing (that would instantly fill to create endless sprawl yet no demand for jobs or shopping opportunities), and some ratios that seemed to mean I would need about 5% of my total city areas dedicated to primary schools. And this was telegraphed by them saying it was releasing rather hot in the run up to launch yet not flagging this release with the Early Access badge (that normally means you're not going to charge for DLC for a while).

Forspoken - I don't think anyone was really going to bat for this in GotY lists (and the demo deflated what enthusiasm I'd previously had) but I wanted to round out the list of games where the dev's previous work was something I enjoyed greatly and was a total flop. Given the studio has been dismantled and now does support work for other teams, I assume they're never going to give it a more fundamental rework to try and find the fun inside.

  Didn't play enough of to comment:

I made it through most of my to-play list from last year, but wanted to note one title that I managed to fail miserably to actually follow-through with and didn't even get far enough to put it on the list above as a pencilled in "miss"...

Return to Monkey Island (2022) - I replayed through both (1 and 2) special editions in this series, which hold up quite well and look good, and 3 (Curse), which isn't as to my tastes but is still by far the most visually striking the series has ever been. Then I played the opening scene of this (6; Return), that starts the second after the ending I don't really care for in Monkey Island 2 and failed to go back. I should fix that in 2024 and give it a real chance rather than leaving my replay hanging [I really can't stand the visuals of 4 (Escape) and could never get into Tales - better to just pretend they don't exist; so it was a smart move to not set the new game at the very end of the series].

Seas of Stars - I played Chained Echoes for my 16-bit RPG fix in the later part of this year so didn't get round to playing much of this. But I am looking forward to diving into this in 2024, if it's half as good as Chained Echoes at mining what's timeless about those old games.

Need to play more of in 2024: Deliver Us Mars; Hi-Fi Rush; Amnesia: the Bunker; Pikmin 4; Terra Nil; Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon; The Crew: Motorfest; Dredge; Remnant II; Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly; The Last Case of Benedict Fox; The Talos Principle 2; Viewfinder; Dune: Spice Wars; Thirsty Suitors; Phantom Brigade; Humanity; Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty; Like a Dragon: Ishin!

Didn't even get to start in 2023: The Exit 8; Assassin's Creed: Mirage; Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader; Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty; Goodbye Volcano High; Atlas Fallen; Slime Rancher 2; Dead Island 2; Immortals of Aveum; Chants Of Sennaar; Lords of the Fallen (2023 rather than same title in 2014); Company of Heroes 3; Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew; Bomb Rush Cyberfunk; Super Mario RPG (releasing for the first time in Europe); El Paso, Elsewhere; Total War: Pharaoh; dotAGE; and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

No PS5 list (and at this point in the perf vs upgrading my PC scale, I can't see it happening until they really slash the price - a $550 4070 made a lot more sense this year to let me play games looking their best vs a PS5 or Series X, which is exactly the upgrade I made): Final Fantasy XVI; Spiders-Man 2; and anything PS VR2 related. [At least outside VR, these should be coming to PC sooner or later.]

Games of the Year 2022

An entire year without posting eh? I'd like to say a lot of exciting things have been happening behind the scenes but actually the cost of living inflation bomb and a constant sequence of national political crises have required a bit more attention than I usually give to making sure my situation stays solvent. It does mean that I have wrapped up a few things and may actually get back into making games over the coming years, as the economic outlook is poor for most but relatively stable for how I have things now set up. At a certain point it would be highly desirable for a few games on Steam to start generating a trickle of income directly back to me, if I can set that up over the next decade.

Outside of wrapping up my old consulting business and managing daily life, I've had some time for games but very little for the more recent AAA productions. The big RPG series I (re)played this year was The Witcher, which I am still in the process of polishing off due to the December release of the latest patch for the third game in the series. Moving onto a (thin) laptop as my primary (low power) work machine due to exploding local electricity prices has also come with a focus on going back to a few recent titles that can do well out of a 3050 via DLSS (just patched into The Witcher 3) or digging into more legacy AAA games. Although you can actually get a surprising amount out of the lowest-end Ampere GPU you're allowed to call a Series 30, especially when using Tensor-accelerated upscaling to boost quality.

Meanwhile, the crypto nonsense around GPU prices has ended but we're still dealing with inflated prices over what you should expect two years after the SRPs were initially set for RDNA2 & Ampere, which shows no sign of being washed away with RDNA3 or Ada, at least in the near-term (and despite huge warehouses of GPUs that are not selling at current prices and are impacting the quarterly results of every GPU vendor). But it's not just GPUs that are in silly season, with the PS5 getting a Sony official price hike rather than a price cut going into the third year on sale. The die shrinks are no longer providing a major reduction in price per transistor and war instability in Europe plus the continued supply-chain issues from the pandemic - I would say we've got to wait for things to get better but at this point it seems like a never-ending chain of problems that are likely to be joined by ever-more-frequent climate shocks and other issues. This could start to feel like a new normal and the 3080 will be the last truly great GPU to wipe away the previous generation (a card that was near impossible to get at launch and almost immediately followed by silly-season street price spikes due to crypto demand). If Intel ever sort out their driver stack (including ensuring popular older games run their best) then maybe something interesting could happen from aggressive competition rather than AMD happy to sit back and merely price-match nVidia with their raster-first RDNA design.

Enough complaining about the world of gaming hardware. At least I recently picked up a 5800X3D for my AM4 desktop so, when I get back from my laptop gaming break, I'll be most likely to drive a new 120Hz 4K OLED display (which I hope someone will announce at CES in a big desk-friendly size but without white sub-pixels) at the maximum refresh rate in a wide range of titles (using VRR to hide any inconsistencies) and jump back into VR. I present, my games of the year 2022:

  Citizen Sleeper

This narrative game lives on the atmosphere it brings to a world that has already seen a major collapse but is now teetering on the edge of an actual fall, as everything that can no longer be advanced finally stops being able to be maintained anywhere near where it was during the golden years. You wake into this world as a cloned consciousness in a company-owned body, escaping the indentured servitude your donor placed you into. It's one of those scifi stories and is very happy to linger on classic questions while wrapping it all in just enough detail and character to feel like a lived-in reality. It's the execution that sells it: the characters you meet and the things they've done and want to achieve as much as your need to keep running and make the most of what time you have left.

The main gameplay system as you move around this large space station is a daily set of six-sided dice that are rolled each morning, depending on the condition of your body the night before, and give you energy to engage in activities during the next day. Maybe a 3 will unlock a specific digital lock you need to decode today or only a 5 or 6 can get you past a check unscathed. All the while, lots of counters are ticking over as the rest of the story progresses forward. You have a decent amount of control over what part of the story you focus on developing next, although all paths will ultimately either reach a natural conclusion point or the end of the road. I never found I was totally on-rails or trapped by the net closing around me, just sufficiently energised to slip through a few moments where it seemed like everything was popping off at once and I couldn't possibly respond with the actions I had allocated each day. Eventually a regression to the mean should mean your pace is rather predictable and so something the gameplay can be tuned around, even assuming the dice rolls are random rather than guided by an invisible narrative hand to keep you where the story wants you to feel you are.

All of the writing and choices you're making throughout this game are backed by some really detailed character portraits and such sleek flat shaded 3D elements that the brutalism seeps from the space station overview back into the story. And the music that underlies everything keeps you in the zone. I was extremely glad to spend a dozen hours in this world, seeing most of the paths the story takes (as when you come to a definitive ending, you can reload back into the game just before you make a pivotal choice about how you are going to try to leave).

  Tinykin

What if Pikmin was a 3D platformer? No one had asked this question before and yet the answer is obviously joyous. Rather than only collect the little flower creatures to help blow stuff up and move stuff around your large open zones, what if they could help build you ladders to jump to new heights or build bridges or connect up electrical lines? What if your own mobility was far more exciting and your little helpers were just the boost to get you into the various perfectly crafted puzzle parts of this large vertically interesting world?

This is a world made up of several large connected areas, a tiny person in a very big house where you can collect a lot of different things (don't worry, there is a reasonable "you got most of them, you can move on" goal associated with the real collect-a-thon spam items in each level) as you would in any other 3D platformer but also slowly amass enough of the little critters to power yourself up to climb any gap and cross every barrier as you complete various tasks to ensure the NPCs of each area are happy and their objects have been moved to where they need to go.

The core traversal of this 3D platformer feels just right and all of the puzzles are just engaging enough to be fun to tick off while never leaving you totally stumped. It's good solid level design and movement fundamentals which has clearly been iterated on a lot. I loved early Pikmin games but was feeling like the announced fourth title needed to do more than just rehash that again to get me excited but here is clearly what I was actually waiting for. I'm more of an open world traversal game fan rather than strict inheritors to those early 3D platformers but this really drew me in and got me thinking through how to 100% the levels, despite collecting literally everything not being a requirement to progression or even the primary completion awards. And then it all wraps up with a very cute story and a gloriously animated visual style.

  Tunic

This is the Zelda I am talking about when I say I'm a fan of that series (a conversation I had recently where I realised that the other person had no idea about pre-3D or mobile Zelda and so did not understand what I was referring to) - top-down action RPGs with plenty of exploration. Perfectly recreated here with some pastel flourish and very clean 3D edges, which occasionally comes into the gameplay by allowing hidden paths obscured by the camera angle.

What really elevates this is a dash of Fez making the world slightly more than it appears and injecting some meta-narrative puzzling into the game world, binding you to uncover both the game's story as experienced by the protagonist and the game's story as you uncover the construction of the mythical release of the game you are playing. This mainly, although not exclusively, manifests in uncovering pages of the game manual as you explore the world. These pages are primarily in a made up language you do not ever need to decode (so not exactly like Fez - it is only a drop of essence used) with sparse localised text and plenty of diagrams. These will explain how you play, provide map outlines, and also implies an experience of getting an import RPG back in the day before you could look anything up online and so have to work out how to play and what to do using only the manual, which you could not read. It's a great gimmick for providing hints and letting most of the game tutorialize itself, slowly ensuring you know what's going on and allowing you to dive quite deeply into the game world they've constructed.

This game has been getting hype at conventions for years with early demos available but the final package is more than worth the wait. The clarity of the blooming visuals, the detailed and diverse level designs, the backing music, and the carefully paced progression: it all drives you towards a really nice conclusion. And it got me into the right mood to dive into last year's Death's Door, which shares a couple of mechanical choices and a soft contrast visual style with very clean 3D art.

  Hardspace: Shipbreaker

We're returning to space for this pick and another corporate nightmare where you don't even own your own body, will seemingly never climb out of the debt that has been thrust upon you, and there will be a lot of days of hard work in a spaceyard between you and the conclusion of the game. But unlike my top game this year, this is more of a simulation of a future job with the narrative acting as trimmings around the edge and justification for the gameplay loop, not the core of the game itself.

As the eponymous ship-breaker, your job is to use a cutting laser to either carve through plates or burn away components that make up derelict spaceships. Each of the ship templates that you slowly unlock as the complexity of the game advances can be reconfigured in a number of ways before you get to it and each of those can also have requirement changes depending on your current tasks. But no matter the details, the main task is always to work out how to safely cut the ship into pieces small enough to shove into one of three bins: the metal furnace, the material processor, or the component barge. Everything has a price so trash the least amount of stuff with the laser, don't let too much stuff blow up, and don't mix the three types of material when you yeet them towards one of the bins. Oh, and try not to die in a workplace accident; those clones you're using are expensive and they'll be added to your debt.

This is one of those zen games where you get into the zone and just start doing a fake job for half an hour to relax. "Ah, this is a Type 4. I know how to depressurize the inside of this without anything exploding and the extra airlocks they usually throw onto every side is going to make a lot of money once I've burned through all the locking blocks holding them together!" The use of air pressure and some slightly tricky fuel and computer systems that need to be drained in the right order and with a time pressure ensure that even when you're going zen, there is always a chance of that panic as things are not quite going as well as you expected or a tether didn't actually bind hard enough to pull a big block of metal out the way before you needed to dive through, meaning now you're on fire and no one wants that.

As the story ramps up, there's some good space trucker unionisation talk and a fun conclusion. My only criticism I hope is fixed in a sequel is that there are only so many ship types and variants of those types in the game (and you quickly see everything before the story has time to conclude). As I understand it, the way they design everything into the puzzles that are the atmospheric and fuel systems on top of all the basic physics for making everything a surface you can either cut or blow up means it's impossible for modders to be allowed to make new ships or even just shuffle new variants. Steam Workshop support for a moddable ship builder would turn this from a really fun game you play to completion to one of those forever games where you can throw many hundreds of hours into everything the community have built for you to play around with and puzzle out.

  Against the Storm

This almost made my list last year (I was thinking about both it and Timberborn as my strategy early access picks to throw up before waiting for a 1.0 release). Back then it was in early access on Epic and was already a deeply engaging city builder with a unique twist. Now it is still not quite at 1.0 but has had a year more updates added to the foundations, tuning what was already there and significantly expanding the rest of the mechanics, factions, and art.

In the campaign structure of this game, you are not building a permanent city that will eventually tower over everything around it, slowly consuming all available space. You are just building some temporary settlements with which to extract resources from the local area, send some back to your home capital, and then get out before the conditions get too harsh and eventually the storm arrives and wipes everything away. Between each storm cycle you will usually get in half a dozen settlements of various difficulties, always starting out in a small glade and deciding when to explore into the surrounding glades by chopping down all the trees between you and them. In some of those glades will be hazards that require creature-power and resources to pacify, but if you don't expand then you'll also run through whatever resources you have available.

The way each run of the settlement building process is kept fresh is via a lot of randomisation. Each time your small band of settlers arrive (of several species with different affinities for work and needs to provide for), you only have access to a subset of buildings unlocked. As you complete goals (which are also randomised), you will get to choose between three options to unlock and so extend your construction horizons. Each area has a different subset of resources at play and each glade within the area will only have a couple of them on offer. Some of the Anno-style recipe chains will have alternative formulations that mean missing out on one resource is never the end of the road but if you can't find anything or a range of resources then you need to look at going in another direction.

When you complete your goals and return to the capital, you then use resources gathered in the settlement to permanently unlock new perks and create a meta-progression, ensuring that even if the conditions and randomisation repeat eventually, you'll be at a different stage in your campaign progression and so respond differently. If you play Anno games or any of the Banished-following indie settlement titles, this is very refreshing but also just similar enough that you know quite a bit of how the game needs to work so you're rarely lost.

  Two Point Campus

Two Point Hospital released in 2018 and, despite absolutely loving Theme Hospital back in 1997, something about the crash-prone experience I had and bits of the fit and finish of the game never quite let me love it. But the sequel, going to a series of campus maps to ask that you balance the books while building out huge institutions of learning, felt a lot more solid to me so I had a blast.

There is also some very useful cadence in the academic year, where a lot of the virtual people you need to satisfy are only going to be around for a few years. This contrasts with the patients in a hospital whose stay time should typically be rather shorter. Build out facilities, achieve goals, improve grades, and get ready for the next intake that you can probably make larger for a greater tuition and rent contribution as long as you're making sure to expand facilities so everyone can be housed and taught. It's a simple foundation (coming as a spiritual successor to games I was playing literally 25 years ago) but the formula still works.

  Opus: Echo of Starsong - Full Bloom Edition

This was a game I knew absolutely nothing about going into it. An RPG (advertised as a "visual novel style adventure game") out of Taiwan with a series that apparently goes back two previous games to 2015. Continuing a recurring theme, we are back in space and in a period of somewhat managed decline after a major war, where corporations are busy ensuring the exploitation of the resources available but with some of the more advanced technology being lost to the current inhabitants.

But rather than the influences of the previous games with this broad outline, this is a lot more like swashbuckling JRPGs like Skies of Arcadia. We have witches and mystical events and space pirates messing everything up for everyone involved. People fall in love, make mistakes, and have great battles as the game, played entirely in flashback, jumps through several pivotal moments for the core characters. The side-scrolling action sections mean there is more here than the very text-heavy choice prompts of Citizen Sleeper (which is most similar to the space exploration sections) but even in the more action-heavy moments it's certainly not going to get confused for a fully open exploration RPG or a mechanics-heavy simulation like Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

The entire thing lives or dies on your tolerance for the rather heightened emotional storytelling of typical JRPGs, which it clearly derives a lot from (even some of the sparse visuals can often feel like they're pointing back towards a previous style of simplistic shapes evoking detail that couldn't be rendered at the time - although looking through how many games are using a similar style on my list this year, it is clearly a production style favoured by indies in the now). This 2022 definitive edition with additional content is helped by the new voice work that provides a lot of dialogue with the emotional notes that a text-only version would lack. I suspect it won't be for everyone but I really appreciated the brisk 10 hours and hope the studio continue to grow their budget and production values for future releases.

  Dwarf Fortress

The original colony sim. Well, at least the template on which everything has built in the last 20 years it has been around. If you like RimWorld or games of that sort, you should at least try the original. This new Steam release is still not as forgiving as the imitations but you do at least get an official readable tile-set (not ASCII art), a tutorial, and some menu updates. If this game is for you, you probably already know.

  Last Call BBS

Zachtronics' swansong (although it sounds like the band might be getting back together anyway as Zach Barth didn't take to an alternative career in education so may be starting a new team) wrapped around themes played with in several previous titles (you dial into a retro server to download some illicit software titles - they are actually a set of games that explore the sorts of things previous games have, so expect lots of iterating on designs then looking at histograms telling you that actually you could have achieved that result with one less component or in two cycles less per iteration).

It might be a good grab-bag to get introduced to a lot of the gameplay mechanics seen in previous games but maybe the light introduction text to each title and short tutorial onramp of puzzle difficulty means this is more for existing fans to play around with (despite only appearing on my GotY list once before, I generally hold the majority of Zachtronics titles in high regard) while previous titles are the best place to start off?

  Ghost Song

An indie Metroid-style game that's certainly hewing closer to that model than Ori did while simultaneously walking towards the same emotional notes that that series is adding, along with more NPC engagement. The early parts of the game, as I explored the non-linear map and felt out the various hard gates on progress every Metroid-style game uses to direct progress, seemed rather punishing and lacked a difficulty change option. But as I unlocked better mobility options and new tools in my arsenal, I found the game had a lot to offer. I just wish it was better signposted early on which ways you may want to explore to find the upgrades that would mean most to your play style.

As I said upon completion, I really wish the boss battles integrated the weapon unlock soft-requirements better into the narrative of the game and also boosted the rest of the story-telling the game clearly wants to get involved in. This is a game that could do great things with some added content and a final pass on the good stuff that is here. It was teetering on the edge of my GotY vs coming in the listings below but looking back after a month, I think it hangs with the rest of these titles in my personal estimation, even if the critical consensus did seem a bit mixed in the few outlets which actually considered it notable enough to review at all.

  Not Making the Top List 2022:

Signalis - This is a retro tech-horror game going hard on that theme but without forcing horrible tank controls (I cannot embrace that retro convention - it's just a frustration; if the character should be slow to turn/move then encode that into their maximum turning speed to create delay between me pointing where I want to go and them executing it, don't force me to use tank controls). And it had some really great atmosphere in that opening couple of hours, richly mining influences beyond just gaming. As soon as it released, some friends were talking about it as their top game of the year (I think Citizen Sleeper would be hard to push off my list, especially given the common scifi themes). They know I'm into a lot of these games.

But I can't get past that aliased flickering mess every time the camera moves. I'm not "looking between the pixels to craft a horror unseen", I'm just getting depressed that the vibes don't match the technical execution. And this is clearly intentional. They wanted this low res retro aesthetic that evokes early games, not quite PlayStation 1 but maybe a PC a year earlier with software rendering doing the absolute most. There is a scene early on where you're at the top of a large hole into the earth and around the snow-white scene there is a dark pattern denoting the edge of the hole. Only the pixel aliasing is so bad that when the camera pans over the hole, it resembles a pure random noise pattern rather than an authored texture implying consistent defined shape. Almost immediately after this, during a more significant cut-scene, the game uses a (full output resolution) perfectly clean depth of field blur effect (on top of this pixelated aliased 360p rendering) so they're not even actually sticking to the limitations of the low res pixel grid.

I find it a shame that the CRT filter is not enabled by default, because that clearly improves things a bit (especially if you're running it on a nice small 4K monitor so that Trinitron emulation can run some very fine R G B vertical lines through the final result). Unfortunately even this is marred with a flaw I found almost fatal while trying to play in the classic horror settings - night, alone, lights off, sound up, enjoying the perfect inky blacks of an OLED. Some of the noise added in the CRT filter squashes the blacks and whites, destroying pure black OLED output (adding noise compresses the dynamic range unless you carefully account for it, because you can only add noise in one direction to pure white or black - pushing them towards mid-grey).

Immortality - Her Story was a runner-up in my list for 2015 and since then, I don't think any of these games have managed to recapture the same novelty and focus of that game. It has started to feel like the only trick they've got to put forward and while this isn't literally repeating the same mechanic of database searches that was reused in Telling Lies, the ability to click on objects in frozen frames of the footage is a step back in my opinion. The search process for uncovering new snippets of footage is now more random (especially how the linking between frames has been chosen here, with more adventure game "logic" binding between some of them than the well-crafted database keyword lists of previous titles).

I got a couple of hours into unlocking footage and so I did not uncover all secrets and know when I'm satisfied but a lot of the themes it seemed to be touching on didn't draw me. While the productions of era content may have been well processed to give archival quality, I think they reached too far with the FMV production itself in trying to make hours of footage from three theoretical movies plus auxiliary content to the point where stuff looked kinda bad in ways that did not seem to be in-line with the intentional aesthetic of cheap old movies. I think a better gameplay hook would have helped push me through that to unlock the actual meaning behind the clips but it would still have been hard for me to love this threequel that some clearly absolutely love.

Weird West - I need to give this game more time but this was not what I expected from the team who moved on after making Arkane (Dishonored) games. The world seems like something it could be fun to learn more about but the top down gameplay did not have anything about the kinetic focus of the stealth from Arkane games which I find so compelling.

A Memoir Blue - I liked this well enough but in a year with a lot of indie titles doing a lot, this didn't quite do enough for me. A biographical exploration story with some quite clear budgetary limitations on the fidelity of the rendering, I feel like this has become a very saturated genre with lots of titles published by this new tier of prestige indie publishers (who do a lot of deals to get these games onto subscription services like PS+, GamePass, etc).

Chorus/Chorvs - Really glad that space combat sim games from the original Wing Commander to Descent: Freespace 2 happened during my childhood, where I absolutely loved every second of them. From the freeform movement and combat to the amazing space nebula vistas, from the hammy sci-fi acting to the rather more interesting underlying narratives being strung together to create reasons for several mission archetypes. Because trying to get into this game, I was completely lost to if this was just a bad game or if I'd lost my tastes for the entire genre. Given how friends have reacted to this and how I've not found a space sim to get my teeth into for literally years and years, I suspect it is simply a genre I can no longer get enthused about (insert pithy comment about how I'll likely feel about the eventual Star Citizen: Squadron 42 solo campaign that I paid for back in 2012).

As Dusk Falls - Not sure if the unusual visual style of mixing static animation frames from FMV into 3D rendered scenes, which is what caused everyone to take notice the second a trailer for this arrived, actually does a lot for me. It's certainly a way of conveying emotion from the actors in a fast effective method over the top of the audio performances but when we have stuff like The Callisto Protocol and The Quarry showing what digitising actors can do in current engines, I'm not sure about this throwback with clearly high production values. Didn't get far enough into the story to know if it goes anywhere interesting.

Norco - Maybe I come back to this in a few years and love it but nothing about that first hour or two hooked me visually or narratively. Another game some are very much loving so worth trying for yourself.

Trek to Yomi - This game seemed fun for the few hours I played it and has a lot of style. The budget limits come through in some of the animations but the post-processing is excellent from a team who have been really able to do stuff with their tech for years (Hard Reset from 2011 still sticks with me as interesting indie rendering choices).


I missed them last year but really enjoyed this year - Death's Door; Boyfriend Dungeon; Omno; Life Is Strange: True Colors; Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy; Road 96.

List of 'Best on PS5' [Coming to PC Later?] games when PS5 is more expensive than last year so definitely not hardware I'm buying yet - Horizon 2: Forbidden West; God of War: Ragnarok; Gran Turismo 7.

To play, hopefully with a new well-priced GPU, in 2023 - Pentiment; A Plague Tale: Requiem; Terra Invicta; Syberia: The World Before; Total Warhammer III; Return to Monkey Island; Somerville; Expeditions: Rome; Scorn; Elden Ring; Stray; Marvel's Midnight Suns; The Callisto Protocol; Dying Light 2; Evil West; The Last of Us Part I; The Quarry & The Devil In Me; Hard West II; CoD: MWII (the second, not the remake or the first MW2).

Games of the Year 2021

With my GPU going well past its fifth birthday (currently sitting next to a CPU that's a bit newer than that but still no longer exactly new), this was a great year for really focusing on older games and those 100 hour RPGs that seem to build up in the backlog. Because PC games will always look better next year, including the ones released years ago (thanks to nice 4K screens and the endless work of tweakers and modders to push what older engines can do). But, despite putting a few games down in anticipation of when the GPU market finally returns to normal prices and stock availability in the future, I did manage to complete some new games too.

    Beavers of the Year:

Timberborn

This little city builder game about beavers building up a post-human society while preparing for seasonal droughts has been eating up my time this year. In Early Access, plenty of things are going to change before it is completed but there's already something here worth diving into, starting from the question "what if beaver Banished?" The answer is both significantly more adorable and possibly going to end up being mechanically more interesting than that 2014 indie hit. You know the drill: place blueprints, assign jobs, and make sure the needs of your critters are satisfied so that you can continue on into the future. Do it right and you can grow a small community into a thriving town. Mess around and, like Cities Skylines, find out just how water simulation can ruin your day.

This game had public demos early in the year then went into full Early Access a few months ago, with the first major update to the stable branch hitting a few weeks ago and a public experimental branch for all owners if you can't wait for those changes to percolate down. The development process currently needs to figure out a few teething issues with later colony management (how do I efficiently get resources moved around storage zones and prevent all these beavers from doing lots of inefficient work rather than smartly managing jobs so haulers wait to move logs from the active chopping areas to where they are needed) but you'll take a dozen or more hours to get to the point where this is holding you back. Before that you already have two family types who have interesting tech trees to develop down and slowly master the various scenario locations by building plenty of dams and vertically arranging your cities.

    Civ of the Year:

Humankind

I say I love Civilization (specifically that sub-genre of historical non-space 4X game) because I've played hundreds (thousands?) of hours of those games and loved my time with them. Civ 2 is very hard to go back to and the undifferentiated civs somewhat flattens it (just like going back to an RTS when everything was mirror matches rather than imbuing factions with mechanical character). I find Civ 4 is starting to get hard to go back to because so much has moved to hexes now and the death stacks plus AI spiral of hatred makes the latter game less than amazing. Civ 5 was my first "wait, do I like the last one more" but probably I'd say that despite the happiness mechanic brutally punishing expansion, it's probably the game I'd play the most today. Civ 6 feels like it tried to fix 5 and failed, even if merging units to create semi-stacks kinda works and the other changes help move it away from constantly butting against constraints (I have not played the expansions - I bounced off it that hard; especially when they sold a New Frontier Pass or Anthology Edition because they wanted even more paid DLC after the two full expansions shipped).

But before Civ 6 was introducing districts to expand your city on the actual map (despite still only allowing you to grow into the classic 3 tile range of your centre and not allowing more than one of any district type - making them little more than added costs before you could build up the specialist building stack in any city), a little game called Endless Legend was already doing districts. It was a fantasy 4X game which is definitely not a Civ-like: important hero units, customising equipment like a space 4X (MOO style), and turning quests into far more of an RPG layer to name but a few features. That team is now back with their own actual Civ-like and I found it excellent.

Humankind in some respects resembles Civ 6, although this is certainly not a clone (especially, as noted above, some of those Civ 6 similarities come from a previous game from this team doing their own spin on districts etc before Civ did). Another way to consider it is that this is a look at what an alternative evolution of Civ 4 might look like today. The path not taken by Firaxis. Unit stacks exist but are limited and work very differently as combat resolves in a mini turn-based battle on the hexes around where combat started (including options for reinforcements if any other stacks are close). Districts grow a city (bounded by population and local happiness) but are not unique or a storage block for other buildings but those cities are places on pre-defined geographic areas they control and automatically work by proximity not a population placement mechanic. Each area can be joined to a city to form larger blocks or put under provisional control via a cheap outpost where provisional control does not enforce hard borders so skirmishes happen far more often. The list goes on and on but every inch of this game feels Civ-like (as each actual Civ sequel may change any given mechanic but still retains the feel) - just not a Civ you've ever played before.

What feels so incredibly fresh about Humankind is the way you can actually have a bit of friction with other Civs without it becoming a diplomatic nightmare or some endless war that builds and explodes in the later game. Endless Legend modelled this as earlier encounters being flagged as in the age of skirmishes - when border conflicts were normal but not formally war between nations - before you developed formal relations technologies. The use of outposts to cheaply control land with only what armies you can muster to enforce a demand for a border there do much the same here. The casus belli mechanics here also feel a lot more like a Paradox title (in fact, I'd love an expansion that moved even further into Paradox war mechanics with preparing frontlines and supply lines when formal war does break out) than how it worked in Civ 6. You also have a pre-city era where you scout the map and hunt wild animals for resources before you establish yourself, so everyone starts out with far more local awareness than a Civ race to found.

But what I've also done here is buried the lede: each era (which you race towards via getting stars in various categories rather than just racing on scientific research) you get to pick a new civ which combines an eternal perk that lasts into the future with era-specific perks that make it a lot like a modern Civ game but you're not trapped chasing the win condition based on the perks you picked before the game begins. If you need to get a boost to science or your economy or are about to start a large war then you can tailor your perks to that, assuming your pick isn't already taken by someone else getting to the era first and taking them. There are also some catch-up mechanics to give slower players a bit of assistance despite having their choices limited, although I hear this works less well in an online game against other actual players (I primarily play my Civ games solitaire). This is a feature I will find it hard to go back to playing without in other games. But with Humankind and Old World showing there is more to Civ-likes than just Firaxis games, this sub-genre feels healthier than ever before.


    Time Loop of the Year:

The Forgotten City

A proven idea prototyped out as a finished game mod (here for Skyrim) then supported via various loans and grants for the arts so it can become a full commercial release (here moving to Unreal Engine)? This is a great example of where things are working the way we say they should from when it used to be a bit more common to pay attention to mods (and the free SDKs that enabled them were more prominent in AAA gaming). It may have taken five years to make but this small team have crafted something that feels both entirely itself and also the sort of thing you'd make if you prototyped everything inside Skyrim, right down to how the conversation camera zooms in to show who you're talking to (without worrying about the budget for a cinematic conversation camera system).

You are a modern day traveller who has awoken on the banks of a river as a mysterious figure asks you to explore the surroundings and find a missing stranger who just recently walked past. In very short order, you are flung back to a tiny Roman civilization trapped in an underground city and cursed by the Gods to ask what is the nature of sin, for breaking the rules will unleash an armageddon destroying everyone there. But the current leader has done a side deal with one of the deities and when that final day comes, they can rewind time back to the previous morning. This is where you come in: you must talk to everyone here, find out who is going to break the rules, and stop them. If you fail, run for the portal that brought you in and the day will restart.

What follows is an engaging adventure game that's almost entirely about talking to characters, working out what's actually going on, and making sure everyone does what you want them to on this loop or making sure next loop you have in your pocket the thing you're currently missing (theft is definitely a sin here, but what's one more iteration of the loop if you really need to pickpocket that trinket and know you can make it back to the portal easily from here). Where does the writing land? If this had come out when I was an undergrad, it would probably have topped my GotY list. There is also plenty of smart game design around making sure you rarely have to do things multiple times, because someone will give you a hand if you tell them what you did last time so they can effectively advance the loop how you need it without repetition. There is also about an hour of combat through what I found a very interesting side story, which is entirely optional and warns you that it can get a bit scary and involves lots of aiming (presumably finding that some people found the mod was otherwise fun without this chunk that mixes up the gameplay significantly). Everything here feels polished by having tried it all before during the mod prototype.

    Halo of the Year:

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

My game of the year 2019 finally got some DLC that expands that solar system with another celestial body while explaining another facet of the history of that mysterious universe? Obviously, sign me up for another trip to Timber Hearth.

What you get, after discovering how something you could never see before has been hiding in plain sight, is a miniature halo world which, like the rest of the game, runs on its own clockwork timer as you count down to the supernova. If you've played the main game then you know roughly what to expect with lots of discovery and only the computer in your ship tracking what you've found between loops. What you don't expect, unless you've seen the trailer for this DLC, is the significantly more immediate horror elements (rather than the pure existential dread of spelunking between the ruins of a long-dead race in the original) that creep into this world and then creep up on you as you explore into the second new area. I will keep it vague to avoid spoiling any of the major reveals because this game and DLC is all about discovery but I will say that the remixed and expanded mechanics on offer here keep things fresh and I couldn't wait to find out where the story of this particular halo was going. My only complaint is that this DLC integrates fully into the existing game without giving a real narrative close to things with a bespoke ending (how the story concludes didn't have the finality I wanted and the small addition to the main ending doesn't get me to where I wanted to get). Given the main game provides several early endings that provided alternative firm closes to various avenues, I was surprised to not see one more ending available here (unless I just missed the signs and couldn't work out how to unlock it).

    Survivor of the Year:

Subnautica: Below Zero

I came to this series a bit late (given it had an extensive Early Access period 2014-2018) and thoroughly enjoyed my time descending into the depths with Subnautica. Combining a single designed underwater world (no procgen or other randomisation more typical of this crafting survival sub-genre) with light narrative hooks (hints of Alien, but not aping that aesthetic at all) and a good mechanical progression through the various survival and habitat building paths, you get just enough discovery and crafted events in the original to feel a bit special. Explore the world, work out what's going on, then work out how you're going to solve it. Build then upgrade the submersible to enable you to travel deeper, which will unlock various parts of the story and access to resources you need to build the next tier of upgrades or a new thing. By the time they stopped patching it, everything was a bit slick and the modding community had even given you a few more options (from new crafting options to an entire map system that filled in the areas you'd travelled to rather than relying on just the navigational beacons and compass).

Below Zero is the standalone expansion that takes place on an entirely new area with significantly more above-water area and a lot more story. There are actual characters you will encounter and talk with along with a lot more story to discover about the planet the previous character was stranded on and what happened both before anyone arrived and after they left. A lot of the tech tree is back and lightly tweaked with new recipes to match the different resources available in this area. The visuals push things up to show off more land, demonstrate the colder climate and more varied weather, and make sure the different biomes always look their best. While billed as not a full sequel, I took about 20 hours to play through Below Zero (about the same as the original game) and cannot imagine playing an eventual sequel without knowing the story of this (which seems far more like the setup for that sequel, especially given what this one says about what happened after the original game). I will say that I did not hugely care for the new vehicles introduced in this but then my old Prawn was something I'd mastered in the original and took me through this handily. There is just enough of an edge of the horror part of survival horror (which the crafting survival sub-genre is linked to) in this series to keep you on your toes, although it is definitely not a combat game and most of it can be played at quite a leisurely pace, full of vistas that generate awe with only brief interludes of panicked fleeing. Putting this game right next to a section on Outer Wilds definitely gets my synapses firing, even if I'd not say they exactly shared a genre (but the Immersive Sim DNA is evident in both).

    Sequel of the Year:

Psychonauts 2

In the years since Psychonauts released in 2005, the abandoned result of a Microsoft publishing deal gone south, lots of people have discovered and loved it. I'm about 60% with them. The other 40% is that this was never a game that was good to play, even before we'd totally standardised joypad action-platforming controls, and something about the actual technical art is just supremely disappointing. You can kinda see what they wanted to do but couldn't, be that from budgetary restraints, trying to get a project to the finish line after being dropped by the publisher, or just tech limitations with the studio dev pipeline at the time.

In a supremely good turn of fortune, the sequel that was originally crowdfunded but later finished off with the backing of now-studio-owner Microsoft (funny how the circle turns) looks exactly how you'd want it to in 2021. What's more, it generally plays well too. I've never been a huge fan of the 3D platformer and related genres but sometimes the quality of the writing and interesting varied gameplay and visuals will keep me going and this is the perfect example of having more than enough ideas to sustain the duration of the game then also sticking the landing with actually implementing those ideas into something that plays well. No 60% agree on this one - it's a 100% banger!

We are getting to the place where "of course it looks like an animated movie" is starting to seep into our expectations but that shouldn't take away from how well Psychonauts 2 manages to capture some of the style behind the first game while actually making it look really good. Unreal Engine is once again doing a very solid job rendering everything in pop-out vibrant colours that the artists aimed for while also giving a cohesive set of effects to ground the various elements no matter how fantastical their inspiration. Even looking at it from a purely technical perspective, it's doing most everything right. Wrap it up in the narrative chops the studio is well known for (reaching into the minds of the various characters presented), shake with a few catchy musical numbers, and serve.

    RTS of the Year:

Age of Empires IV

Ensemble Studios made Age of Empires II in 1999. Over 20 years later, made by Relic Entertainment, this is effectively Age of Empires II-2. Everything you remember (possibly refreshed by the recent remaster of that earlier game) is basically here with a few new spins and a lot of new flourishes around the edge. The several faction campaigns (which I hope will be expended over time with campaigns for the remaining factions and even some new factions added to the game) draw you through some lavishly produced documentary videos explaining the history of the time and then dumping you into a short scenario map that allows you to have a bit of fun on something that approximates what the documentary was talking about, including with additional VO narrating the events as they occur in the scenario itself. It's a good binding layer that ties the RTS together while also offering little bites of historical facts about the actual events from primarily Northern Eurasian history.

We do not get many classic RTSs and this is as classic as you can possibly get. It feels like how you remember those old games looking and playing, while actually bringing them into the modern era (unfortunately this means the actual game looks a lot more like a nicer version of a 20 year old classic rather than the initial menu and interstitial loading screens, which have an amazing gold-lined style that could look really good if implemented into the game itself). You also get a bit of variation with the faction designs moving forward and offering something slightly different when it comes to things like a nomadic faction who can pack up every building and who are meant to slowly deplete rock outcrops rather than rapidly mining them with many workers. It never feels like you'd be better off just going back to the AoE2 remake from a few years ago.

AoE4 also ensures that new players who are brought into this series via the ease of GamePass will not feel completely lost. I've been obsessively playing RTSs since Dune 2 in 1992 or maybe even Mega-Lo-Mania in 1991 (depending where you call the origin of the current RTS design) so some of the tutorials are not really something I can fully judge. But giving them a quick look over, and how the first couple of faction campaigns operate as elaborate tutorials for most of the core mechanics shared by all factions, it all seems like the sort of onboarding that will ensure someone isn't lost. If anyone wants to take it further, the game quickly highlights online multiplayer and practicing for that via AI skirmishes. But even if you just go through the campaigns, this isn't light on content.


    Rest of the Year:
Forza Horizon 5 - The sequel to Forza Horizon 4 is exactly what you expect the sequel to that game to be. Some of the visuals are definitely a step up thanks to being a cross-gen title for a new console generation but the underlying engine is still having increasing issues keeping foliage shimmer and other sources of aliasing under control when it only has MSAA (which is way too expensive if you force transparency MSAA in the drivers on PC to be a realistic option on my current system) to work with. Imagine what this would look like with a DLSS/XeSS patch on PC to clean everything up while also reducing the internal resolution so that it can run at even higher framerates consistently. They also clearly tweaked AI difficulty somewhat, especially in dirt events and it seems even more "win by a mile or never even have a chance because you start at the back of the pack" than before (all assists off, top difficulty) so maybe that could do with a few more iterations (before the expiring car licenses permanently delists this and any accumulated content updates or DLC in a few years).

Outriders - Some have called this a B game or ripped out of the PS360 generation but with a large online endgame, modern look, and responsive gameplay, this felt completely current to me. The disconnect may simply be that the narrative doesn't aim for the Sony house style or where the Call of Duty crowd has ended up. But B game is certainly not an accurate assessment of the assets on show, which are right up there with other AAA releases from big publishers (everything about this is a step up from when this team made a Gears of War title). From a technical perspective, I do not understand calling this "budget" while remaining absolutely silent on how Metroid Dread is priced as a AAA game but competes almost entirely with $20 indie titles (which look no more constrained by budget). Outriders is a good loot shooter with plenty of optional missions to give you reasons to return to the quite linear path through their interesting world. My main gripe is the tone never quite settles down and this comes to a crescendo near the end when they choose to place some combat encounters in an abandoned concentration camp (which would have been a lot more effective as a hauntingly silent walk).

The Riftbreaker - Part base builder, part top-down action shooter. This is one of those little hits that bubbles out of nowhere and possibly will not be remembered by that many in a few years but was fun while it lasted. The use of persistent bases that you move between, with different environmental hazards in each region and a slowly explored tech tree, creates a good campaign flow that feels unlike a traditional RTS but also not just a tower defence level-based game. Layer the (chatty - with generally enjoyable VO) mech suit you pilot on top as a super-unit in a game otherwise devoid of controllable units while infested by a lot of hostile critters and waves of attacks - it's both quite frantic and something where you feel you can usually come back as long as you put your attention in the right place. We haven't had a lot of RTS games, classic or slightly weird variants, for a while so this was something to savour.

Sable - This really wowed quite a few people but I have to say it didn't hit me nearly as hard. The visuals reflect their influence well but something about the aliased edges really rubbed me the wrong way about how to digitise the original art style. To the point I injected FXAA and fixed it for myself (something the sparse graphics options do not offer). It's very much an open world game that's more about the act of traversal (both climbing and by customisable ship) than much of the actual fetch quests you get during your travels. What the story said about finding your place in the world: that bit was a big miss for me.

Exo One - This is just an incredibly visually lush experience. You control a probe, built to specifications beamed into the solar system, and have the power to increase your local gravity tenfold or reshape into a disc that glides on the breeze. Travel through several planetoids as you try to make sense of what happened after taking control of the probe but really this is a game about vibes and enjoying the act of traversal.

Next Space Rebels - I didn't see this bothering too many people's lists but I did want to just make a note of it because Kerbal Space Program but with a full narrative wrapper (around YouTube toy rocket stars and dark shadowy internet land-grabs, all done with FMV) isn't something you see every month. The 2D rocket designer never quite matched the precision of KSP and neither did the actual flight controls but at least people are trying to make their own spin on the formula. More of this sort of thing.

Myst (2021) - Name another game that has, for a single game world - so direct remasters/rebuilds only not stealth sequels or other offshoots - been rendered both by offline render (1993) + real-time (realMyst onward) during different iterations and has used their own internal 3D engine (realMyst using Plasma), Unity (realMyst: Masterpiece Edition), and Unreal Engine (2021). This 2021 rebuild of the classic 1993 game (based on the work done last year for a VR port) completely remakes everything once more and clearly eclipses the original offline renders in every single way. Is it the best adventure game for modern tastes? Not really but if you half-remember most of the puzzles and haven't played one of these 3D remakes in almost twenty years then it's quite fun to go back.

Twelve Minutes - I didn't hate this nearly as much as the eventual critical consensus but I also went in after the discourse had said it doesn't stick the landing so buyer (and pre-release hype believer) beware. I quite liked the VO performances, felt the eventual plot twist was gratuitous but no worse than what many reach for looking for shock value, and enjoyed working out the path through the loop - even if I possibly didn't find them all. (Why was Dafoe playing two different roles in an identical voice? Was that ever explained?)

Unpacking - This hit a lot of people's lists but was a bit too slight for me to rank it in my top games. A short sweet tale of environmental storytelling you can finish off in a single sitting.


    Waiting for a PS5 or New GPU:
Everything new in VR - The Valve Index deserves it; Scarlet Nexus - Something about how the PC port runs isn't quite right but hopefully a patch, mods, or brute force GPU power can fix it; The Medium - Beautiful survival horror slash adventure game? Can't wait; Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy - I didn't mind the story part of "the bad" Eidos Marvel game last year so looking forward to a universally liked one; Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - PS5 exclusive is PS5 exclusive; Returnal - Run-based action shooter that dials the particles up to 11? Ok; Halo Infinite - A year of post-release patches and a new GPU should make this sing (please add DLSS/XeSS because the current TAA upscale is… definitely something); Deathloop - DXR visuals are worth waiting for, along with the online being reinvigorated by what I expect will be a big Xbox and GamePass release in a year; Resident Evil Village - RE7 was very good in VR and on PC but given the lack of the former here, I'm sat waiting for them to fully fix that completely broken PC port; Kena: Bridge of Spirits - Lovely animation and a consistent art design (worth playing looking its best); The Ascent - Top-down ARPG fun but a bit too heavy for my current GPU.

    To Play Next Year:
Even in another quiet year, some titles I just didn't find time to play. Luckily they will still be there next year, along with everything else in my backlog. The Artful Escape, Shin Megami Tensei V, Far Cry 6, Tales of Arise, Inscryption, Life Is Strange: True Colors, Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes, Hitman 3, Lost Judgment, NEO: The World Ends with You, The Gunk, Oddworld: Soulstorm, Biomutant, Recompile.