Main Post
Update 1: January
Update 2: February - March
Update 3: April-July
Update 4: August-December
Bonus December Game(s)
Completed
August
26: Operencia - 20 hours
Operencia is a style of western RPG that you don't see much of anymore, a first person game that is focused around exploring small and very tightly designed hand-made dungeons. Each dungeon/area may only take you ~2 hours to play through, but feels like a unique and deliberate addition to the game with its own self-contained story and secrets to find. If I had one criticism of Operencia it would be that it doesn't feel super polished. The character progression had D&D vibes for me where you were attempting to synergize your stats, armor, and ability choices to make well-rounded characters but feels a little underbaked with many unexciting skill tree/equipment choices. The voice acting throughout the whole game is a mixed bag, but the voices of the characters in the intro are by far the worst and may even discourage people from playing. Complaints aside, I'm really glad hand-crafted dungeon crawl games like are still being made. The visuals are also fantastic, vivid and diverse, and this game was a great choice to break-in the new XB1/TV I bought this year.
8/10
27: Hidden Folks - 4 hours
Hidden Folks is similar to Where's Waldo but since it is a digital game the areas and villagers within them are full of animation and personality that makes them feel real. Playing the game often feels like peering into another tiny world. The black & white art style gives the game a unique story-book feel and adds to the challenge of finding villagers using the clues the game gives you. The game is strongest when it has you in small levels where you can appreciate the details without getting overwhelmed, which sadly means the back half of the game isn't much fun to play with massive maps to search and huge lists of villagers to find.
7/10
28: Aaero - 2 hours
Aaero is a combination of a rhythm game and rail-shooter, I enjoyed it despite the Dubstep soundtrack. Bouncing between lines to the beat a la Amplitude is great fun but when combat does pop up the game feels a bit too chaotic and it's hard to get a good read on the screen to see if you've locked-on to all the targets that you wanted to. For example, the target reticule, lock-on icon, and danger icon are all the same shade of red. It's very cool and impressive that this was made by only two people! I would like have liked to see more music variety (anything besides more Dubstep, really) and some improvements to the combat, but this was still a fun time.
7/10
29: Destiny 2 - 12 hours
Destiny 2 is polished to an incredible sheen with amazing gunplay and super fluid graphics. I've had problems with both Destiny 1 and 2 of appreciating the game beyond the surface level polish however. Neither the loot or the open world objectives in 2 excited me at all and as a consequence me and the friend I played though 2 with both groaned whenever we realized we needed more levels before moving onto the next story mission. My biggest complaint with the game is that I still can't get into how Bungie does world-building and story-telling. Destiny is rife with incoherent terms, factions who have no personalities, and even the damn menu terms are unnecessarily complicated and deliberately weird. Instead of a Mission Menu Destiny has The Director. Instead of Achievements Destiny has Triumphs. It seems like a small pedantic complaint, but this sort of deliberate and unearned need to differentiate Destiny from every other game is present through every aspect of the experience playing it. A good version of Destiny 2 would be, for me, a game that focused on a being a tight co-op experience instead of a GAAS title designed to keep people playing forever and never really satisfied. It would also be a game focused on telling a good story instead of hopelessly trying to build a convincingly different setting.
7/10
30: Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - 3 hours
I think I might hate this game. It was retro in all of the wrong ways: clunky controls, unfair deaths, and a lives system that puts you in an awkward position every time a key character dies and leaves you wishing the rest would die too so that you could get full-strength attempt at the next section. It's a short game that feels weirdly bloated both in levels and ideas. Rather than acting as an appetizer or proof-of-concept of the full-fledged Bloodstained release this year Curse of the Moon felt like an active warning to stay away from it.
5/10
31: Wandersong - 9 hours
Indie games have a reputation of covering more personal & serious themes than most big budget games are willing to and this is certainly true of Wandersong. What appears to be an overwhelmingly saccharine game based on the visuals & premise actually tells a pretty nuanced story about how people deal with optimism and pessimism. The story was my favorite thing about the game, but it's also worth mentioning that the game does a fantastic job at keeping the same singing mechanic fresh for the ~10 hours it takes to reach the end. In one area you may use the analog stick & song to shape platforms out of vines, while another might have you using the same analog stick & song mechanic to fend off attacking crows. That the same 2-button interaction can remain fresh and interesting for the entire game is really impressive.
9/10
32: Assault Android Cactus - 3 hours
Assault Android Cactus does a great job of bringing bullet hell chaos to a fully 3D 4-player game. At full player count with all the gunfire and lasers bouncing around the game looks like pure chaos and plays beautifully on PC. There are a lot of Androids (characters) in the game at this point that all have a very different feel to them with 2 unique weapons and a unique Ultimate ability. The weapon/ability kits feel sufficiently deep and varied within and no Android feels too-niche. Despite the short length the game does feel very repetitive, and could have benefited from getting out of nearly identical Arena levels and a bit more enemy variety.
8/10
33: Hue - 5 hours
Where Wandersong managed to get ~10 hours of variety out of a color-wheel mechanic, Hue doesn't manage to achieve the same feat. The game has a pretty clever color-block platforming puzzle that it introduces at the start but it feels like the same puzzle is repeated in every level the game ends. The regions/levels in the game are not distinct from one-another and do not introduce any new puzzle ideas, though the last level gets pretty close to feeling different. The story starts off with an interesting philosophical premise about how people see the world through a shared understanding of colors, but it never goes anywhere with it and falls a bit flat overall.
7/10
34: Slay the Spire - 40+ hours
I picked this up during early access based on how promising the concept looked, a rogue-like deck-builder, and finally checked it out when it officially released this year. It's fantastic. Each run feels exciting and new thanks to the huge variety of items, random events, enemies, and bosses. More importantly, each run feels different due to the great variety of cards and possible ways to build out your deck with each of the 3 current characters. Even within a single character the game succeeds here and you might have one "Silent" character run focused around poisoning enemies to slowly defeat them and another focused around card draw and defeating enemies with massive combos. Hell, even if you focused around poison in multiple runs with the Silent character, the way you are poisoning enemies and the overall feel of your deck will still be different. An average run takes ~2 hours and the time goes by in an instant. I think the game is basically perfect and I enjoy it so much that when I did a run the other day, a few months after "finishing" the game (by completing a run on each character), to refresh my memory for this write up I ended up playing for another 10 hours and am looking forward to playing it more over the holidays to unlock all the cards and try for the true ending.
10/10
35: Ape Out - 3 hours
Ape Out is a jazz-inspired take on a Hotline Miami. In it you play an Ape trying to escape from a military medical testing facility. Every action you take and enemies take, whether it is turning around a corner or throwing an enemy into a wall builds sound into the jazz soundtrack. When you're running at full speed down a hallway while bullets fly by you and the music is capturing all that action it's really impressive and near-synesthetic. Where Hotline Miami asks you to memorize levels and enemy patterns and then execute it perfectly, Ape Out has levels that are randomized and reset to something different every time you die. That makes the focus of the game more about reacting to what is going on around you, embracing chaos and movement, instead of planning things in advance. It's very much in the spirit of jazz improvisation and the game does a pretty brilliant job at connecting the soundtrack and gameplay. Ape Out doesn't outlive its welcome and I had so much fun with it that I wish there was an album or two more worth of levels.
9/10
36: Void Bastards - 9 hours
An immersive sim where all the levels are randomly generated seems like a paradoxical premise, but Void Bastards does a pretty good job pulling it off. Within each level you are making decisions about how to spend your finite resources, which paths to take, and whether to use technology & stealth to succeed or brute force. At the start of the game this works pretty great and the game makes an impressive first impression with lots of weapon/upgrade variety and simple but fun combat encounters. Once you get deeper into the game you start to see that there is a severe lack of enemy variety, and that exploring ships more thoroughly to find all the secrets and cool stuff is never worth the risk. All the levels start to feel the same and B-lining towards objectives becomes the best strategy as the enemy numbers & difficulty grows. You'll have seen everything in the game within the first 2 hours but it goes much longer than that even if you focus on the critical path. Void Bastards is an impressive accomplishment but one that needed a bit more variety and balancing to be a great game. Worth mentioning that the game has an amazing art style and the sci-fi comic book look was the one thing about the game that never got old.
7/10
September
37: Horizon Chase Zero - 8 hours
Horizon Chase Zero is a retro 2D arcade racer designed to honor the racing games of the 8 & 16-bit era. The very first thing I noticed when I started playing is that it has a great sensation of speed that I didn't realize was missing from modern 3D racing games. Even with the starter car stages fly by you at breakneck speed, making every moment of the game feel exciting. The stage visuals are beautifully varied as you tour around the world and the levels that start during the day and transition to night are amazing to watch unfold. On the downside the soundtrack needed a bit more variety to match the variety that exists in all the levels. The difficulty is also a bit uneven and it feels like the middle of the game is where the hard levels exist and was the only time I felt like I needed to replay older levels in order to progress. Still, I had a great time playing this and it's proof that arcade racers still have a place in the modern era.
8/10
38: Control - 12 hours
Control doesn't make a great first impression. The narrative starts off deliberately confusing and drops you in with almost no set up. The combat initially feels stiff, difficult, and overly simplistic. The layout of the Oldest House is confusing and hard to navigate. I ended up loving the game by the end. They manage to tell a cool story in a cool way and they justify starting you off in the dark. The combat quickly adds important abilities to your toolkit that allow you to get around easily and deal with enemies in creative and satisfying ways. It's fantastic by the end, feeling a playable version of the battles I dreamed about while reading X-Men comics as a kid. The highest praise I can offer is that the game felt short, despite it being a meaty 12-hour campaign and longer than most games I played this year, and I didn't want it to end. I hope it did well for Remedy because I'd really like to see more games in the setting.
9/10
39: Judgment - 27 hours
I played Yakuza Kiwami 1 last year and Yakuza 0 the year before that. I like the series for the unique setting, fun characters, and the total dedication to story telling that they have. Still, for me these are games I like in-spite of the big problems they have: bad mini-games, mediocre combat, and a crazy 1:8 ration of gameplay to cut-scenes. Judgment has the best version of Yakuza combat out of what I've played but it's still not great: every combat encounter feels the same and combat lacks weight and intention in your actions. All of the other mini-games/game segments are almost universally awful. I groaned every time a drone segment or tailing mission came up. Weak gameplay means that my enjoyment of Yakuza games is almost entirely based on the quality of the story, where Judgment is a mixed bag. The story becomes increasingly implausible as you play and the last 1/3 of the story definitely felt like the weakest part of the game. I liked the story overall and really enjoyed Judgment's cast of characters but it wasn't enough to make up for the weak gameplay this time.
7/10
40: Wolfenstein Youngblood - 10 hours
I'm a huge fan of the Dishonored series so hearing that Arkane Studios were going to help develop a co-op Wolfenstein with immersive sim elements was exciting news to me. In practice the levels feel only very lightly inspired by immersive sims and it never quite feels like you are building your own path through a level or that exploring is rewarded with cool items or stories. The mission design on top of those levels is very repetitive and you'll revisit the same areas or ones nearly identical to each other to complete missions that also feel identical to each other. I enjoyed the presentation of the game and the fun "sister duo kill Nazis" spirit of it that is reinforced through banter and elevator dances. The combat is also sometimes thrilling with guns that all feel fun to shoot and enemies that are fun to shoot at. As a whole the game feels underbaked, like it needed more time and mission, level, and combat encounter variety. That said, even mediocre co-op games pretty fun with a friend and Wolfenstein is no exception.
6/10
41: Gears 5 - 12 hours
Gears 5 feels like a massive step upwards from Gears 4 which I also played earlier this year. Both the tech weapons and robotic enemies in Gears 4 receive a substantial upgrade and are actually a bit of fun to fight with and against. The game also feels a bit more comfortable letting you use older/classic weapons throughout the story and I never felt like I was stuck with a loser. The story builds on lore from Gears 3 and answers interesting questions instead of feeling like a "next generation of characters" rehash. The visuals are gorgeous and colorful and the game does a great job with visual and mission variety throughout the lengthy campaign. I liked the addition of a third player in co-op though a competent human playing Jack does sort of break the game. I didn't spend a ton of time in the multiplayer but it seemed like a fun version of Gears PvP. Overall Gears 5 is a really promising next step for the series.
9/10
42: Monster Hunter World: Iceborne - 54 hours
MHW was my GOTY last year but I did not get into the post-game much. After a ~ 1 year break from finishing it Iceborne felt like more of the same in a way that wasn't immediately welcome. I played solo this time as well because friends had either not finished the base game (a requirement), had moved on, or both. The expansion really throws you right back in the fire, asking you to defeat a new monster and relearn the combat right away. It took me a few hours to get back into the swing of things with the Chargeblade but once I got over that initial hump and started using SoS for multiplayer I fell in love again and the hours just melted away. The expansion feels pretty packed with new content, though the single new environment doesn't quite stand up to some of the originals in MHW and it looks very same-y throughout. The new monsters are great and there seem to be a ton of them and the story is pretty well-done. I think the expansion does lean into a few of the post-game elements of MHW in ways that I didn't love, and it feels a touch more grindy than the original campaign with many weapon/armor that you'll want for normal story progression locked behind extremely rare drops. Overall I loved it though, just like MHW, and I can't wait to see the future of the franchise.
9/10
October
43: Untitled Goose Game - 3 hours
Untitled Goose Game is irreverent and charming, content to let you run around as a goose in a small English town causing low-stakes chaos. The game was a total hit at parties every time someone brought it out which I think speaks to the game's strengths: it's a bit more fun to watch than to play. As the person controlling the game you might be annoyed by the clunky feeling of the controls as the game asks you to do increasingly difficult things towards the end, especially as those tasks are near people who can shoo into a corner or otherwise cause your goose to get stuck. As the person watching the game, the clunky controls and questionable competence of the goose only make it more fun to watch.
7/10
44: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (2019) - 16 hours
I played the original Gameboy version several times as a kid so this was an interesting remake for me. Compared to other 2D Zelda games it feels pretty short and confined, like an introduction to the series rather than an entry that stands alongside the greats. When you remember that it was a Gameboy game though, the game feels huge and lengthy. Looking back as an adult it is retroactively amazing that they managed to cram so much content and such a large map onto a 512 KB cartridge that played on a 160x144 pixel display. I was really impressed by the art style of remake where characters and environments often evoke stop-motion clay. It's still a fun and pretty unique Zelda-game, story-wise, but it's a little shallow if you compare it directly to all of the other amazing 2D Zelda games that have come out in the 25 years since it was originally released.
8/10
November
45: Concrete Genie - 8 hours
The artwork is front and center for Concrete Genie which is appropriate for a game about painting. Everything about how the game looks is great: the graffiti monsters that are full of life, characters reminiscent of stop-motion animation from yester-year, and all the bright and interesting things you cover the walls of the town with. While everything looks great, the gameplay falls a bit short of the creative painting dream you might imagine when you first see the game. Painting is more akin to using stamps and the game places several limits on how and where you can paint. With the only activity you can do in the first ¾ of the game being that painting mechanic, things feel repetitive and get stale pretty fast. A late-game shift in the gameplay is welcome but does not control particularly well and feels like something out of a PS2 game. Overall, Concrete Genie feels like a really creative and passionate product that falls a bit short of the polish, gameplay depth, and length that you'd want from a modern game. There is a lot of charm and a lot to like here though and the friendly and mischievous graffiti monsters never failed to put a smile on my face.
7/10
46: The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan - 5 hours
I'm a big fan of Until Dawn but have not been impressed by any of Supermassive's follow-up work. Hidden Agenda & Inpatient both felt like short and underbaked side projects and not successful iteration on the things I liked about Until Dawn: the branching narratives, the creative and tense QTEs, the psychological profiling the game does on you the player, and the great mesh between a watchable a playable game for groups. Man of Medan wears its lower budget on its sleeve compared to Until Dawn but I'm happy to say that it feels like a solid follow-up. Passing a controller and playing with a small group was my favorite way to play Until Dawn and Man of Medan fully embraces that with two entirely different ways to play co-op. The QTEs aren't quite as creative this time around as the game is not exclusive to one platform and cannot lean into unique controller features like the light strip on PS4. The branching isn't nearly as robust this time around and the game is a much shorter experience overall but this is matched by a lower budget/cost. I hope the game does well enough to make more "Dark Pictures Anthology" series games beyond the already-announced sequel and that we continue to get more games in this unique style.
7/10
47: Devil May Cry 5 - 11 hours
DMC is a series that I kind of lost track of after the first one was released. It stuck with fixed camera angles longer than most series and felt pretty dated at the time the sequels came out. More importantly DMC seemed really juvenile both in how the main character(s) acted and in the amount of fan service from the female characters. I was surprised when I checked out DMC5 and found that I was really enjoying myself. Dante & Nero are fairly likable characters here and V gets less screen time but is appropriately mysterious. The humor, weirdness, and fan service in the game are still not always welcome, but at least feel like they true to the Japanese developers rather than just being a marketing gimmick. The star of the game is definitely the combat which is chock-full of variety and has about a million different ways to approach each encounter. Everything runs at a beautiful 60FPS and as a result the combat always feels fluid and responsive. Nero was my favorite character to play with his Robotic Devil-Breaker arm keeping combat variety moving at all times as they rotate out and are replaced during combat and your moveset changes a little bit accordingly. I think the game does expect a little too much from players as you switch between 3 characters that play fairly differently and so many weapons & special attack mechanics for each character on top of that, but I appreciated how much variety was there for people that wanted to perfect their gameplay or replay the game. This is definitely one of my favorite things I played this year.
9/10
48: Patterned - 10 hours
Patterned is a very simple and traditional visual puzzle game on Apple Arcade. Each image is a repeating pattern so finding where to slot each puzzle piece can occasionally be tricky, but the difficulty remains very low throughout. There are ~120 puzzles in the game but the gameplay never changes or evolves in anyway, so it does get stale quickly. For me this was strictly something I played to kill time while commuting or during flights. The best aspect of the game is that all of the solved puzzle images are available to use as high-resolution wallpaper on your mobile device and there is loads of great looking artwork to consider.
6/10
49: Luigi's Mansion 3 - 16 hours
Luigi's Mansion 3 is the first game in the series that I've spend much time playing and certainly the first I've finished. I loved the setting of the game and how charming and full of personality all of the characters and ghosts were despite having almost no text or voice dialogue. I did not expect, but greatly appreciated, all the weird themes the floors of the mansion explore. I loved how every single room in the mansion felt like it was stuffed with secrets to find, to the point where it often felt like the core of the game. On the downside, I wish the economy of the game had been more interesting as you spend 90% of the game sucking up coins and there are 0 interesting things to use them on. Likewise, the collectibles in the game were fun to chase, but ultimately provided no benefit either and felt like a missed opportunity. Still, this was an all-around pleasant game to play and it felt like a great value too by modern standards with a campaign that is stuffed with content.
8/10
50: Grindstone - 34 hours
Grindstone is based on pretty tried-and-true mobile game design: matching and chaining same-colored rows of objects to try to get high scores, but it rises above most of those games in a few ways. First off, it's got the typical Cabybara games art style and polish complete with lots of great looking enemies and environments. Second, it could have very easily felt too repetitive since you're repeating the same basic puzzle gameplay loop for ~30 hours. Instead the game is constantly throwing enemies, environmental mechanics, items at you to use, and even bosses to fight. There are 150 levels and each set of 15 feels pretty unique both visually and mechanically. Lastly, and most importantly, since it's an Apple Arcade game instead of a mobile F2P game there are no time-wasting mechanics and the game is not designed to try to get you to spend money or to play a certain number of sessions a day. Instead of a metric-and-revenue focused game like most in the genre, Grindstone is simply focused on fun. It's the most exciting game in the genre since Puzzle Quest and even that series eventually fell victim to F2P mobile game design.
9/10
51: Pilgrims - 1 hour
Pilgrims is another adventure game from Amanita design which attempts to make the puzzle-solving more organic an open than the "only 1 key fits" design of most adventure games. This made it easier to progress in the game, as solutions to puzzles were a bit easier work out, but I was still left in situations expecting a solution I had in mind to work only for the game to say it wasn't valid. I liked the art style quite a bit and appreciate how the game expresses character motivations and emotions without ever using dialogue but still don't like the genre.
7/10
December
52: Pit People - 8 hours
Pit People is a co-op tactical RPG from the Behemoth. The big "twist" on the genre is that Pit People embraces RNG: you cannot assign targets for your units to attack, instead they randomly attack anyone without range of their weapon. This is what most of the complaints in the community focus on, but I didn't mind it much. The random attack targets mean that when you're playing with a friend it's just another thing that can go wrong during battle to laugh about and you end up teaming up a bit more often to try to ensure that threatening or low health targets die. My bigger problem with the game is how slow combat feels. The sense of power or character progression is non-existent despite the game showering you with loot after every battle, and this means that for the entire game you're stuck with characters doing tiny amounts of damage. A single battle can take over an hour as teams slowly chip health away from each other and it can take 5-6 turns to defeat an enemy even if everyone on your team can hit them. The whole game drags as a result of this and all the side content & optional battles on the map (of which there are * tons* of, when I finished the game my completion % was ~15%) is completely unattractive when you know that any random battle will take an extraordinary amount of time to finish. The game does have a fun sense of humor and is nice to look at but it's a shame that such a core component of the game, the combat, falls so short.
6/10
And with that
I'm done! I didn't end up playing a couple GOTY contenders that I was planning to like Sekiro, RE2, or Outer Wilds but there is always next year. It's also possible I'll finish another game or two during the holidays but my current plan is just to play lots more Slay the Spire.
This year was a bit crazy for me career-wise and current events continue to be depressing as fuck so I was always grateful to have this challenge and finishing fun games to focus on. Thanks again to everyone else who participated and Wozzer for running it.