Welcome to my personal list of games I enjoyed this year. That’s right it’s my list, feel free to disagree with me but it won’t change anything.
Anyway here are the rules;
1. These are games that I’ve played and reviewed this year.
2. The only order in this list is the order in which I reviewed them, it’s not a top 10, these all feature because of how good I consider them to be.
3. The games don’t have to have been released this year.
With that all said, let’s get into it.
Cryptmaster
A dungeon crawling typing game with a wonderfully sardonic sense of humour. I loved playing this game and have actually done a couple of run throughs since. This is also the game that caused someone to accuse me of using AI to write my review, apparently these people have never heard of a template or a formula.
Wasteland 3
Last year Wasteland 2 made it into my end of year list and its sequel is everything that game had and a lot more. My only gripe with it was that I wanted to play it multiplayer in a manner similar to Baldur’s Gate 3 but apparently you can only have one other player. As gripes go, it’s pretty minor.
Hi-Fi Rush
Rhythm games and I don’t usually see eye to eye, but this one was one I loved from start to finish. The visuals really pop out from the screen and everything moves to the beat which made even someone as rhythmically challenged as myself able to keep in time.
The Last of Us Part 1
I believe this might be the progenitor to the rise of the ‘Grumpy dad escorting child’ theme we have been seeing a lot of, but I’m not complaining. Also, this game made me sad, but in the best way.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
The sequel no one saw coming and it is glorious! This game and Boltgun are doing some real good work at getting the general public to pay attention to 40k.
Alan Wake 2
There aren’t many games that make me wish I could erase their memory from my mind so I could experience it all again for the first time. Alan Wake 2 is exactly one of those.
I almost put the DLC’s here because of the way it got me so hyped for the Control sequel. But I have an unofficial rule about not including DLC’s.
The Ten Bells
Anomaly hunting in a setting I’m quite familiar with. This game actually unsettled me for a while, so I had to include it.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Do I really need to say anything? I mean it won nine awards at the Game Awards this year, now I’m not sure it fit into a few of those categories but that’s a whole other debate. What I can tell you is this game is not only beautiful in its artstyle but also its story.
Killer Frequency
This is such a unique setting and premise. I’ve not played a game quite like it. Something that I thought was great was that failing to solve a puzzle didn’t just end the game but instead changed the ending.
Dredge
Lovecraftian horror meets cosy fishing wasn’t a combination I expected to work but…
I think that I’m not alone in believing that AI shouldn’t be used in any creative industry. I actually think that AI in general isn’t ready for general usage, and certainly not in the way it’s being foisted on us all. Sadly, I think that the tech giants are going to keep pushing this on us, try and overwhelm us and make it normal. Just like how microtransactions are now seen as normal when they used to be a major hot button issue. While I wish that Valve would disallow games made using AI entirely, I can at least applaud them for implementing the ‘Made using AI’ tag. Oh, and fuck you Tim Sweeny..
For the small part that I can do I’m going to endeavour to avoid playing games that have used AI.
