1) Baldur's Gate 3
2) Chained Echoes
3) Street Fighter VI
4) Party Animals
5) The Finals

Also I'm going to download The Finals. Seems a laser targeted reg game.

Cyberpunk should be allowed since the 2.0 update.

That's Spiderman 2 100%Ed. The best 9/10 of the year.

DD2, yes. I could've spent a good chunk of the year just on that if I didn't have to move on to other stuff.

regmcfly wrote:

That's Spiderman 2 100%Ed. The best 9/10 of the year.

Oh wow, you like it more than Mario Wonder.

Nice to see Dredge in there.
Its been a great year for gaming but hasn't really aligned to my tastes or what I currently want to play and what has has been too compromised for me to want to give it points so I wont be doing a list. If I was Dredge would be on it for sure though.

Aye that's them being woke

Wokeba

I dunno you're saying a lot of my happy things in that sentence

In 2023 I am expecting something a bit more original

Aargh, I guess I better come up with a list.  Lots I haven't played this year, but of the ones I have, I'll go with...

1). Baldur's Gate 3 - literally the only thing I played for nearly 4 months.  It was sometimes wonky, acting on choices I'd not made yet, or occasionally taking insane amounts of time to decide that, on reflection it won't move that character anyway...  I didn't care. I'm a slave to a game with a story, and this mostly pulled off the illusion of allowing me to feel like I was crafting my own.  Even as I was inevitably funnelled towards a conclusion there's was enough strange invention, and indulgence of my whims, to leave me giddy.  The first and almost certainly last game to allow me to leave a thieves guild under the control of miniature giant space hamster.

2) Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom -  A whole different kind of invention was possible here. Zelda's always been an isolated experience. None of the bandying about with your chatty mates, like Baldur's Gate - but instead you could set off in any direction you wished, and just see what was waiting.  You could glue random shit together, and use mountains as lifts. It felt like there were a hundred ways to kill a Moblin, and all of them were fun.  Somehow though, it all became a bit much towards the end.  Perhaps it was the familiarity, perhaps I just spent too long in the dark, unforgiving underground - but ultimately it wasn't quite the joy that BotW had been before it. Had its predecessor not existed would I have put it first on this list?  Maybe...

3) Super Mario Wonder - I'll confess I haven't finished this yet.  I've been playing it with my wife - which alters the experience greatly.  Whilst the previous two entries have been pretty much solo efforts (despite BG3's attempts to emulate company) the majority of joy from this has been discovering stuff together.  Does it mean I haven't been able to go through meticulously picking up every last secret yet?  Sure - but I've enjoyed doing it this way so much more.

4) Humanity -  I know lots of you bounced off this, and I think I get why.  It feels quite detached, quite clinical.  The pitch "Lemmings with humans" turns out to be wildly misleading.  (The humans, for starters, are infinite - so their deaths are not felt in the same way).  Instead it's a curious mixture of genres - chiefly puzzles for sure, but there's a bit of real time strategy in there, and even some gentle platforming. At first I felt it had slight delusions of grandeur - pitching itself as something more than it really is - but by the end it had somehow managed to become what it claimed. A strange, distant, yet wonderful, rumination on what makes us the what we are. 

5). Synapse - A VR shooter (of sorts) that doesn't make me throw up, and instead has me lurching around my living room wrecking merry havoc.  Stylish, and ridiculous - the shooting quickly gives way to more satisfying force powers, so that you're grabbing your enemies and hurling them around the room with glee. If you've ever vaguely enjoyed such powers in video games using a regular controller, I can heartily recommend doing it in VR.  Literally juggling bad guys (almost) never gets boring.

Lot of really special games this year, including a bunch I never got round to that could have troubled the list (e,g Armored Core 6), but in the end I have gone with the following line-up:

Minnesänger wrote:

List Done. 
1. Baldur's Gate 3 (PC / PS5)
2. Dotage (PC)
3. Slay the Princess (PC)
4. Pistol Whip (PSVR2)
5. Direct Drive (Playdate)

---

6. Lunacid (PC)
7. Against the Storm (PC)
8. Shadows of Doubt (PC)
9. Resident Evil 4 VR (PSVR2)
10. Final Fantasy XVI (PS5) 

Just missed out:
Synapse (PSVR2)
The Light Brigade (PSVR2)
Shogun Showdown (PC) 
Brotato (PC)
Resident Evil Village VR (PSVR2)
El Paso, Elsewhere (PC)

Apologies that I haven't gone through this yet. Will do by end of the week.

Thought we were going to get a shout out for 1-2 switch 2 there