Back on the other website, there used to be a sub called r/12in12 where people would try to beat 12, 24, 36+ games per year. I never really set myself any specific target like that, but the end of year reviews were always fun to read/write. Considering that I don’t think a single game I beat came out this year, I think this is the right community to ask this.
What games did you beat this year? What did you think of them?
For me:
January:
Nothing!
February:
Spider-Man: Miles Morales 7/10
When I first played Spider-Man on a PS4, I didn’t like it. The 30fps cap made the swinging feel clunky and nothing about the rest of the game made up for it. The PC release finally comes around and at last I get the hype, the web swinging is so good. The combat is very Arkham and it’s fine, the story is fine, but the web swinging is just so good. Spider-Man Miles Morales is just more of that.
The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection ?/10
This game is responsible for Steam thinking that Solitaire is one of my favorite genres of games. There are multiple versions of the game here, most of them are fine but Fortune’s Foundation is probably my new favorite version of Solitaire. I don’t know what I’d rate this out of 10, but I got 90 hours of entertainment for my $10.
March:
Split / Second 8/10
The PC port sucks, you have to use a fan patch to remove the 30fps cap, the controller support is terrible, but there’s nothing else like it. It’s a fantastic arcade racer with a super unique premise. The rest of the industry seeing this and Blur bombing financially is probably why racing games are so goddamn anemic now which is such a shame.
April:
Rakuen 7/10
I’ve never really gotten into any RPG Maker games like this, but it had great reviews and I needed something battery-friendly to play on my Steam Deck. Rakuen was pretty darn good, the characters are well written and the environments outside of the hospital are pretty. The story is a little predictable, but I think that’s fine what it wanted to tell.
May:
Hotshot Racing 6/10
What’s here is fun, but there’s almost nothing here. I beat the entire campaign in about an hour. The AI rubber-banding was a bit annoying at times. Also re-reading the Steam page, apparently it has always-online DRM? The fuck?
June:
Universal Paperclips ?/10
I was in the mood for a clicker game. I tried Cookie Clicker first but the pacing is just so slow. Universal Paperclips is a clicker game that can be completed in a reasonable amount of time, and it scratched the itch I was looking for.
July:
Wilmot’s Warehouse 8/10
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ai4NZnjOdUE/maxresdefault.jpg
Super Meat Boy 5/10
I’ve forced myself to start this game so many times over the years, I finally completed it and I just don’t like it. Way too janky/buggy for a simple 2D platformer. I beat the final level 3 times and couldn’t figure out what to do at the end, only for it to turn out that the final cutscene wasn’t activating because my frame rate was too high. Ugh. It just made me want to play N++ again.
Ape Out 9/10
Ahhh it’s so good. The soundtrack and sound effects and visuals, it’s just perfect. A little on the short side (only took 1:40 to beat), but it’s pretty replayable.
Neodash 7/10
It’s basically Distance but worse. Distance is one of my favorite games of all time and is firmly a 10/10, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Any levels that rely on the mid-air controls bring down the experience a bit, but luckily there aren’t a ton of those.
August:
CrossCode 10/10
A top-down RPG with a ~50-hour story? I should hate this, but everything clicked into just the right place. The puzzles are fun (maybe a little too long), the combat is great, the characters are great, the story is great, I did not expect to love this game as much as I did.
Sayonara Wild Hearts 6/10
It’s basically a 1-hour music video. It’s very pretty and the songs are good, but the gameplay just kind of… exists.
Mad Max 6/10
It’s a beautiful looking game and the vehicle combat is fun, but everything else is pure mid-2010s generic open world game, complete with Arkham combat.
Riptide GP2 6/10
It’s fine, but there’s absolutely no reason to play this over Riptide GP Renegade unless you’re really board and looking for a grindy podcast game like I was. Renegade is just this but better in every way. It is a bummer that there are so few boat (or boat-adjacent) racing games coming out these days.
WRC Powerslide 4/10
It’s insanely repetitive and the driving physics are really floaty. The power-ups are awful but luckily they can be turned off in settings. The damage model is actually really good though, which is bizarre for a top-down racer. This got delisted from Steam years ago, if I didn’t already own it, I would not go out of my way to play it.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 7/10
It’s a fun little walking simulator mystery game, I don’t remember much of the actual story right now lol. I played the remastered version which was very pretty though.
Quantum Conundrum 7/10
It’s a 6/10 puzzle game brought up by a full point because of John de Lancie’s character.
September:
Hotline Miami 8/10
I know it’s technically kind of a mess, but like everyone else I really loved it anyway. The soundtrack is excellent and clearing rooms is super satisfying. Raycevick’s video really makes me want to play OXTO next.
PowerWash Simulator 8/10
The perfect podcast game.
October:
Cassette Beasts 8/10
The Pokemon games have always sounded interesting to me, but I’ve just never been able to get into any of them as an adult. Cassette Beasts finally scratched that itch for me, and this works way better as a concept than the Pokemon games do for me. As a bonus, the story is surprisingly good as well. Also it’s made in Godot!
Sonic Generations 5/10
I don’t like the Sonic games, but I’ve always heard this is one of the good ones so I decided to play it. A couple of the levels were fun, but most were just frustrating and/or buggy. For a character who’s entire thing is going fast, the levels sure like constantly slowing you down with obstacles that cannot be seen coming.
The Witness 6/10
90% of the levels in this game are good and clever, where finding the solution is fun and satisfying. The remaining 10% includes puzzles where the entire screen is flashing to make it hard to look at, puzzles where the answer still makes no sense even after googling it, and puzzles that cannot be solved unless you solve a different puzzle first with no indication of where that’s the case. The story is also nonsense but luckily it’s easily ignored. This video was so cathartic after finishing the game.
Doom Eternal (& The Ancient Gods) 8/10
November:
Superliminal 8/10
My primary complaint is that it isn’t longer. It took a little over an hour and a half to reach the end, but what’s here is fantastic.
December:
Nothing again, lol
November
Blood Code - In the same way that I like to focus on horror games in October, I like to play Visual Novels in November. It’s Visual November! Get it?.. it’s… Blood Code was a bad game to start the month on, not necessarily because it’s not a good representation of visual novels, it’s just not good. I could rant on this for a while but ultimately: bad translation, poor design regarding rewards for using your time, unclear paths to routes, and laughably bad pacing at the beginning. Arts okay, though.
D
Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk… - Much higher production value than the first and it shows. Comes together much better too, so that the chaotic and disjointed nature can be appreciated as part of the picture rather than just as a janky narrative.
B
Just Deserts - One of the most vanilla time-management dating sims I’ve played. The writing ended up being more respectful of the cast than I was expecting, but they attempted to put a turn based battle system into a visual novel engine and oof.
C
World End Economica episode 1 - Very much a part one of a large story rather than its own contained story, which is perhaps the part of it that I liked the least. The focus on day trading was too specific for me to really care about as well. Turns out that I couldn’t get fully invest… interested in that kind of narrative. In the end I felt more compelled to look up the other chapters’ endings online rather than actually play through the games to get there, which is a pretty big sin when it comes to narrative driven entertainment
C
Coffee Talk - I find that simply comparing one game to another (or worse, a mixture of games) is lazy, reductive, and ultimately unfair when critiquing games. That said, it would be very difficult to talk about my experience here without referencing VA11 Hall-A. I played the latter last year and loved it. Easy S. This game is similar to the point where it’s hard not to think about VA11 Hall-A when playing as another drink-master-talking-to-customers 'em up. This made an interesting use of its world and had a fun, if a touch underutilized, cast. The Indonesian flair added a nice flavor to the game as well. Interested in picking up the next one.
B
Hustle Cat - I like this one for how much it is itself. A very casual game that isn’t a masterpiece but isn’t trying to be. Short story with romantic branches of working in a cursed cat cafe. The kind of moderate comfort of a TV movie on a sunday afternoon.
B
Utawarerumono: Prelude to the Fallen - A series that I had thought would be far hornier than it ended up being going in due to my wife’s very vague knowledge of the series. The game is a very competently written story in a feudal Japanese fantasy world, something I wish showed up more in Japanese games. Its fatal flaw is the inclusion of tactical battles which the team very clearly did not fully grasp the design of. They aren’t terrible, a balance toward the player making them more tedious than anything else. However, I enjoyed the story to the point that they didn’t bother me. I cannot fully ignore them when trying to grade the game, though.
B, would have easily been A without the tactics battles
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Tatarigoroshi - I went from being a fan of the series through the original anime to loving it through the games. Who would have guessed the “book” would be better than the “movie”, eh? Even as what I had thought was one of the weaker points of the overall story and already knowing its conclusion, I was fully invested in visiting it again. These games have a very different feeling of tragedy to them when you know the answers to the mysteries presented and why certain things are happening. As with the others in the series, one will need a healthy resistance to anime foibles to be able to appreciate this fully.
A
Elisa the Innkeeper - I am trying to limit this list to games that I have finished, but this is a rare one that I know for certain that I will not finish. I applaud anyone for being able to fully create a game, but that is where my praise will end here. Not offensive in its existence, but nothing of quality.
F
December
Unpacking - Freedom from gimmicks! For the most part. December can be my clean up month, so what better way to start than an organizing game! I love how the devs were able to convey character and narrative with so little when it comes game mechanics. Short and sweet.
A
Nightmare Reaper - Turns out that I rather like Doom-like shooters. Now it seems like the cool kids are calling them movement shooters rather than boomer shooters, but who knows if that one will stick. Nightmare Reaper is a rogue-lite affair with a high number of rather short levels and looter-shooter elements. These both work very well in the system and lead to a very addictive game. It also has a rather unique upgrade system where each upgrade is earned by completing a simple retro minigame that take the place of skill trees. The game runs a touch long, considering it expects the player to loop through a la Diablo, but not so much that I grew tired of it.
A
Psychonauts 2 - I had watched this game nervously the entire time it was in development. I had loved Psychonauts, but it is so easy for a narrative driven experience to fall short in its sequel. I couldn’t be happier to be wrong here. I could go on and on about all the things that make Psychonauts 2 great. I will instead just say that, in an industry that has become obsessed with outside validation, where devs spend hours and hours replicating the limitations of the real world through face scanning celebrities and making digital film grains, Psychonauts 2 shows just how spectacular of an experience you can make when you throw off the shackles of what’s real and embrace everything that video games could be.
S