Me too! I'm playing it right now. I've been surprised how many times it's made me laugh out loud. For such a bleak looking game it can be quite funny at times.
I was amazed at how good a reflection it is on the nature of investigative police work, and what makes a detective a detective.
It’s not the gun or the badge (you start off without either), it’s not the innate authority (you start off in a humiliating predicament) it’s not being able to call upon the might of the state (your fellow police officers barely bother picking up the phone).
No, what makes a detective - maybe even the best detective on the force - is the willingness to do the work. To observe. To inspect. To interrogate. To pound the pavement day after crappy day. To completely give oneself up to the task of figuring out what the hell happened, and follow the clues wherever they lead.
The second one, forbidden west, is good too.
But I find the world building and architecture of Meridian and the surrounding towns very interesting and very beautiful in many ways.
I think I prefer the first one, the mechanics got changed a bit and I don't really like that you can just fly everywhere in the second one.
I was almost not going to respond with Outer Wilds, since it feels like I played forever ago. But apparently I only played it in June of this year, so that's my choice. It's one of my favorite games now, if not my favorite game ever.
It's so good, in fact, that it's helping me get over this weird anxiety I have of talking about my hobbies with other people (including my closest friends). Outer Wilds is so good that even though I hate talking about games I like, I still feel the need to recommend it to people. And now that the floodgates are open I feel a bit more comfortable talking about my other favorite games, like Baba is You, which I got another person to play as well, and The Messenger, which I'm playing now and loving it.
Outer Wilds is one of those games that is better the less you know about it. So I will be a bit vague, bit this would be my pitch:
It's a space archeology game with a very good story, charming characters, and an intriguing mystery. It has fun mechanics, as I enjoy simply flying around in the ship (once I got the hang of it) and some unique puzzle design.
After the tutorial section it is an extremely non-linear experience.
Highly recommend, don't look up any spoilers though!
Unfortunately, I agree with the other commenter. It's very hard to talk about the game without taking a bit out of the experience.
I will say that it's a space exploration game, where you fly around a tiny (handcrafted!) solar system and explore the various planets. There are a handful of mysteries around this solar system and you eventually figure out how the various clues intersect.
It's also very much a game about information. You never gain upgrades or stats or anything, your character when you start the game is exactly the same as when you finish it. But you learn things about the solar system and your knowledge of this world and it's mysteries increases, directing you on where to go next and what to do. The game also doesn't present you with explicit goals, so at the beginning you can do pretty much everything you want, but there is an ending you will eventually reach by following the clues laid out around the universe (and I seriously recommend that you don't stop before the ending).
It's also a very hard game to replay, as after you know the answer to the mysteries, there's a part of the appeal that is lost. I wish I could forget about it so I could replay it fresh!
If you liked outer wilds I would check out Forgotten City. I just started it, but it has a similar feel. It's more piecing things together through dialouge rather than exploration but has a similar "the whole world is a puzzle" vibe with the a kinda rouge lite experience of needing to use what you learn each cycle to progress further.
I finally got around to playing the Mass Effect trilogy (the Legendary Edition remasters, anyway). It's excellent.
In 2011, I gave up on ME1 after getting to a very difficult combat encounter that I was not prepared for and having no other saves to go back to. I essentially rage-quit the trilogy for over 10 years, lol.
Still about halfway through ME3 but I am already planning my second playthrough. Truly a God-tier set of games, IMO.
I've been nibbling at these recently (although in my case it's a replay). I'm a little bummed that no one ended up finishing the same-gender romance mod for this version of ME3 but otherwise I've been having a great time with it. I still think ME2 and ME3 are among the best RPGs I've ever played.
The Citadel DLC is still the best DLC I've ever played in any game, by a mile.
I also played through this for the first time this year and liked it alot.
The reviews for the game didn't do it justice. It wasn't breathlessly paced like the first Mass Effect game (which I liked), but it was really quite fun.
Super Mario Odyssey. It's mostly extremely fun, controls well, with only occasional camera angles and poor checkpointing infuriation lighting its copybook.
Celeste is so good, it instantly became one of my all time favorites when I played last year, I even bought the PC version for playing on the go with a laptop, shame there was never a vita version.
I gave Fallout 4 another try recently, after only playing a few hours of it a couple of years back. I ended up getting sucked into it. So far, I've only used a couple of quality-of-life mods, like a high FPS fix and allowing Dogmeat to be a companion alongside any other companion, which the game had unimplemented code for.
I've tried multiple times to get into this fallout having liked the others from the first but I just hate all that base building crap that it keeps trying to force on you.
Is there a mod to remove all base building quests so I can just ignore that shit?
Try Sim Settlements mod. It doesn't remove the settlements, but it makes it interesting.
Instead of doing everything yourself, you can plop down plots for different purposes and then the sellers build it themselves over time.
You can also opt for a pre-made town footprint by choosing a settler as mayor.
Most of the base building quests are completely optional. There is a mod that automates base building, turning it more into something like SimCity. I haven't tried it out, but it's a top mod over on the Nexus site.
I started Fallout New Vegas (with basic modding) with the intent to experience as much if it as possible in one playthrough. It's been a great experience so far, but I really underestimated how much time it would take. The game is huge.
I don't know if it's the best, but the oldest games I've played this year are:
Montezuma's Revenge
Commander Keen
Zelda (NES)
I'm also looking for an old game I had on a 5" floppy back then... a fast-paced vertical scrolling shootemup/bullet hell, possibly with "Goose" in its name...
That and a Space Invaders-like that sounds like Galaxian, but is not Galaxian...
Similar concept, but possibly from the 90s, and your ship had a retractable claw to catch power-ups, and some sort of vertical sidebar in its UI with your score, wave progress, etc.
I used to play Tekken 1 and Tekken 3 on PS1, so huge nostalgic trip. And I've wanted to play God of War for forever, but never had a PS2, but Steam Deck (and Emudeck) made emulation so easy that I'm catching up.
I just started playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and man alive is it good. I've never been a fan of the soulslike genre but apparently all I need to fall in love are the samurai aesthetic and a mother frickin PARRY ability!
Sekiro is my favourite game. Once you complete it 100% though you’ll struggle to find something to compare, which sorta sucks. I wish there were more games like Sekiro
The worst part about Sekiro is that when you're done with it you feel like you're good at it and you want more but there's nothing else quite like it 😥
ADACA and Signalis just came out last year so not far behind but they were fun. ADACA is billed as Half-Life meets Halo meets STALKER by reviewers and it’s a fun, light FPS. (although I couldn’t get into the more open Zone Patrol mode)
Signalis though, that oozes atmosphere, an excellent soundtrack, and offered feels in a neat fleshed out world. I enjoyed the gameplay quite a bit, a callback to top-down survival horror from an era I never really played. I really appreciate a lack of jump scares except one enemy’s presence when you enter a room making your screen/radio go haywire but hardly FNAF material which I will only watch.
I'd say Hitman III (now called World of Assassins) or No Man's Sky. Both are really great values for their price.
I think I'm mostly done with the Hitman franchise for now, but I'll probably come back to NMS next time Starfield has some big update and I need to scratch that exploration itch.
Probably Omori, although I haven't gotten to two of four endings just yet. Its vibes naturally resonated with me over time, even at its darkest moments.
Child of light
Had it on my radar for some years, then in my Steam library for many more. Finally played it. Really nice vibe and combat system with amazing art direction and narrative.
The King's Field Trilogy on PS1. These games bounced off me hard back in the day, but I got curious about them after reading about their influence on Souls. These were games that were waaaay ahead of their time, and so satisfying now that I have the patience to really appreciate what From Software were trying to create. Also: definitely play the translated version of the first Japanese one.
Final Fantasy XIII-2, modded with HD upscaled textures, community fixes, and Reshade. 2K Resolution w/ Improved AA + Color Correction + Motion Blur + Ray Tracing made this game look modern af 😎
And for the best game this year part, the developers really said "so FFXIII was linear? Well how about time is not linear!" Jumping back to old locations surprised me in that I actually wanted to go back to them and do optional content. And beneath the extra ass music (lol), is some of the most down right horrific/sad stuff shown in a FF game. Like the straight up Zombie apocalypse-like C'eith outbreak in the future that Serah even being near causes people to turn, she apologizes to them in battle as the turned enemies try to use remedy on theirselves to no avail. Being the last human alive and having to deal with seeing the last people alive dying off till it's just you on the planet. The cruel fate of some characters and the risks taken storywise and gamewise really surprised me.
I don't really want to pick between the three, but I'll go with Sifu, because it's got a little of that super tough, Fromsoftiness built in.
Runs like a dream on my Steamdeck too, and has some genuinely really impressive moments of beauty that I wasn't expecting from a super-hard-beat-people-up-with-a-pipe game.
I opened up Bloodborne again a few weeks ago. Performance isn't good, but it's a lot less miserable than the time I played before that. I definitely like the mechanic of dual mode weapons. The chain-cane is pretty fun to approach enemies with.
I wish it was on PC for steam deck though. I'm not in front of the console as much.
Xenoblade chronicles X. I finally got a beefy pc that can emulate it with all the graphical upgrades the Wii u can't even fathom, and this game is so much less of a slog now that I'm an adult with a finer appreciation for menus stacked in menus sacked in menus