Alice and Tim’s games of the (last bit of the) year
Wrapping things up with our picks from September to December
Hello there, and happy holidays! We’ve come to the very last newsletter of the year, so first of all I just want to thank everyone for reading; we’ve been thrilled with how well our first 50 or so issues have been recieved. And secondly, it must be time to close things out with the third part of our triennial Game of the Year extravaganza! If you want to refresh yourself on our previous picks, or get a sense of our list of favourites for the full year, you can find parts 1 and 2 here and here.
Have a great break, and we’ll see you in three weeks for another whole year of games for every kind of player.
Tim’s picks
Shovel Knight Dig
The original Shovel Knight and its add-on campaigns contain some of the greatest action platforming gameplay of all time. But the string of cameos and spin-offs the character’s had after the fact, in the hands of developers other than Yacht Club, have been hit and miss. Thankfully, everyone’s favourite spade-wielding hero is back at full power for Dig; a fantastic remix of the original’s strengths with some new ideas and bewitching 16-bit-style art and sound.
Prolific mobile developers Nitrome have effortlessly mirrored SK’s vibe and humour here, but elements of the original like powerful relics have been adapted to roguelite style; unlocked over time to appear randomly in semi-procedurally-generated runs. Each time through gives you more knowledge (of what different keys and enemies do, of what the heck eggs are for) that help make you that much powerful next time, until you’re ready to blitz through to Drill Knight’s castle on a single, marvellous dig.
Marvel Snap
If you measure greatness by how often you intend to stop playing a game but then keep playing it anyway, Marvel Snap is probably the greatest game released this year. But while it has a lot of those familiar mobile game hooks designed to keep you playing (constant unlocks, endless progress bars, numbers exploding), Snap is less repugnant than most thanks to its comparatively reasonable take on monetisation. You never have to pay for the latest cards, and you can’t pay for power. Mostly, paying just gets you new art for your cards, or marginally speeds up unlocks.
It helps that the game itself is brilliantly designed. You take your crew of 12 heroes and villains to war in a brief (five minutes tops) battle against someone else’s crew, where each character’s specific powers are constantly interacting with other characters and the game-changing qualities of the three play locations. It’s quick and surprising strategy, with just enough randomness that you can’t always win from sheer power or technique alone.
The Devil in Me
Supermassive’s yearly interactive horror movies are always fun (and make great grown-up family activities on the holidays FYI!), but The Devil in Me might be the best. It’s not on the scale of the big standalone games Until Dawn or The Quarry, but it’s the only Supermassive game so far that doesn’t keep you wondering whether or not a supernatural force is at play: this is a game against a human serial killer, who’s trapped your crew in a puzzle house and is going to murder you one by one.
As ever the fun here comes in making decisions that you think will keep you out of hot water, often under pressure, and then finding out how that choice actually leads to a bloody killing. I love the movie night mode, where you split the five characters between however many people are playing and if I was picking just one Dark Pictures Anthology game to get newbies started, it would be between this and the Man of Medan’s ghost ship.
Sonic Frontiers
I hesitated to include Sonic, because it has a lot of problems that make it tough to recommend unconditionally. The story is both dumb and annoyingly told, imprecise controls and glitches make it easy to rocket yourself into oblivion when you’re just trying to get around, and the game seems dead set against you enjoying its best parts until you suffer through its worst and cringiest. But as a Sonic fan, I found these problems easy to look past because they’re the things modern Sonic games always suck at.
Beyond its foibles, Frontiers is a wonderfully breezy and agreeable sandbox filled with points of interest to investigate, micro-challenges to complete, inexplicable floating rails to grind and islands to blaze across. It may come as no surprise that the best bits are the soundtrack and the focused, traditional-style Sonic levels, which both kick ass and are disappointingly under-utilised. But then it wouldn’t be a modern Sonic game if it gave us everything we want.
Atari 50
Digital Eclipse has been making excellent historical collections for years, but this is the first one where the ephemera feels like the main course, and the games themselves are garnish. Objects are organised in a timeline that covers the entire 50 year history of Atari, and include photos, planning documents, business cards, videos and more than 90 playable games. Everything is pristine and readable, which is a huge feat considering it’s decades old, and the best parts are the brand new video interviews with most of the key players from the company’s heyday.
Not only does this feel like the game equivalent of a historical gallery meets slick Netflix documentary series, but all the context and care actually makes the experience of playing these ancient games more meaningful. Virtually no Atari game holds up well in 2022, unless it’s an arcade game and you have the original controls, but Atari 50 helps you appreciate what a big deal something like Pong or Adventure was at the time, which is a rare thing.
Alice’s picks
Pentiment
Pentiment is just such a delightfully nerdy, weird game. Sure, it takes way, way too long to do almost anything, yet time moved differently back in the 16th century, things didn’t move so instantly, so it’s period accurate or something.
But it’s a murder mystery made by complete nerds with a gorgeous art style. The story unfolds beautifully, with player choice being very important. I still don’t know if I made the right choices, and I’m looking forward to playing more of it to see how the different options change things.
While Pentiment definitely won’t be to everyone’s taste, I think it’s the most creative and innovate game of the year. Pentiment is the kind of game you don’t see very often, and that’s very special.
God of War Ragnarok
If you liked the first game in this rebooted God of War series, you’ll love Ragnarok. What I love about this series is that it takes these huge stories about killing gods and getting divine revenge, and makes it so personal, character driven and family oriented. I do slightly wish Kratos and Atreus were able to have a slightly larger emotional range, and perhaps the ability to bring a touch of humour to their situation, but the story works as written.
Even if this game wasn’t technically brilliant with an interesting story, it would be worthy of the GOTY list purely for its commitment to accessibility. PlayStation might not be as loud about accessibility and inclusion as Xbox is, but the company has been hitting it out of the park on accessibility in big first-party games, as well as the inclusion of queer leads in games like TLOU.
NBA 2K23
On the one hand, my irritation with the way the men’s game is presented as a way to mine microtransactions and waste your time, where the women’s game still feels like an afterthought (though slightly less so than last year) made me not want to include NBA 2K23 in my GOTY list. On the other hand, I still love this stupid game and I play it way too much that not including it feels like a lie.
If you ignore the men’s part of the game, which in many ways is getting worse, NBA 2K23 is actually kinda wonderful. The WNBA mode could use some more development (but not so much it’s monetized to death like the MNBA section), but also I just enjoy it so much. It’s fun, fluid basketball that reminds me of the NBA 2K games that made me fall in love with the sport, and it has the power to introduce people properly to the WNBA (go Storm).
The actual basketball gameplay in 2K23 is the best and most realistic it’s ever been, so it’s a must-play for basketball fans who haven’t kept up with the franchise in the last few years. Just go in eyes open about the nonsense in the men’s career mode.
Honourable mention: Gotham Knights
Look, I still haven’t finished this game, because the rush to get everything done before the end of the year has eaten up most of my free time, and (as I’ve said in a previous newsletter), I’m enjoying taking my time with it. But I’m also pretty sure that I would have included it on this list if I’d had time (it’s also on my Kotaku list as a special mention), so I’m not going to penalise it just because there aren’t enough hours in the day. For me, this game harkens back to the good parts of the Batman Arkham series, but with the characters that are more interesting than Batman. I still want a game where Renee Montoya’s Question teams up with Kate Kane’s Batwoman, and the more games there are that are willing to explore the adventures of members of the Batfamily, the closer we get to that game. Ooh, or a Gotham Central game, I would play the hell out of that.
But, anyway, the gameplay is interesting, the co-op is fun, and it’s clearly aiming for fans of comic books, rather than fans of the lame DCU and MCU movies, which gives it extra points in my book.
Honourable mention: Need For Speed: Unbound
This is another one I haven’t finished, and another one that I included in my Kotaku list as an honourable mention. I haven’t finished it because I haven’t had enough time, and the lighting team leaned way too heavily into the strobe effects which makes my brain too itchy. But the driving is fun, the characters are interesting, and I cannot stress enough how much I ship the player character with Yaz, and I’m sad about how that all goes down. So much potential, squandered.