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I started Metal: Hellsinger last night, played the first two levels and really enjoyed it. I never got on much with the modern Dooms, and this is a similar feel but is really clicking with me. It just feels so good to be doing everything to the beat, and the music is great. It starts out with just a beat, but as you build your multiplier it layers on more and more of the track. It's so hype when you hit a 16x multiplier and the vocals kick in, up there with the Persona 5 music when you're doing you're final thieving run on a dungeon. It does have weird performance characteristics on PC. Adjusting the graphics settings doesn't seem to affect framerate at all, resolution is the only thing that seemed to matter. On the main menu (which has a 3D scene in the background) at 4k ultra I got 84 fps, and at 4k low I got 85 fps. Turning it down to 1440p got me to locked 120, but again other settings had no effect. It's not a major problem, I can play at 1440p, it's just weird.

I installed the seamless co-op mod for Elden Ring to play with a friend and it's been a pretty fun experience. The mod actually attempts to feel like a legit game mode so it's not just adding a bunch of people and steamrolling over everything. The enemies scale depending on how many people are playing together, just like in the normal game, and includes extra scaling for a fourth player. It adds some QoL tweaks to the game to better facilitate the mod too, like showing other players on the map on compass. However, it still has to follow certain rules to function. For example, if one player rests at a grace then the world is reset for all players, even if they're in the middle of a boss battle. It's pretty much necessary for the mod to work at all. Even with that in mind, this is a beta and there's still some jank. It works fairly well for the most part, but there were a couple crashes and sometimes my partner or myself were unable to summon Torrent in the field, which could only be fixed by quitting and rejoining the session. The mod has kinks to work out, but if you've played Elden Ring a ton of times already then this is a good way to revitalize the experience.

I've yet to play Elden Ring (probably won't) and not yet got around to Ragnarok. Given literally game I've googled that I thought came out this year came out in Oct/Nov 2021...it by default means my game of the year is: I did rather like GotG and Deathloop.