TheMightyEthan

Thirsty Suitors This is another indie game about a girl coming back to her hometown after leaving 3 years earlier, making peace with her family, her exes, etc. By fighting them. Think Scott Pilgrim, if Ramona was the main character and she had to fight the exes herself. Lots of emotional growth and working through past conflicts, etc. It's really lovely and heartfelt. Grade: A+

Sea of Solitude This is a cool (and very pretty) little indie puzzle game about dealing with your own and others' demons, via the metaphor of traversing a magical ocean on a tiny motor boat. It's fun, and doesn't overstay its welcome. The emotional metaphor isn't the deepest thing in the world, but it at least doesn't feel the need to explicitly explain it to you via voiceover like so many other indie puzzle games do, so I'll take it. Grade: A

I liked FF7.

I had heard on a podcast you can grab bullets out of the air and throw them at enemies, but if that's true I was never able to get it to work.

Superhot VR This game more than any other has made me feel like a movie action hero. Time moves when you do, you dodge bullets and shoot mans. It's perfect. My only complaint is I wish there was more of it. Grade: S

Final Fantasy VII Yes, I finally beat the game from 26 years ago! I'd tried it a couple of times before throughout my life, and never even made it out of Midgar, but wanting to finish it before FF7 Rebirth comes out motivated me to stick with it, and I'm glad it did. It's obviously got some old game jankiness, and some very much "guide dangit" moments, even ignoring secret bosses and weapons and stuff, but overall I'm surprised how well it held up, and how hard the story hits. I would definitely recommend giving it a shot to anyone who's interested. Grade: B+ (I know this is probably unfairly low, but I never got into a JRPG until Persona 4 Golden, so I don't really have a way to judge how good it was "for the time," so this is just my current enjoyment of it)

Master Cheeks!

Yeah, the submission to me is just so I can score them and generate an overall list, I figure there will be discussion once the list is posted. And yes, only restriction is release this year.

Assassin's Creed Mirage This game was billed as a return to form of the pre-Origins AC games, and they nailed it. Easily the best one since before they switched to the Action RPG formula. It captures the feel of the old style of games while keeping some quality of life improvements so it doesn't feel outdated. This is exactly what I wanted. It's only about 20 hours long too. Grade: A Too bad it looks like they're going back to the Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla style for Red.

I do (did), and it's probably not, but my biggest gripe with the Steam Deck is the low-quality LCD, so this high quality 1000 nit HDR OLED is very appealing. Originally I was going to wait for a true successor, but there were a series of things that pushed me closer to caving. First was just the fact that it was OLED, second was finding out it was HDR, then finding out it had better battery life, then Digital Foundry's testing indicating that it's about 8% faster than the original Steam Deck, and finally the thing that pushed me over the edge was finding out on Monday that the Limited Edition of the OLED Deck was still in stock. I was able to sell my old Deck on FB Marketplace at least, so that's enough to cover about 60% of the cost of the new one.

I did a thing.

Alright, let's do 5 instead of 10 then.

So I know it's a little early still, but I wanted to try something different this year, so I wanted to get the word out early. What I'd like to do is have everybody DM me their personal top 10 list, and I'll compile an overall list for the forum. The way I would do it is assign points, so if you rank a game #1 it gets 10 points, #2 gets 9, and so on, and total up all the points from everyone to get an overall list. The only rules I would suggest is that all the games have to have released this year, and ask everyone to DM me by December 20. Is anybody interested in doing this? We could obviously all post our own GOTY's too like we have before. Also, is 10 games from this year too many? Would 5 be better? Let me know what you think!

Dead Space Remake I got a month of EA Play Pro for Jedi Survivor, so I decided to try Immortals of Aveum (not good) and this (pretty great). If I didn't already know that they had changed the layouts of the ship a little to make things flow better, I would think this was a 1:1 recreation of the original's levels, and that's pretty emblematic of the whole thing. Basically, it perfectly modernizes everything about the game in such a way that it seems like it's a perfectly faithful recreation, when in fact everything is improved. It's pretty amazing. Also this game is still great.

Immortals of Aveum Goddamn I hated the characters in this game so much. They were trying to be fun and sassy, but I just wanted to punch them in the face. The gameplay was kinda fun, but not enough to put up with these characters. Grade: C

Well, I was able to get it working eventually, so I avoided starting over, and now Star Wars Jedi Survivor properly belongs in this thread instead. This game is pretty good. In some ways, particularly the combat, it's better than the original. However, I think they expanded it too much, the areas are too big, it's just overall too bloated. I started having more fun with it once I stopped exploring every single nook and cranny and just kind of explored stuff as felt natural as I moved through. So I didn't just follow the complete main path, I would go look at little side areas when I saw them on the map, that kind of thing, I just didn't make a point of exploring every single inch. When I made that change it picked up and started feeling better. The combat is also improved over the original, which was pretty good to start with, though it still does the dumb "oh, I suddenly remember how to do something I should have known how to do this whole time" thing, but thankfully not nearly as often. It just feels smoother, you're less restricted at the beginning, and overall just feels better to play. That said, I did think several of the boss fights were badly designed, and ended up bumping it down to story mode for two of them, not because they were "hard", but because they felt unfair. The story would have been better if I hadn't seen the big twist coming literally from the first mission. I actually had almost convinced myself I couldn't be right, because even a Star Wars story couldn't be that obvious. Well, I was right, which completely robbed the big narrative moment of any impact. Also, the PC version is still a mess. I got multiple crashes per play session, which given the way it handles saves is terrible. I had to redo the final boss fight because it crashed in the middle of the end cutscene. It's just bad. Overall, this game is still worth playing if you liked the original, but it's not anything amazing. Grade: B-

Yeah, that's why I said "eventual" release, I don't think it'll be anytime soon. But since Remedy owns the rights, not Epic, the publishing agreement probably has some kind of a time limit on it, even if it's like 10 years or whatever.

I do hold out hope for an eventual Steam release like with Control, because Remedy retains the rights to Alan Wake, it's not owned by Epic, and I can't imagine they would agree to store exclusivity in perpetuity for their own IP.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor The game crashed 2 hours in and broke my save. I'm not starting over. Grade: F-

Jusant This is a cool little game from Dontnod, way different from their other stuff. It's like Ico crossed with Journey. You're a person climbing a giant tower. At its core that's all there is to it, but the climbing mechanics are surprisingly deep, and many of the sections you have to climb function as puzzles. It's surprisingly fun and rewarding, and pretty as all get out. There's also some lore to discover among the ruins of a vanished civilization on the tower, that tell the story of what happened. All in all it's a very charming little game. Grade: A

Spider-Man 2 Surprising no one, this game is great. If you've played the other two it's more of that, just further refined. The story was compelling and well-told. There's not really much more than that to say, it was exactly what I expected. Grade: A+

Forgot to post this, bought it the day I finished Alan Wake 2. Walmart still had the "launch editions" on the shelf too, despite it being two weeks later, so I even got all the preorder content.

Alan Wake 2 This game might be my GOTY, which is insane given the games that have come out this year. It is exactly what I wanted when they announced a sequel to Alan Wake. It captures the ideas of the original, and updates them flawlessly. Gameplay is actually good now, the shift to full-on survival horror works perfectly, the story is incredibly well-done, everything just comes together in a marvelous whole. The game isn't perfect, obviously, but any complaints I have are minor nitpicks, overall they completely nailed it. Grade: A+

It's spelled "REm4ke", smh.

Cocoon This is a little indie puzzler from the main guy behind Inside and Limbo. Everyone's been raving about it. I'd say overall it was pretty good, definitely pretty and with an interesting visual design, but it drags too much. The puzzles never really get all that complicated, and it takes way too long to get even as complicated as they do, so there's a lot of the game where you feel like you're just running along a more or less linear path pushing buttons with no real thought involved. The mechanics were promising, but I don't think the game lived up to their potential. Grade: B-