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
(Possible Minor Spoilers ahead)
I’ve half played more games than I’ve finished, but I had a decent enough track record this year, mostly with indie games. In no particular order:
Collapsed to not take up too much space
Hollow Knight - Was a replay, but I got all the way to the Complete Soul achievement, which I’m proud of.
Deathloop - Interesting game. I really enjoyed the Groundhog Day style mechanics and had fun achievement hunting.
Pineapple on Pizza - Not much of a challenge to finish, but it stuck out to me as an interesting play. Very short, interesting game.
Kingdom Eighties - Bounced of the other Kingdom games for various reasons, but this one really caught my interest. The 80s aesthetic and “Kids fighting monsters” story really appealed to me.
Beholder 1 & 3 - Interesting games. Didn’t enjoy 2 enough to finish it.
Dead Rising 4 - After hearing so much hyperbole about how bad this one was, I decided to finally get around to playing it and, while it was definitely not as interesting or fun to play as DR 2 for me, it was fine. After reading up on some of the dev history behind it, its foibles are pretty understandable, imo.
Marvel’s Spider-Man & Miles Morales - Fun games. I have my own complaints about them here and there, but having been a huge fan of the PS2 Spider-Man 2 game, I’m just happy to have a modern web slinger game in an open world. Eager to play the sequel if it ever gets ported to PC.
Dredge - Fun little indie fishing game. Short, but just long enough for my attention span with games.
Dave the Diver - Same comments as Dredge, with the additional critique that, while the plethora of mini-games within it are interesting, some feel like they’re just there to add more onto it. Interested to see what the Dredge combo-DLC entails.
Resident Evil VII - Not usually a fan of horror games, but this one toed the line just enough to not over-spook me out of it. Having seen some playthroughs, I wasn’t too surprised by anything, but it was fun to playthrough myself.
Factorio - Put this one off for a long time because it looked too “technical” to appeal to me, but I decided to give it a shot as a different kind of survival sim and got hooked. I didn’t go too deep with it, but I did finish the story missions and might hop back in when the big update comes out, which looks interesting.
Power Wash Sim - “Completing” it is a bit of a stretch, but I did finish all the missions. Interesting, mindless little game. Funny to say that I enjoyed a cleaning game, hah.
Pikmin 4 - Never had the chance to play any of the other Pikmin games, but I did enjoy this one. My only real complaint is that, for a game that has the player unlocking abilities up to the very end, it could really do with a New Game+ mode because all that effort felt like a bit of a waste since there’s not really anything to do after getting everything unlocked.
Grounded - Played this one while it was in beta and thought it was pretty neat. Decided to give it another go now that it’s complete and really enjoyed it. Fun little crafting-survival game with surprisingly complex combat. Probably not a great game for anyone that’s doesn’t do well with insects.
LotR: Return to Moria - More intrigued by the setting than anything, this game was fine enough. To be honest, the gameplay wasn’t particularly great and it had so many bugs, but I did finish it through all of that.
Heretic’s Fork - For a combo of genre’s that I generally just avoid (deckbuilders and tower defense), this was pretty enjoyable. Not a super long game to get through, and good to just hop on and get a few runs in.