It has been a weird year for games, and a weird year for my relationship with gaming. There is a separate piece in me at some point about boycotts, ethical consumption under capitalism and billionaires owning mega yachts.
What I will say is that, for the first time in a long time, my playing of games has come with a big old fat caveat. My enjoyment of them has rubbed up against my sense of justice.
Feels weird to start this list with even more of a downer than my previous years of writing about games when those years were about people losing their jobs, consolidation and greed. But, hey, now we are getting into war-profiting and this feels untenable.
Yay.
Anyway, this article is pure indulgence. I already did a video about my favourite games; if you cannot be bothered to read this just go there.
A little shout-out to two of the worst games of this year: Elden Ring: Nightrein and Minds Eye. Absolutely the biggest wastes of my time. For those doing a quick scan, and who know me, a few eyebrows might be raised that there is only one (loose) roguelike on the list.
10. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Review)
This got on the list because my partner will spend an entire day glowering at me if she reads this and it isn’t on the list. She’ll say something like ‘How could you not put one of the best games ever made on your list?’ (and I’ll be all the way on her side – Jamie)
This will be way too low for her liking as this is the best game ever made, so she will still be giving me shit about it, but it is my list.
I didn’t finish Clair Obscur but what I played of it I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
As a person that has been bored to death by every traditional Final Fantasy entry, Clair Obscur managed to pull me in with the parry and dodge system, and then introduced the Pictos. The Pictos allow for synergies between the party members and the depth of the tactics sold me on it entirely with each character feeling significantly different to play.
If I had posted this a little earlier, I would have missed that the development team used a bunch of Generative AI (thank you IGN for throwing QA under the bus for missing it rather than pointing out the fact that it was implemented in the first place).
2026 might be the year that Gen AI specifically eats itself. What that means for the world economy and tax payers everywhere? Hard to know. What I will say is that finding out obvious AI-generated content was used in this game meant that I felt very much like the author of this article.
“I grieve for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Or rather, I grieve for my construct of it. I have heard the arguments: it was just placeholder, it was left in by accident, it was always meant to be removed; the list goes on. The hard truth is that this placeholder has tainted the entire experience, rendered it all nearly meaningless.”
Are the creatures in Clair Obscur inspired perversions? Or are they just whatever was spat out of the art-stealing machine?
10. Virtua Fighter 5 REVO (Review)
VF5 is back. The combat is as good as it always was. It is simultaneously simple and deep. This package has more content with more for solo players to get into and learn.
This is all covered in my review linked above.
If you like fighting games, you have to play VF5: REVO.
9. Blue Prince
The thing I hate more than anything is a game that delivers some top tier mechanics, but that has a little wink and reveal where the game ends up being something else completely. If you need references for this, think: Tunic, Fez, and The Witness. Each game has this fantastic loop that is really compelling. The games are smart, and make you feel smart as you start to unravel what you assume is the core.
Then they go ‘Aha! Well done! Now for all the other bullshit’.
Blue Prince is a fantastic roguelike. Each day you enter a house and are given room tiles to place in order to try and make it to the elusive final room. Most rooms have simple puzzles and you’re trying to balance your step consumption and keys to be able to get further. The meta unlocks for rooms and abilities are a delight, as you feel like you are learning more each time.
But Blue Prince starts hinting that there is more to the game fairly early on. Eventually, I unlocked the ‘final’ room and the next stage of the game was unveiled. That was when I knew I was done.
If Blue Prince had just been that first section and all the other nonsense had been hidden away, I would be arguing that this was easily the game of the year. Instead, there was this sinking feeling. It was like watching a film apparently getting a great ending, and then checking the run time and realising there is another 45 minutes left.
Some people loved this element to Blue Prince. I don’t begrudge them, but it is not for me.
8. Eternal Strands (Review)
I reviewed this game very early on in the year and it stuck with me for being a game that tried to incorporate lots of interesting systems (heat, cold, destructible scenery, climbing), and most of them worked. I think I celebrated the game’s freedom of expression in the review and I stand by that assessment – it felt like there was really a lot of cool things you could do while fighting giant monsters, and being able to climb everywhere added this beautiful verticality. However, the missions just sucked the good will out of the late game, and the crafting felt like an idea that could have been cut.
That said, still an excellent debut for the dev team.
7. Dead Reset (Review)
Look, Wales Interactive is currently my favourite publisher. Every time they release a new FMV game it immediately jumps to the top of my list of ‘must plays’. Dead Reset is a fantastic, hammy, horror game. A man is stuck in a time loop where there is an alien creature killing people. You then have to make choices to try and save the crew and stop the monster.
The story, unfortunately, doesn’t quite live up to the complex premise it presents, but I was invested in the cool practical effects and the broad stereotypes.
Anyone who likes Wales Interactive’s goofier stuff like Bloodshore and Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus should definitely play this. For those of you who have never heard of this publisher but like their horror films with a slice of cheese, this is unmissable.
6. Keeper
Jamie called me out on this – I am a sucker for Double Fine games. The team has such a vision for colour and style that makes their work feel so distinct. This game is all about controlling an ambulatory lighthouse that is accompanied by a cool little bird. Every scene is an oil painting and it is sumptuous in a way that only Double Fine delivers.
5. Sorry, We’re Closed (Review)
“All nostalgia is bad, except for my nostalgia” is a TL:DR version of my review. Sorry, We’re Closed just hits all the marks for someone like me that wished that SEGA had kept on supporting the Dreamcast.
What I appreciated was that the game does a lot to justify its artistic and mechanical choices. It controls super well, never feeling clunky except when trying to convey the difficulty of shooting a gun. The colour and design manages to look old-school, but with a much more modern sensibility. The writing and mood is also great, harking back to that listless Gen X style of the late 90s and early 00s.
4. Split Fiction (Review)
I just like playing a great Co-Op game. Being able to hang out with my partner while shooting, jumping, and solving puzzles. The story, once it gets over some of its tweeness, does eventually start to give its characters depth, and I was actually endeared to both by the end. Every part of this game is buffed to a sheen; there’s no area that I didn’t enjoy playing, which is impressive given that the mechanics are constantly changing up.
The only thing I can criticise is that this game is maybe too polished – it has less quirky charm than its predecessors, less time for a player to sit in the moment of considering what these characters are. It’s not enough to blight my enjoyment of the game, but enough for me to yearn for the dev team to get a little weird with it.
3. I am Your Beast (Review)
Every year, I just want another game that mimics Bizarre Creations’s The Club. All I want is to have a scoring system around murder. I Am Your Beast delivers this with aplomb: each level is super smart, the controls are slick, and it makes you feel like the unstoppable killing machine you are supposed to be. The variety is great with tons of weapons and each level feeling different in terms of objectives and tactics.
What surprised me the most is that the game is dryly funny. I cared about catching each new cutscene to hear the line delivery.
2. Promise Mascot Agency
I am going to stipulate that Promise Mascot Agency is everything that I should hate. For starters, the developer’s previous game Paradise Killer did absolutely nothing for me. Then there is the fact that I generally hate a lot of talking in my games. And what about collectathons in games? Hate them, could not imagine playing a whole game that is virtually nothing but that.
However, despite including most of these elements, Promise Mascot Agency just seems to nail everything in its presentation. You play a member of the Yakuza in an alternate timeline where Japanese mascots are alive and not just people in costumes. Early on, the protagonist has had to fake his own death and move to a cursed island to try and make enough money to keep his found family afloat. There, he encounters a severed finger mascot called Pinky, who helps him start hiring other mascots so that they can revitalise the island and take down a corrupt politician. This involves a lot of driving around a 3D open world with Pinky, collecting stuff and talking to the residents, while occasionally stepping in to help the mascots with their jobs.
There is a light card battling minigame and the truck gets some very funny upgrades (like being able to launch Pinky into the air to collect items), but that is basically the whole game – it is a credit to the game’s design that it was super compelling. Each day involves buying more upgrades, levelling up mascots, and paying off debt. It’s simple but propelled me forwards each time.
And it helps that the writing is genuinely funny. Some of the lines had me sniggering as I listened to/read them. Pinky is deeply, psychotically endearing, and it helps that the very first mascot you encounter is a crying, sentient piece of tofu.
Promise Mascot Agency caught me off guard and made me realise that sometimes the best version of a type of game I hate might still win me over by simply excelling at the implementation. This was a gem that constantly surprised me by being unrepentantly itself and very good at all the things it did.
1. ISLANDERS: New Shores (Review)
In these trying times – games can be a soothing balm. Building little cities over maps while calm music plays over the top can’t be beat. I don’t need complex stories, I don’t need complex anything (ever). I just need to see little buildings be placed on a hill and see a number go up.
The dopamine hits with this game make me feel so good, and I just like to zone out and see beautiful bucolic scenery work in harmony with quiet little towns.
If you need a cosy game that isn’t dependent on a lot of cosy game tropes, this is the one to play. It’s like watching Bob Ross paint and talk, but you are the painter instead.
Runners up:
Metal Eden, Monster Train 2, Ball X Pit, Avowed, Sonic Racing CrossWorlds, Herdling
