What better type of sophomore post to this blog than a top 10 list containing my favorite 10 games of the year? Surely I must start by feeding the content mill. The ranking should be considered a light spicing at best, I find it very difficult to make such absolute judgements.
10. Cities Skylines II
After the disappointment of SimCity 2013 I was sure I would have to stick to SimCity 4 and 2K to satiate my megalomaniacal lust for bureaucracy and city building. Enter the original Cities Skylines. I put hundreds of hours into that game, modding it to high heck and getting most of its increasingly less interesting DLC.
While I haven't played that much of the sequel yet, I am certain it will entertain me at least as much as the original release did pre-DLC and mods. Playing on GeForce NOW means I don't encounter much of the performance issues people are complaining about and I enjoy the fact that most of the functionality I added through mods seems to be included in the base product now.
9. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Turns out I didn't join the FromSoftware fanbase with Dark Souls like I thought. I remember enjoying my pirated copy of the original Armored Core back on the PlayStation 1. So I was pretty excited about what an updated version might look like.
It's pretty great. I kind of wish it was more of a sandbox experience when it comes to customizing your AC and not locking parts behind progression, but that's not the kind of game it is. I probably spend more time tweaking and changing my load-outs then out on actual missions.
8. Forza Motorsport
I like racing games and have played almost every entry in the Forza franchise (including the Horizons) and found that as time went on that they become increasingly less fun. Emphasis was laid on microtransactions and weird buffs you could buy. Progression became more convoluted and opaque.
While the newest entry does away with a lot of issues, it still suffers from the fact that your interaction with the career feels like going through someone else's Spotify playlists. But I am enjoying this latest entry for a superficial reason: the graphics. They are just absolutely stunning, weather effects are lifelike, and the raytraced lighting replicates the way the sun moves over cheap grey dashboard plastic in a realistic way.
7. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
If there's two things I love it's Dark Souls and Star Wars. So when you combine the two, you can bet I'll be there eagerly. I never finished the original because I kind of ran out of steam on it near the end (which is a big compliment, because I have the same problem with From Software Soulslikes). However, I finished this one over the course of a week or so.
The plot is rather predictable and deals with High Republic stuff I'm not really interested in but jumping around and swinging your lightsaber was just too much fun. I did find it a bit too difficult to find the path ahead at times and the in-game map is near useless. But I'm willing to forgive a lot because it's Star Wars and there's lots of fun little creatures.
6. F1 23
I'm not a sports-person, but since 2019 I’ve been following Formula 1 religiously. Part of the influence was the excellent F1 2019. Since EA's takeover of the franchise the dreaded microtransactions and battle pit passes have arrived. But it also gave us the My Team mode, allowing you to play through season as your own 11th team.
And that mode has my bread and butter since they introduced it. In fact, I even made an entire in-character blog for it in the first year. This year's entry adds some cool real life features like red flags and such, it is mostly here on the list because the game is such a mainstay for me. I usually play at least two 100% length races each week.
5. Starfield
Since Morrowind I've been dutifully playing every Bethesda open-world RPG. None of them have reached the enjoyment I got out of Morrowind, of course, because I'm that specific kind of gamer. However, I will always prefers spaceships over dragons, so a sci-fi Bethesda RPG definitely would appeal to me. I was also a fan of No Man's Sky from day one.
Much like Armored Core, my favorite part was constructing and customizing my own spaceship. I mainlined through the main quest to get to New Game Plus and since I've just been tooling around going to random planets in my increasingly baroque vessel. It's basically a podcast game for me at this point, I don't really care about the universe or the characters, but it's just generic time-wasting fun. And sometimes that's enough.
4. Mortal Kombat 1
I never got into a fighting game like I did Mortal Kombat 11. I did the weekly and daily challenges, I even got competitive enough with a single character that it was a 50/50 shot of me winning or losing an online fight.
MK1 continues this tradition by paring down everything but still being excellent. The story mode is great as usual and there is enough on offer for someone like me who primarily plays these kinds of games solo.
3. Baldur's Gate 3
One high school summer vacation in the early 2000s I spent taking a single character (a paladin named Tallnar) through both Baldur'ses Gate and their expansions. I remember specifically modding the game so I could still romance Viconia, an early indication of where BG3 would lead.
Of course you can imagine how much I looked forward to the third installment. I will admit, I got stranded in Act 2 and I intend to start over with a new playthrough, But just the first Act alone was enough to cement this game's standing. I regularly DM a D&D campaign and when I spent a boss battle not just fighting the enemies but instead trying to push them off the rafters in the ceiling to kill them through falling damage I realized this was a perfect representation of realistic D&D gameplay.
2. Super Mario Wonder
Super Mario World is my favorite Mario game. Let's just establish that from the beginning. I have always preferred the 2D Mario games. While the “New” Super Mario games somewhat satisfied me, it did not feel quite the same.
Wonder does not dethrone World for me, basically impossible because I am no longer 8 years old and now set in my ways, But Wonder comes so close to capturing the weirdness and, if you'll excuse the pun, wonder of those early games. Mario turning into an elephant. The course totally changing when grabbing a Wonder Seed. While it did not capture the exact feeling I had as a youth, it was a very good facsimile of it… and that's wonderful.
1. Alan Wake II
If you were asked “what are three things Jeffry is into,” you would not be wrong by answering Twin Peaks, Stephen King and meta-fiction. So you can understand how much this game appeals to me specifically.
The tone, the content, everything just itched my brain in the right way. I was along for the ride from the word go. The way it took several hours before you actually fight your first enemy, but you feel like they are lurking just around the corner every second leading up to it. The puzzles that make you feel clever for solving, even though they aren't that hard. The songs. Just an incredible crowning achievement by Remedy. Absolutely the most fun I had with a video game this year.