Five Awesome Games I Played This Year

All photos included are official content. Warning: extremely minor spoilers ahead for each of the games discussed.

Last year, I reviewed a few games that stood out to me during the year, and I kinda like the idea of making this a tradition. It’s December again, I played a bunch more games, and here are a few of my favorites.

 

1. Celeste

This year, I revisited a lot of games. It started early in the year with Celeste, which I picked up again when I was craving a challenging platformer. Unsurprisingly, Celeste delivered. This game is an indie staple of the last few years for a reason, and coming back to it with the intention of diving further into post-game gave me enough steam to make it through every A- and B-side, including the Core, but not all the C-sides and the final “Farewell” chapter. Still, I had an extremely satisfying time playing Celeste, and I fully intend to return to take on those final, grueling challenges once the platformer urge hits again.

 

2. Civilization VI

Of all the games I played this year, this one probably took up the most amount of total hours. I discovered that it had been released on the Switch and decided to give it another try, despite my initial disappointment (misplaced, I think) with it when I bought it years ago at its PC release. My trick this time around was to go in with the specific goal of learning to play the game on the hardest difficulty: “Deity.” Despite limiting the diversity of viable strategies I could use at first, this turned out to be an immensely gratifying approach, because I felt so acutely the feeling of improvement over time. Maybe it’s because I’m still a newcomer to the 4x genre, but trying to wrap my head around all the intricate systems in order to determine my next move felt like setting my brain on fire—in the best kind of way.

 

3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

For the most part, I’ve already said what I have to say about this game, here and here. But I do have one more thing to add, now that it’s been a few months. I am predicting that this game will follow a similar path in the public eye to Breath of the Wild. Here’s what I mean: after an initial positive response, people will start to sour on it somewhat, and there will be a period of “this game wasn’t actually that great”. Eventually, after a few years, people will rediscover it, and remark on how incredible it was the whole time. My personal experience with the game was amazing, but I did lose momentum once I finished the story. I’m excited to eventually revisit it when people start talking about it again, to finish some of the things I started the first time.

 

4. Super Mario Bros. Wonder

New Super Mario Bros. Wii was a pretty impactful game for my development as a “gamer,” way back in 2009, so learning in June that the 2D Mario franchise would be getting its first actual next chapter in many years was an extremely pleasant surprise. Once it released, it only took a couple of weeks for me to play through and 100% the game, which was exactly as satisfying as I expected. The amount of challenge felt just right, and the levels of sheer whimsy tied it all together well. Overall, it’s obvious the difference it made for Wonder to be given several years of development, because the quality holds up for every aspect of the game. If only Nintendo would grant the same space to the Pokémon franchise, maybe the mainline games could stand a chance to make this list some day.

 

5. Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero

A lot of my teen years were spent playing online competitive games, so it’s been fun in the last few years to go back and give more single-player games an honest try, especially with my spouse nearby to experience them with me. Subnautica and its sequel were actually her ventures first, but this year I went back and played both of them for myself, curious to see if there would be any replayability once I already knew the stories. In both cases, the experience was unexpectedly well held up by the remaining gameplay elements; especially for Below Zero, whose story fell a little flat in comparison to its predecessor. The exploration, resource-gathering, inventory management, and base-building really carried the games and made my time with them memorable, especially with the added features in the sequel.

I also spent a lot of time this year thinking about games I would like to play, but couldn’t: Baldur’s Gate 3, Diablo 4, Elden Ring, and nearly countless others that were all out of my reach, technologically speaking. But now that I’m finally building myself a more capable computer, all these things are on the horizon for next year.