Five Incredible Games I Played This Year

All photos included are official content. No spoilers this year!

 

Honorable Mention: Hades II

The only reason this game doesn’t earn a full spot is because I already included it in last year’s list, and I make it a rule to not repeat games. Hades II had its full release this year, and despite some initial backlash for the story’s true ending, I think the game ultimately stuck the landing, partly by patching said ending to address people’s concerns. Everything good I already said about this game is still true, plus now it’s a fully fledged game.

 

1: Balatro

I knew that when I finally gave in and played this game, it would be a hit for me, and I was right. I love card games, I love roguelikes, and I enjoy some digital gambling—when the stakes are made up, at least. The way everyone talks about this game made me think there’d be more of that than there was, when really it’s just the standard amount of risk-taking inherent to a roguelike. Some reviews had me thinking Balatro was the closest you could get to doing actual drugs through your computer screen.

That being said… it is pretty addictive, the poker aesthetics are extremely fun, and it’s really easy to pick up and put down, even more so than something like Hades because there’s no technical requirement to playing well, just strategic ones.

There’s also a ton of completionist goals to hit, meaning I always know what I’m working on when I decide to try another run here and there. If you’re curious, so far I’ve beaten red deck on every stake, and now I’m cycling through the decks on every stake, not moving on until I beat it. I’m in the middle of the black stakes right now, and I think I’ve started capping out at where my current skill level can get me, so it might be time soon to return to YouTube and study up again.

 

2: Age of Mythology: Retold

I played the original version of this game many years ago the truly old-fashioned way: using a disc. It came in a big plastic box with cover art and everything, and you had to type in a code on the back of the box in order to install the game. It first released in 2002, and I was probably ten or so when I first played it. I wasn’t very good at the game, if you can believe that.

Twenty-two years later, this visually remastered version came out, and I picked it up this past summer to see how it held up. Some games, when you revisit them many years later, feel completely different when met with your powerful adult brain. Age of Mythology was not like that. At least, not for me. I played through all of the old campaigns on moderate difficulty (the fourth hardest setting), and most of the time I barely squeaked by. But I had a blast, and I didn’t even make it to the newer stuff before other games captured my attention, meaning I can come back any time and know exactly where to land.

AoM is still the only proper real-time strategy game I’ve played, and like most games, playing it casually has given me a ton of respect for the people who play it competitively. It feels like I’m giving my brain a workout, and the iconic soundtrack feels like it’s scientifically designed to help me focus on the game, even if after all these years I’m still not very good at it.

 

3: Cult of the Lamb

I loved the look of this game for years, but I finally bought it in order to include it in a rotation of roguelike games I was playing at the time. I was playing Hades II while also revisiting Hades, but I was having too much fun with the back-and-forth of those games, so I decided to push it further. I started a cycle that added in, Balatro, Slay the Spire, Peglin, and Cult of the Lamb.

Swapping constantly and having to re-orient to a new game that I hadn’t played in five cycles was pretty fun, but after a few rotations of Cult of the Lamb I had to put the other games down to focus in on it. All of those other games have their own satisfying gameplay cycles, but CotL has two very distinct types of gameplay that feed back into each other, meaning that interrupting the flow felt much more disruptive than for the other games.

There’s the combat portion and the cult management portion, and the several progression trees in the game give a ton of flexibility for your approach, meaning you can favor certain styles of play and still progress at a steady rate. The real achievement here isn’t the novelty of the individual elements, which on paper are nothing special—roguelike combat, farming, cooking, sanitation, dancing minigames, etc.—but the combination of everything, tied together with the adorable cult aesthetics.

I only put about fifty hours into this game, but I feel like I really got my money’s worth, and you can bet I’m going to pick up the coming paid expansion when it comes out.

 

4: Hollow Knight: Silksong

I’ve already written about Silksong a bit here, but now I also have the benefit of some additional time to digest my experience and hear other people talk about it.

I stand by my original stance that the game’s difficulty is well-tuned, and also that it could probably benefit from an optional difficulty adjustment setting. It’s hard, but it’s very beatable, and I say that having finished the “true” ending, but not much post-game content.

Apart from that, I think the most impressive aspect of Silksong is that it met and exceeded everyone’s expectations. I’ve watched and read plenty of reviews, and the consensus seems to be that six years of apprehension were summarily shattered by this masterpiece of a game, silencing the doubters and somehow accomplishing the impossible task of following up on the absolute indie titan that is Hollow Knight.

Also, the fact that the game costs twenty dollars is almost laughable. I’ve spent twenty dollars on meals I didn’t even like, and Silksong might be the greatest game of all time. Obviously it’s still too early to say something like that for certain, but it’s definitely up there somewhere. People have been joking that we can expect a sequel featuring Lace to come out in 2032, but personally I’m hoping all three developers are taking a well-deserved break for at least a few months. Lord knows they’ve earned it.

 

5: Minecraft (heavily modded)

I have countless hours in vanilla Minecraft over my lifetime, stretching all the way back to before there was a hunger bar in the game. The base game is incredible, of course. The best selling game of all time for a reason. But for a long time now, the real way to play Minecraft has been to mod it to absolute hell. The current modpack I’ve chosen (FTB: Evolution) runs 461 mods, and includes stuff like ritual magic, wind turbines, jetpacks, and all manner of biomes and portals to other worlds—plus countless tools, armor, enemies, building materials, and some especially productive bees. It’s a truly dizzying amount of content, none of which is in the original game, and all of which is community-made and free to access.

Arguably the core charm of vanilla Minecraft is that there are no goals, and you must simply decide what you want to work on. So it’s somewhat ironic that these types of curated modpacks often include their own outlined gameplay structure for “completing” the pack: a set of increasingly complex tasks to accomplish and items to acquire, often requiring multiple mods working in tandem. With so much content, though, it helps to have some direction, and if you’re like me, you find yourself coming up with intrinsic goals along the way regardless.

To give you just a glimpse of what the gameplay is like: currently, I’m in the middle of troubleshooting a production line of machines that work together to make uranium hexafluoride, which I centrifuge to make fuel for my brand new fission reactor. Naturally, I need the fission reactor because I need plutonium.