OLD. I caught old this year and did a big horrible 40 all down myself. All my friends have got older recently so I reckon I must have caught it off one of them. Still, it made me feel pretty rough. One day on the walk into work I caught myself daydreaming about getting into vinyl, getting some decks and maybe taking up DJing then it hit me like a big, red, convertible sports car that this was my mid-life crisis. So I binned all that off and bought myself an ELECTRIC DRUM KIT instead. Fuck yeah! Nah, only joking. I settled for miserably staring at the wall for endless Sunday afternoons, thinking about work and my impending death. Far more suitable behaviour for a man my age.
Being 40 is neatly encapsulated by how it feels on the rare occasion I’m still out in town at 1am these days. Namely, if I drink any more, everything is definitely going to get worse. In fact if you’d allow me a tortured metaphor; if life is a big night out, then I’m on the walk home. Arguably the most fun bits are done and all that’s left is the sweet, warm embrace of sleep/death. But LIFE BEGINS AT FORTY I hear you cry. Well, it doesn’t. There’s definitely some numbers before forty. I’ve categorically been some other – objectively better – numbers previous to this one.
Nah, I’m being dramatic. Getting older is alright really. I can get into the cinema to see any film I want and my receding hairline means I use far less hair product than before, so there’s savings to be made. Plus I’m starting to gain this calm acceptance of who I am and what I don’t like, without necessarily feeling the need to share my opinion all the time. You do you. Live and let live…But while you’re here, Wordle is impossibly dull and breathlessly posting your score to show how very clever you are makes me think less of you, not more. Stop it.
The calm acceptance swings both ways and these days I feel I have a firm grasp on what I do like too. You’ll see a lot of familiar faces in this list. But then you’ll also see some completely new chops that totally fucked me sideways. Good old videogames. You’re as unpredictable as the length of a Stranger Things episode (oooh, topical). Except unlike temporally disrespectful TV shows, games are good rather than annoying. We can all see the joins just split this episode in two for fucks sake.
10. Bayonetta 3 (Nintendo Switch)
Reckon I look a bit like Bayonetta. I’ve got the whole square, big-rimmed glasses thang going and I can move like the sexiest goddamn eel you’ve ever seen. I’m basically a sensual Peter Crouch. I once swapped clothes with a girl friend at a party (that’s a friend who’s a girl, nothing more. I’m not as prolific as you’d expect) and I looked fucking incredible. Don’t think I’ve found a pair of jeans that fitted me as well since. Yes, I definitely look like Bayonetta. Although perhaps I’m a little sexier. And, my hair doesn’t turn into my clothes. I can’t really spare any atm tbqhwy.
Everyone’s favourite S&M witch finally returns in what feels almost certain to be the swansong for the character. It took a bloomin’ age for this to arrive; vanishing then sporadically reappearing to remind you it exists like the novel coronavirus, but unlike that spikey little prick Bayo’s return is something to be savoured. Even if it doesn’t quite hit the lofty heights of its predecessors.
The big hook here is The Big Hook from a massive demon swinging its fist. You’re now able to summon gigantic badasses at will (appropriately enough by getting your bum out – Bayonetta has a history of getting nude for her biggest moves. Another thing we have in common). And it’s the flitting between the micro and macro where the game is at its most satisfying. Finishing off one of those classic combos by summoning a really big toad rarely gets old and the imagination on display in these allies is really quite something. Highlights include a Big Train, whose appearance I naturally heralded by saying ‘BIG TRAAAAIN’ in the style of the intro to the sketch show, and a massive clock tower with punching gloves that feels like it was ordered from ACME by Wile E. Coyote. Occasionally, it can make the combat feel a little chaotic; especially when compared to the purity and tightness of the games that have come before; but broadly their addition is a welcome one that stands the game apart from others in the genre.
Unfortunately, not all the additions are welcome. Bayonetta 3 has a weird quirk of assuming you’ve bought a Bayonetta game but don’t really want to be Bayonetta. The series has always had a knack for slightly shite non-sequiturs, but this dedicates nearly half the game to them. The 2D stealth sections are phenomenally crap. We’re talking fifty-foot frog poo levels here. To ask you to do it once would be a bit much , but they appear every three levels or so. Baffling. Nearly as bad is the introduction of Viola, an intensely unlikeable Poochy of a character who looks like she’s going to crash the mall with Avril Lavigne in the Skater Boi video. She initiates witch time (the ultra-cool slow motion mechanic) by blocking rather than dodging, a subtle change which isn’t nearly as satisfying. But worse of all, where Bayonetta blows a kiss to destroy a barrier after a battle, Viola gurns and does the double devil horns with her hands. As a forty-year old man I doubt I’m an authority on what’s cool, but fuck me whatta cringe binge. Slight spoiler, but when the game finishes suggesting that Viola is going to be more front-and-centre in the future it feels like a threat. Get her binned, please.
These side hustles only go to highlight just how well Platinum nailed it the first time. Bayonetta herself is just utterly fantastic to control; surely one of gaming’s greatest in that regard. Yeah, it’s possible to hammer the buttons and get *something* but dedicating yourself to mastery is where the real fun lies. I tend to see the normal difficulty playthrough in these things as training for the main event, and that’s certainly the case here. Hard is just so much more satisfying and comes with the added benefit that you can guilt-free skip the cutscenes (as per, the story feels like it’s told by and excited five year old – ‘and then she turns into a spider and then she pulls her heart out and then a dragon roller skates on four tanks and then you see her bum’).
Bayonetta 3 is easily the weakest of the trilogy but a bloody good time none-the-less. If you can live with the awkwardness of playing a game with a sixty foot bikini clad butterfly woman having a bath in the clouds you’ll have a brilliant time. Doubly so if you’ve ever listened to Limp Bizkit unironically. Despite – or maybe even because of – our physical similarities, Bayonetta continues to be fantastic company. What a hottie. Whit woo.
9. Nintendo Switch Sports (Nintendo Switch)
I work in an industry where it feels like all the shit gets done on the golf course. In fact, I think the only industry that’s more obsessed with golf is golf itself, and even then I reckon it’s pretty close. Due to me being an exceptionally cool badass, I’ve never actually picked up a teeing stick which at times makes it feel like I’m robbed of an extra week’s worth of holiday a year. I’ve even had occasions where half the office has chipped off (GOLF) early in order to beat the traffic and get to the course earlier. I wonder if my hobby would attract the same concessions if I asked if I could leave at half four so I could make friends with anime schoolchildren. Honestly boss, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Anyway, I briefly got to experience how it feels to be a normo when they added golf to Switch Sports in early December. I was routinely dreadful in my initial attempts and was swinging to the right more drastically than the Labour party (ay oh!). I demoed my swing in the office, before putting my penis away and then showing them my golf technique, and a colleague gave me a couple of tips. Miraculously, this actually worked. I’m now hitting it straight every time. That’s it. I’m a GOLFMAN now. I’ve bought several pairs of chinos, a subscription to The Telegraph, I hate my wife and say what you like about Piers Morgan but at least he tells it like it is. It’s like that Harry Enfield sketch where Kevin and Perry turn 13, except instead of becoming a teenage sulk I’ve become the kind of guy you see clapping obnoxiously loudly in the Question Time audience.
Mad to think this time last year we didn’t know this existed. Switch Sports was announced and released within the space of a couple of months and arrives with all the easy-going competition and state mandated exercise vibe of the Wii Sports series that came before it. Trying to once again bottle the lightning with all its grandparent-enticing, television-smashing glory, this comes with a greater focus on online competition which ploughs its own furrow but also causes the game to fall short of what has come before.
Getting the issues out the way first, an awful high proportion of the games here involve hitting things over a net. Volleyball, Tennis and Badminton are all present and have their own subtle differences but you are fundamentally doing the same thing. It’s like getting the Christmas treats in and buying Roses, Quality Street and Celebrations. I mean, they’re all great but would it hurt you to get a pack of cashews? Some Twiglets? Small cheds? It could be worse; it could be Chambara. A rock-paper-scissors style sword fighting game that’s fun for an imperceptible small period of time. An mmmbops worth of entertainment.To extend the festive snack metaphor further, it’s like someone bringing in a tub of gone-off coleslaw to enjoy in front of World’s Strongest Man. It just doesn’t work.
Fortunately, the rest of the games are excellent even if they can be variations on a theme. Football is a very gentle and twee rendition of the sport; less ‘Rocket League’.and more…er…’Pootle Tournament’. Still, it’s a fun version of the real thing and comes with the benefit of not being fronted by a corrupt and hateful organisation (but enough about EA!!!!). Bowling is bowling; perfectly fine entertainment even if you’ve done it a million times before. The aFORE!mentioned golf is a good walk spoiled without the walkin’ or the spoilin’. Equally enjoyable on your own or in a group it’s a really pleasant way of whiling away an hour or two and you don’t need to wear stupid trousers or vote Tory to partake.
But as it happens the three net sports are my favourites. Volleyball has a satisfyingly rhythmic 1-2-3 flow as you bump, set and spike your way to victory (incidentally, ‘bump, set and spike’ are my ‘set menu’ sex moves). It’s a game that manages to quickly and effectively build a bond between teammates and its slightly slower tempo means it’s normally the first thing I play when I fire it up. Tennis is excellent as it ever was, with its sweeping swings and epic volleys translating naturally to enthusiastically waving a controller dangerously near the lamp.
But my favourite is Badminton (or ‘bdmntn!’ as the announcer says in the pleasingly vowelless 90s arcade game kind way). A deeply intense one-on-one battle of cheeky ficks and vicious smashes, the need to calibrate the controller tells you all you need to know about its accuracy compared to Tennis. I used to go to my school’s Badminton club (largely to spend time with a girl I liked; because there’s nothing women like more than having cocks blasted towards them – just ask the guys that send unsolicited dick pics) and have attended a couple of tournaments. Although it would be clearly ridiculous to suggest it recreates the experience entirely, it does a bloody good job of replicating the intensity and headfuckery of of a really long rally. Sell Badminton on its own for a tenner and it would still occupy this position in my top ten. It’s that good.
As with all anthologies, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, but I sincerely hope this is just the start for the game and we get to see some more sports over the coming years as what they’ve delivered so far is excellent fun. Trying to replicate the mega-success of the original was always going to be a tough task but the addition of the brilliant badders and the online leagues has meant the game has wormed its way into my Friday night party time rotation. These are some totally bitchin’, switchin’ Sports. Good stuff.
8. Marvel Snap (Mobile)
Nana-nana-nana-nana Marvel! Yes, Marvel. Little fun fact for you; all the recent Marvel film properties operate within the same fictional time and space, a Marvel cinematic universe if you will. Myself and the children made our way through the many, many seven out of tens that make up this wise-cracking, finger-snapping soup and I had a bloody good time all told. Maybe it’s because these films are actually quite good fun. Or maybe it was because I got to connect with the kids over something that demanded so little effort from me. WHO CAN POSSIBLY SAY. In any case, I’m a fully up-to-date, eagerly awaiting the latest instalments and feel a bit of a dick for being so snobby about it in the past. Similarly, I’ve never really got into mobile gaming. I played some Super Hexagon, a little bit of Drop7 and stroked my chin through 80 Days. But the time I spent with those already pales into insignificance to the amount of time I’ve ploughed into Marvel Snap. A free-to-play, card game you play on your phone with Iron Man in it. A title so powerfully mainstream, that upon downloading it my copies of Edge Magazine spontaninstant ignightified sphericaciousnessley.
Much like the MCU, Snap manages to strike a perfect balance between being mindless and actually quite clever. Games are played over six turns and the aim is to win two of the three locations. From that simple premise, hundreds of different permutations are introduced via the abilities on the character cards and the effects of the locations.
It’s all wonderfully tactile and dramatic with individual animations. Star Lord’s card has little rocket boosters where it’s feet would be whilst Captain America will buff his comrades by launching his shield around (I imagine he also uses it as a Big Plate in the Alan Partridge breakfast buffet scam). Best of all, Ant-Man will go ‘HOWAY!’ and crash his car after being two times over the alcohol limit. In the locations, the Bifrost from Thor will spew rainbows and Grand Central Station will do something with the arrivals board for reasons unapparent to anyone that hasn’t read every comic since the invention of the printing press. Yes of course, with this being the entirety of Marvel there’s plenty of ‘Who the Fuck Are They?’s but it’s easy to just shrug and get on with it. When I was a teenager, I briefly wrote a comic about a character called ‘Mediocre Boy’ whose ability was that he was ‘able to complete most tasks to a reasonable standard’. Half expecting him to make an appearance, to be honest.
The Snap of the title comes in the form of a gamble that you can play whenever you’re feeling confident of a win. In its simplest terms, it multiplies the potential losses and gains depending on how early you play it. When both players snap – hoowee – we got ourselves a card game. In keeping with the fantastic presentation elsewhere, it announces itself with a brilliantly epic ‘SNAAAAAAP!’ from the voiceover, although bizarrely doesn’t seem to have any connecting tissue with ‘The Snap’ that Thanos did with his Michael Jackson glove. I would also like to see a collaboration with the 90s dance outfit of the same name and have taken to shouting ‘I GOT THE POWA!’ whenever I twist, much to the annoyance of the rest of the bus.
But for me, the true genius of this game is that it’s almost exactly one ad break long. Each game is against a real person and the matchmaking is mercifully short, meaning that you can get your phone out and fit a couple of hands in during virtually any downtime. First at the pub? Marvel Snap. Boiling the kettle? Marvel Snap. Awake at four again? Marvel Snap. Wondering if it’s all worth it? Marvel Snap. Waiting for the bodies to dissolve? Marvel Snap. Its ability to infiltrate literally any and all free time would seem insidious if it wasn’t so immediately entertaining. I’ve been trying to steer away from social media this year because Facebook makes me hate everyone and Twitter makes me hate one person in particular. A card game in which I’ve grown unusually attached to some character called White Tiger has filled the gap rather nicely. Hey Tiger, u ok hun? Msg me xxxx
As it’s from the mind of people that brought us the ludicrously successful Warcraft spin-off Hearthstone, there’s every chance that of all the games on this list, this is the one I’ll still be playing next year. Or the year after. Or five years after that. It’s part of my life now. This is what I do. I think it’s what you should do too. Nerds; ASSEMBLE.
7. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (Nintendo Switch)
Telephone fan and beloved husband of Colleen, Christopher Nolan directed and wrote the total belter that is Memento. For those that are unfamiliar, the film charts the story of a Guy who can only remember the last fifteen minutes; a condition that places him in the same conversational hub as the more frequent weed users in my uni friendship group. I wrote an assignment on this film on the subject of the ‘Unreliable Narrator’. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, you can’t always trust a booming disembodied voice. They come with their own baggage, their own perspective, which may not be the best prism to understand a sequence of events. Which brings us to The Stanley Parable. This is a game entirely built around that quandary . Can you really trust the storyteller? Well?! Can you?! See, those three years of higher education weren’t entirely wasted.
The two doors room presents this Parable at its purest. Moments into the game, Stanley wanders in a room with a door on the left and a door on the right. ‘When Stanley came to a set of two doors, he entered the door on his left’ narrates The Narrator. Except of course, you’re in control of Stanley. So whether he obeys is entirely up to you. From this incredibly simple concept, the game blossoms into dozens of constantly surprising and inventive ways; like a particularly blossoming and inventive plate of surprising spaghetti.
And if you enjoyed the sub-par Douglas Adams impression in that last sentence, then you’re in luck. The Stanley Parable has a wicked sense of humour, with a particularly British streak to it. There’s the darkness, the absurdity and sarcasm that’s particularly prevalent from a wet island full of racists. If I’m completely honest, sometimes it was a little too Blackadder for me. A little too Lord Smugward Smugginton of Smugchester. In particular a joke about a bucket massively outstayed its welcome, like an unwelcome bucket of no…let’s not do this again. But broadly the jokes land and even when they don’t, the wild directions the narrative takes you are enough to pick up the slack.
This has some truly outstanding flights of fancy that would be outrageous to spoil, but suffice to say it’s meta as all fuck mate. Some routes you think you’ll have figured out within the first minute and then they veer into ridiculously inventive directions. It can be proper, full blown genius and discovering what shit lies in store is the entire draw of the game. So…I can’t really say much more. You’ll just have to take my word for it. Well? TAKE IT.
It’s a game that also made me confront my personality *ever such a little bit*. I am an enormous square that abides by the rules and does as he’s told. Put it this way, when I’m told to make a character in a videogame in 95% of situations it looks like me. My wife once made an avatar on the Xbox that didn’t quite look enough like her, so I changed it when she wasn’t looking. You know when you’re playing Mario Kart and there’s a Mii that looks like a Picasso’s through a kaleidoscope? That disturbs me on a very basic level. So having to do the opposite of what I’m told in order to see all the endings was a little bit liberating. As I say, I don’t want to give too much away, but there was a bit where you had to set the internal clock within the game’s system that made me feel powerfully seen. Turns out that yes, you’re right; I am very suggestible.
I never played the original, and truth be told I found it very difficult to figure out where the joins were here. What’s new? What isn’t? Who knows. What I do know is that this is an immensely entertaining examination of choice in videogame narratives, even if the story of a white collar office worker mindlessly doing as he’s told hits a little close to the bone. And Jason was exceedingly pleased with himself that he did this without having to do the crushingly obvious thing of narrating this review in third person. Yes, very pleased. Very pleased indeed.
6. Overwatch 2 (PS5)
Famously, one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do. But then apparently, *two* can be *as bad* as one. It’s the loneliest number since the number one. I mean, I clearly don’t have the emotional maturity to comprehend what Three Dog Night were on about there; two is clearly less lonely than one. TWO. Two people! Two’s company! Have a word, lads. But I guess when you look at it, there’s not a lot of difference between two and one. It’s just one bigger. And one *is one*, so two one’s ain’t too one to one. But then a two often represents significant improvement. Terminator 2. Back to the Future 2. Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Can’t completely say that’s the case here, unfortunately. Overwatch 2 is a sequel where the number is doing an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting. A barely perceptible change from the original, that had me considering whether it really qualified for my Game of the Year at all.
Fortunately for Blizzard – who I expect were waiting for their inclusion in this post with bated breath – I’m a total square with a strict list of internal rules for GotY qualification and after consulting with the committee (aka I had a pedestrian-scaring mutter to myself on a dog walk) it’s clear that it had to be included. ‘They’ve rebadged it, you fool!’. Well, yeah. But it’s also totally dominated my gaming time for the latter part of the year. So why don’t you sit the fuck down and I’ll tell you why it’s still one of the greatest ways to shoot people (online).
The genius of Overwatch is that it takes the characterful, special move setup of a Street Fighter and applies it to the competitive online shooter. Let’s face it, these kinds of games are usually as charming as, oh God what was her fucking name…Liz Trust..? But Overwatch actually has a bunch of people it’s enjoyable to spend time with. The character select screen is packed with sparks of personality. The emotes, highlight reels and voice lines are frequently funny and inject buckets of life into this inherently likeable world.
Of the three new characters added at launch, Junker Queen highlights this best. Powerfully Australian; like Steve Irwin and Alf from Home and Away had a baby, and that baby grew up to invent massive spiders and finishing statements like they’re a question?; she’s ludicrously fun to inhabit, literally yelling about knickers at her teammates to buff them up. The new healer, Kiriko, is a little blander. A ninja in a fox hat, she’s a bit like a mascot I would have designed when I was ten and sent off to Nintendo with a note saying that if they made a game based on her I’d go halves on the profits. My actual pick of the newbies is Soujourn; a soldier cybernetically enhanced with rockets in her legs, so that she can slide along the ground and launch into the sky in a move that’s just as fun as the post-school disco, dancefloor knee slide that surely inspired it. She also continues Overwatch’s rich tradition of magnificent noises; her standard weapon powering up a railgun with each successive hit accompanied by an immensely satisfying, gradually building do-do-do-dO-DO-DO-DO-PEEOW! It’s the sound you’d imagine an ejaculating robot to make (come on, we’ve all thought about it). She’s also Canadian, so has that naturally endearing air they have for some strange reason.
Other changes from the original are more about what they’ve taken away rather than added. You’ve now only got five on a team rather than six; reducing each side to a single tank to try and limit the ‘double shielding’ tactic which was about as exciting as it sounds. I can’t quite explain why, but I think the reduced player count makes the matches seem more frantic and bunched up. Perhaps two less players naturally funnels the remainder into the same area, a more professional and learned writer than myself might posit. Also, the unlocking structure has been revamped. This is no longer a ‘pay £50 then there’s loot boxes’ but a ‘pay nothing then there’s a battle pass’, a change that weirdly feels a couple of years out-of-date. It’s got strong ‘we’ve announced a collaboration with Among Us’ vibes, everyone has just moved on a bit. I can’t say it’s a change I particularly like, but as it makes the sum of fuck all difference to the actual matches it’s pretty easy to just shrug and move on.
But yeah, in essence, this is remarkably similar to the original. In fact, I’m remarking on it right now. Consider it remarked. But when that original was one of the best games of the last decade, the chance and encouragement to return is welcome. More heroes and modes are coming soon, and combined with the queuing and disconnecting clusterfuck that was the launch week (EA™), it all suggests that perhaps they were eager to get it out the door before it was truly ready to do so. A crying shame as it feels they’ve burned through some goodwill that a more fully-formed version wouldn’t have. But fuck me, this is still fantastic, brilliant fun. When it got my GotY in 2016 I described Overwatch as ‘a spectacular high bar of non-stop, balls-to-the-wall, face-melting, heart-in-mouth entertainment’ (big year for hyphens, 2016). It’s both a criticism and to its credit that this all still applies.
5. Neon White (Nintendo Switch)
I went to school with a Leon White. I wonder what he’s up to now? Probably not pacing around his kitchen trying to find a witty and engaging way to start a paragraph about a videogame he likes, I expect. In the many, many years I’ve been doing this I’ve never escaped the fear of the great white chasmic expanse of the blank page. If I t’were to take you for a peek behind the curtain, I often do the first paragraph of these things and then come back to it a week later; finding it substantially easier to pick up where I left off rather than hit the ground running. That first block of text might only be a couple of hundred words long, but will have been deleted, rewritten and edited many times over before it becomes the synaptic feast you see before you. Doing the same little bit. Again and again. Restarting, redoing. Hopefully making it that little fraction better each time. IT’S A BIT LIKE DOING A LEVEL IN NEON WHITE! Fuck me, we got there in the end didn’t we. Thanks Leon.
Yep, Neon White joins the pantheon of games that I always liken to banging your head against a wall; but in a fun way. Perhaps banging your head into a button that dispenses the intensely cinnamony middle of a cinnamon swirl into your mouth every thousand presses. This is a game where you will fail the same seven second stretch repeatedly for an hour, just for the sweet release of when you nail it (sex). It’s a game that attempts to distil the experience of being a speedrunner into an easily understandable format. You know those videos of someone boshing a Super Mario in six minutes? It’ll make you feel – however briefly – like that. Except you don’t have to dedicate every waking hour to it or have something severely wrong with you. More’s the pity!!!
Taking place in an afterlife where everyone wants to fuck each other; (don’t ask; this is a weirdly thirsty game and in a really irritating way. Just skip all the chatting and you’ll have a much better time) the aim is simply to reach a goal that only unlocks when all the enemies in the level are defeated. Weapons take the form of cards that you pick up along the way and each have a secondary traversal function when you discard. Although the levels are self-contained little open worlds, there is clearly ‘the way’ that the game funnels you down through your first attempts, with the very specific card you need in very specific circumstances always being directly en route. What follows is a deeply satisfying parkour simulator with the additional entertainment that shooting demons provides. In the space of five seconds you’ll snipe a bugger in the distance before rocketing across the sky, shotgunning his friend in the chops, exploding your way through a wooden door and blast past the finishing line.
This is a game in which every single nanosecond counts. Every corner cut or inch saved gives you that slim advantage over your peers. Seems obvious when I type it out, but I distinctly remember a moment when I discovered if I was pressing forward before the game started up, I’d save myself the reaction time from being told to go and actually going. These tiny margins matter in Neon White and the game is confident enough to help you notice them. Completing levels in a certain time will give you a hint to a shortcut – turns out ‘the way’ might not necessarily be ‘the best way’ – and the game then becomes an intricate dissection to find the slimmest advantage. It’s the stuff of obsession; literally playing the same ten seconds for several hours trying to find a quantum second to save. It’s a game capable of producing some powerfully sweaty palms, so please, stay hydrated while playing.
It’s a game that reminds me of about a hundred others. There’s some Paradise Killer, Persona and Killer 7 in here. And the mission complete screen has the air of a Platinum with its hushed, breathless whisper. But most prominently – and in a way that’s difficult to completely explain – this game feels very, very Dreamcast. It’s in the slightly undefined metallic graphics, the intense blue skies, the smoothness, the oddness, the arcadeness and the vibe that this is a single person’s mad brilliant idea. It feels like a stupid thought that’s been invested in and it’s incredibly charming as a consequence.
Had Neon White stopped at around the halfway point there’s every chance that it would have made its way even higher up this list. Sadly, it does become rather unfocused as it ramps up the mechanics. Some later levels stretch into several minutes and this just feels fundamentally at odds with what the game is good at. But in those early levels when it sings, fuck me this is good. It reaches you on a molecular level. It’s chemistry. It’s da bomb, yo. Yeah Mr White! Science bitch!
4. Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course
Hmmm, that liquid is pretty questionable, isn’t it? What could possibly make up the pool of grey liquid that swishes around Cuphead’s head cup? Liquefied brains would be the most obvious answer (a phrase I find myself saying all too regularly these days), but that really does ask more questions than it answers. What happens when it rains? What if he drinks it all? What possible evolutionary benefit could there be in all your cognitive functions being held within a measure of easily accessible liquid? What cruel God added the predator-friendly straw? I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the realm of ‘he’s a fictional character Jase, please come back to us. The kids and I miss you so dearly’ but to leave it be would be to abandon the very madness within my soul that you first fell in love with, B. I’ll see you all next week. Thank you for visiting again. Tell the nurse I’ll take my vitamins now.
Regardless of the content of his hollowed out skull, Cuphead returns in the DLC ‘Delicious Last Course’ (initials are fun) with all the outstanding presentation and combat that was present originally but with some neat twists that bolster the entire package into something any masochistic gamer will enjoy. A super tight, pinpoint boss rush of epic battles that wouldn’t look out of place in a Souls game if the bright cartoon aesthetic was replaced with that ye olde art style white men with beards like (in fact, I’ve just realised a certain other From Soft game features giant anthropomorphic jugs, so perhaps they’re closer than I thought).
It’s in the controls. Just before Cuphead, I played Metroid Dread this year and like a big old Mary Mary I was all contrary and thought it handled like arse. And a notably unruly arse at that. I could never quite get my head round how to make Samus do what I wanted her to do. No such fear here. Cuphead is directly linked to your fingers; like you’re puppeting rather than playing; and it’s this meticulous connection between player, pad and protagonist that makes the game always feel fair even when it’s maddeningly difficult.
Make no mistake, Cuphead is fucking rock, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the parry only bosses that make up around a third of those on offer here. The game strips away your abilities until you’re only left with the power to knock back pink projectiles with a well-timed jump spin. Appropriately, these foes take the form of chess pieces as it feels like you’re engaged in the kind of one-on-one struggle that demands complete and total concentration. They are all truly, truly brilliant; but big shout outs to The Knight whose tentative jabs and shuffling feet will make you feel like you’re in fencing match and The Rook who is an absolute all-timer requiring you to have such a high degree of mastery over the television screen that John Logie Baird himself would struggle.
But really, all the bosses are brilliant. Each and every one bounces with buckets of personality and every encounter feels like an epic saga until the results screen tells you you’ve been playing for less than two minutes. Cuphead is so intense that it has the ability to bend time; seconds become elasticated as you struggle to survive just one more moment or get in that one last hit. One piece of design genius is that the game doesn’t ever show you an enemy health bar; until you’ve lost. You only know how agonisingly close you were once it’s too late. It’s like a final fuck you from the devs and I absolutely love them for it.
Rumour has it that this is the end of the road for the series. The frankly astonishing animation is just too labour intensive with the one game and DLC taking twelve years to get out the door. If this is to be the case, then they can raise their heads in toast and hold their cups with pride. I’m told by my youngest (who also became obsessed with the game and devoured the Teen Titans Go-style Netflix spin off show) that the liquid inside is milk. Bit anti-climatic , but when you’re producing the best looking game ever made and and still finding the time to make it ludicrously entertaining despite being a 20-odd person studio you deserve a pass on liquid choice. This is a milk-boggling, brainshake of a game that I’ll be talking about for years. I bloody love it. WALLOP!
3. Immortality (Xbox Series)
You know what I like best about David Lynch? I mean, aside from his head looking like a cross between Mount Rushmore and a Mr Whippy ice cream. It’s that you know what you’re going to get with him. Guy’s such a straight-talker. Always telling it like it is. His work has such an easy going vibe, it’s like a big old roast dinner. I’m being facetious of course. If Dave made you a roast dinner the potatoes would float two inches off the plate and the chicken would slowly turn and smile at you, showing off a beak full of brilliant white teeth. But you can’t deny that the dude has a knack for making you feel deeply uncomfortable. And making you shit yourself; although I guess those two situations are generally mutually inclusive. Immortality has this knack too. You know that bit in Twin Peaks when Bob is hiding behind the sofa? It’s like that except it’s eight hours long. You know that bit in Mulholland Drive when you see the craggy, burned up face of a witch-hobo peek-a-boo round a wall? It’s like that except here *you* choose to look. It’s a deeply troubling fever dream, a symptom of too many drugs, a half-thought that’s never meant to be fully explained. It’s also one of the most spectacularly well told, unrelentingly adult videogame narratives I’ve ever played and it has the possibility to herald a new era in interactive film. Yeah. It’s pretty fucking good.
‘BuT iS it rEaLlY a GaMe?’ some contrarian cretin bleats from the back of the room in a take so tedious I resent the additional time it takes me to type in alternate lower and upper case. Yeah, it’s a fucking game. It’s on your Xbox or whatever, you press some buttons and things happen. I’m not about to get into the weeds with literal definitions because I’ve got more interesting things to do like read your deeply fascinating Wordle score posts, but this ‘is it really a game’ chat always strikes me as an attempt to dismiss in the safest way possible. Like, an attempt to push it away from everything else so you don’t have to confront how dreadful it makes the general standard of videogame storytelling look in comparison. Well, I’ve got bad news for you buddy. It’s a game. It’s a game. It’s a game it’s a game it’s a game it’s a GAME.
Exploring the career of Marissa Marcel – an actor who mysteriously disappeared and doesn’t appear to age across the three films in which she featured – Immortality is an exploration of the predatory nature of Hollywood with a dash of pure horror. Told in a manner so astronomically clever that it will make you feel like a particularly shitty amoeba in the presence of a particularly magnificent God, you can start the narrative at any point and it then kind of blossoms outwards in all directions. The game involves examining clips of Marissa’s films and behind the scenes recordings and then clicking on points of interest to leap to a similar point elsewhere. There must genuinely be over a billion methods of having the story told to you. You know the Always Sunny meme where Charlie Day is manically gesturing towards a crime scene investigator’s thought map? It’s like that except it’s a blank-eyed goat gesturing toward an 11 dimensional shape.
Like the similarly galaxy-brained Adam Sandler film ‘Click’ (Sorry; I can’t let this pass without pointing out it’s a joke, my pride just won’t take someone thinking I’m serious) you can pause, rewind and speed up the footage in order to peel away the glossy LA façade. Immortality just knows that watching people do stuff slowly and backwards is inherently creepy. Particularly when that stuff is fucking. Yes, Immortality will make you painstakingly examine some truly unsettling stuff, in a manner that isn’t even remotely sexy, but is uniquely challenging. It’s proper voyeuristic, recalling another Lynch scene from Blue Velvet where McLachlan hides in a cupboard and watches Dennis Hopper be extremely Dennis Hopper. I felt more gross and uncomfortable than I do usually, which let me tell you is quite the task
But then there’s this ‘other’ deeply unsettling theme draped over the entire game smothering it like some kind of poisoned weighted blanket. I don’t need to go into specifics here, but suffice to say there’s this pervasive feeling of dread that reaches into every scene and has made all other horror games I’ve played feeling like fucking Kirby (I mean that for emphasis, not actually *penetrating* Kirby which I’d imagine to be quite terrifying). My wife didn’t enjoy being in the same room as me whilst I played it. This is next level shit yourself; like It’s coming out of your ears.
Immortality is a game that made me feel like I was losing my mind at points; playing mobile phone ringtones backwards to see if I could spot a hidden tune or making phone notes about aspect ratios and subtitle fonts. But it’s also a game that – genuinely – has made me feel like no other. Regardless of how good the game is, that’s a hell of a feat after 35 years of playing the things. That it also happens to be one of the most exceptionally smart and well-told narratives the medium has to offer is the creepy cherry on the nightmare cake. This is a damn fine cup of coffee. One of the best. Get it the fuck played.
2. Splatoon 3 (Nintendo Switch)
Booyah! Yes, booyah. For the uninitiated, yelling ‘Booyah!’ is one of only a handful of ways that you can communicate with your teammates during a game of Splatoon. I mean, what more could you possibly need? Surely the majority of human experience can be summed up with a portmanteau of ‘Boo’ meaning ‘bad’ and ‘yah’ meaning ‘yes’ (naturally with the ‘bad’ being the ‘good’ ‘bad’ not the ‘bad’ ‘bad’). But rarely did this phrase have greater import than the weeks immediately after release, given that the game came out the day after HRH Queen Elizardbeth The LIIzard was all dead. Fantastically, (or tragically depending on whether you own any union jack bunting) this meant that for a brief moment in time all the user generated graffiti in a game populated by streetwise octopuses was about Queen Elizabeth II. Owning noobs like a total sweat under a banner that reads ‘R. I. P LIZ’ is a truly humbling experience indeed. Boo, yah majesty. Boo. Please also note that ‘total sweat’ is youth slang for someone good at videogames and is not a reference to Prince Andrew.
On the subject of outdated and stuffy institutions, Nintendo aren’t particularly known for their iterative sequels. Sure, they are rather partial to selling you the same thing over-and-over again but they’re not really known for just adding a one to the number and changing the colour scheme. An awful lot of people will tell you that’s what they’ve done here. And they wouldn’t be completely wrong. This is a sequel in the vein of FIFA 22 to FIFA 23. Or Modern Warfare (the second one) to Modern Warfare II (the second second one). It also happens to be my absolute favourite online shooter of all time.
It’s a game that’s so elegantly designed you can only assume it’s by accident. You don’t necessarily need to hit anyone to contribute; your ink could be providing vital routes back into battle or your sporadic Pollock spray (that’s POLLOCK spray. With a P. This is a classy GotY, sir) could be hindering the opposition’s approach. Mixing up your squid game and diving into the ink makes you quicker and harder to track so you’ll be flipping between the forms faster than a disorganised accountant on tax return day. Every match builds into a natural, tremendous climax (like your mum, lol) with the final frantic bars of the outstanding soundtrack sending everyone totally bananas.
This time out I became especially obsessed with the Clam Blitz mode, a kind of American Football with guns and shellfish that encourages team play to plot and withstand audacious sieges on goal. And I fell deeply and troublingly in love with Salmon Run. The four player Vs AI mode – now freed from the hilariously Nintendo-esque feature in Splatoon 2 where you could enjoy it at certain times of day; like kids telly in the 90s – its frantic minute-to-minute play with just the right level of randomisation means that it absolutely chews through evenings. The addition of the fuck off, gigantic Godzilla-style megafish that pop up every now and then seals the deal. In the many, many hours I spent running the salmon this year, I beat the big boy a grand total of once. They’re appearance is a genuine event and a suitably epic challenge.
But there is something about Splatoon that speaks to me very specifically. A regular complaint I hear about this game is how difficult it is to buddy up or communicate. Nintendo’s reluctance to have a party or friend system like everyone else may be a bit ‘oh, won’t someone please think of the children’ but is fucking perfect for someone as socially anxious as myself. Every player is in their own isolated bubble. It’s incredibly difficult to be a dick. You basically have to be nice. I can sympathize with the frustrations of players that want to join their squad, have mad bantz and listen to racists, but can’t I just have this one little island to myself? Just this one game? Please?
Splatoon 3 is a beautifully intense and vibrant festival of last gasp victories and unspoken camaraderie that guarantees excitement in every match. An achingly cool game with buckets of style in both presentation and mechanics that welcomes newcomers and veterans alike with open tentacles. An online game designed with minimal communication in mind so that the terminally shy can still join in. An online game designed with spraying haphazardly so the terminally shit can still join in. A game that’s so totally my jam I’m trying to spread it on my toast. A game for the fucking ages. I love this thing – I fucking love it – and somehow it’s only the second best of the year. Now that deserves a booyah.
1. Elden Ring (PS5)
It sort of crept up on me. One Friday night I swilled a whiskey in a glass and stood with my elbow up’pont the mantle staring deep into the fire. Ruminating on the night’s adventures. The places I discovered. The friends I made. The foes I felled. The stream of mind-altering, unfathomable batshit that had been fed to me from the moment I started the game to the moment I turned it off. ‘Could it be? No!’ I muttered to myself, and tossed the glass deep into the devouring flames; regretting it instantly as my wife walked with the fire getting a little out of control. ‘Jase, what the fuck are you doing? Why is there glass everywhere?’. I laughed. But twasnot a happy laugh. Twas a laughed laced with sickness. With madness. She know naught what she hath witnessed. She not knoweth the knot deep with my spleen. Lady hath no mind of the schism in my soul. Basically; she didn’t know what I was on about. I slowly raised my gaze to meet hers – my mouth dry with anticipation. Hairs raised. Muscles tensed. The world stopped.
‘I…I…I think Elden Ring is the best game I’ve ever played’
‘That’s great. Now are you going to sweep this up or am I?’
I’d avoided everything about this prior to launch. It was out fairly early in the year, when the schedules are as bleak as the weather, and aside from knowing it was from From; creators of one of my all time faves in Bloodborne; the only other thing I’d picked up was the collaboration with George R R Martin. Old Georgey boy is largely famous for writing the Game of Thrones books – the TV show of which I didn’t particularly gel with. Oh look, a dragon. Oh look, a boob. Oh look, a dead. I’ve got the same problem with Dark Souls. That setting just does nothing for me. If somewhere has a ‘keep’ or if there’s pointy ears I’m basically out. So, I went in with middling expectations. This will fill some time. This will be alright.
Sweet mother of God, I’m a fucking idiot. I will say – without hesitation – that Elden Ring is the single greatest achievement in videogames. It’s as simple as that. It just is. The scale is mind-blowing. The density is impossible. It’s a game that doesn’t just exceed your expectations but leave them vanishing in the distance. I found myself getting up early on the weekends to have more time with it. I found myself jogging home after work for a few extra minutes. It completely and utterly consumed me. It completely and utterly consumed everyone. I can’t remember a time when opinion seemed so universally accepted. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the greatest videogame ever made. Let’s not fuck about. This is the best videogame. It’s this one. Look no further.
I find it genuinely difficult to parse how the fuck they did it. This is a game that starts off large and then just gets bigger. You open a door within the first few minutes and get ‘a moment’ as the world folds out around you, full of possibility. Ruins lie in the distance with a ghostly golden tree towering over the horizon. Many, many hours later you’ll find yourself under that tree or exploring those ruins. But it’s just replaced one tantalising horizon with another. Then you get to that horizon and guess what? There’s a-fucking-nother one. Why did they not stop? Why did they keep making more-and-more? What drives people to do that? It’s an accomplishment that truly has a dash of madness to it. It’s just stupidly, stupidly huge.
At any given point you will have 360 options and at the end of each of those options will be something amazing or terrifying or both. This is a jaw-dropping simulator. A WTF generator. You are guaranteed to see something incredible every fifteen minutes. One Saturday afternoon my mother-in-law caught me playing (Elden Ring has the ability to capture literally everyone in its tractor beams and force them to watch) and she was excitedly pointing in directions for me to check out. ‘What’s that?’. ‘Oh, it’s just a goat’ I laughed but went over to check it out regardless. Brilliantly, fantastically, hilariously, the goat curled up into a ball and roly-polied down the hill. Nothing is ‘just a’ in this game. Everything has something. Everything is a suprise.
It managed to smash through my boredom barrier. I think it actually reprogrammed my brain and briefly altered my personality. I have this incredibly short attention span and my number one complaint for games, films, TV, everything is ‘could be a bit shorter’. After the 100 hours it took me to reach the end – during which I barely scratched the surface – I wanted to go back. At around hour 90 I looked up what the Dragon Hearts did and it turns out they’re used somewhere I explored ‘fully’ about 70 hours previous. Mate, if you think you’ve seen everything in an area, you definitely haven’t. Had a moment where I went ‘oh I don’t feel like I’m going to achieve anything today’ and then immediately found a medallion I’d been looking for for half the game. When I finally found the strength to move on I purposefully played something mindless (Ratchet and Clank) afterwards. This’ll be pretty, I thought. This’ll be different. It was meant to a palette cleanser, but it felt so fucking grey. Could anything have softened the blow? Let’s face it, I could have played a fucking Zelda right after and I reckon I would have still had the pangs.
It frees From Software’s design philosophy from its self-inflicted prison. Souls games are famously brutally difficult, with a large part of the satisfaction coming from conquering the insurmountable. Elden Ring chucks all that out the window and it turns out it doesn’t matter. Struggling against a boss? Don’t worry about it! Just go do one of the hundred other things available to you and come back later. There’s no gate keeping, only gate crashing. Like Jurassic Park on curry night, there’s piles of astounding shit round every corner. Pull on the tiniest thread and it’ll turn into an epic yarn. Look, it’s really fucking good alright. I’m running out of superlatives here.
Fuck knows what George R R Martin actually did. A Zoom call and a name on the box, I reckon. Massive fucking shrug. Seriously, stick E L James on it for all I care, the game is where it matters. The combat, the scale, the ambition. The design, the thought, the balls. It’s a game that follows deep complex cities and long treacherous mountain trails with whole sulphuric skied regions designed unlike anything you’ve seen before. It’s a game with a subtle yet beautiful soundscape that will hold a single string note for a minute, allowing the tension and dread to fill the room before crashing it around your ears. It’s a game that doesn’t understand the concepts of ‘enough’ or ‘average’. It’s a game with fifty-foot walking bell. It’s a game with a turtle in a pope hat. It’s a game with a guy with worms on his face called Wormface. It’s a game that towers above all others. The roly-poly GOAT.
Fucking hell, Elden Ring, man.
Fuck.
JollyNiceSoup 