Sky: Children of Light is a delightful game from the creators of Journey, and plays sort of like a Journey MMO
It has a splendid soundtrack featuring vocals from the ever talented AURORA, and beautiful visuals. It is also a great social experience, putting a focus on fostering connections and community. It gets regular content updates and its just super cozy!
I think its likely that goty will go to Helldivers 2 or Black Myth: Wukong, both of which I think are aggressively “OK”. Goty awards are largely a popularity contest, after all.
A steam deck is my recommendation. I have a £2000+ gaming PC that is now practically collecting dust because of my steam deck. Being able to just game anywhere in my house, from my bed, from my couch, from a chair in a sunny spot in my garden, has been a game changer in a way I didn’t expect. I’ve owned handheld consoles before but none of them have hooked me in the same way.
The fact that I have my entire backlog of PC games available to me and don’t have to buy into a new ecosystem (like the switch or previous handhelds) is a huge bonus, but the absolute winner here is the variety of input options and the degree of customizability, as well as the fact that its a PC, so I can fuck with the refresh rate and the clock speeds and all that - extending the battery life!
The portability also has me being a bit more social with the other occupants in my home. I can play some low-focus game on the couch while they watch TV, for example, and we can chat and so on, as opposed to being isolated to the room where my PC is.
If you think there’s any chance you’ll get a kick out of being able to just grab your deck and go loaf somewhere comfortable to game, its a no-brainer to me.
It says a lot about the passion of their team, I think. Larian was not even on my radar until a little while after DOS2 came out, and while I enjoyed dos2 I burned out in act 3. It was, however, plain to see that they poured buckets of care and attention into the game, even if it wasn’t exactly for me.
With Baldur’s Gate 3 made an upward trend in quality and kept the same love, care, and attention. If that level of care and attention is present in their previous titles (I have no idea), then I think it was all but inevitable that they’d find this critical success.
It won awards, but it didn’t get the “overall game of the year” award from any of those 5 outlets. And, compared to baldurs gate 3 I think its quite easy to understand why. Totk was a well polished experience but it suffered quite a lot from “mile wide inch deep” syndrome IMHO. Probably one of the best games Nintendo has ever made, but it isn’t as good as baldur’s gate 3.
I understand your perspective but I guess I just fundamentally disagree. I’d be annoyed, in the same vein as you, if every character was poly (unless they were actually poly and they had other lovers and referenced your other lovers and it was genuinely part of their identity) or if a relationship with them wasn’t different from a close friendship, besides having sex (because sex isn’t the only thing separating a close friendship from a relationship).
I guess, the way I approach the kind of game that we’re both talking about is just different. I’m not interested in exploring 100% of all the content possible, but rather having a rich experience in the content that I do explore. I’ll take an authentically written gay man and an authentically written straight girl who both won’t explore a relationship with me, over the opportunity to have more content that’s shallower. But yeah, again, thats just a different approach we both have to games.
I’m sort of the opposite. Give characters sexualities! Make them people! Give them criteria by which they will or won’t find my character attractive! I feel gross when every NPC is pansexual and aggressively attracted to the main character for no reason. Then again, I’m acespec, so.
I hope disco elysium and tunic are both in the rankings, because they’re probably two of the most perfectly crafted experiences in the last 20 or 30 years, never mind just 1 decade.
The Last Campfire is delightful, and feels like being read a bedtime story. God, it’s good. I could listen to the narrator read the back of a shampoo bottle.
Planet of Lana is a drop dead gorgeous side scrolling puzzle platformer with a beautiful soundtrack and world building.
Beacon Pines isn’t technically linear, in that you can complete some stuff in an order of your choosing. But the overall experience is quite linear. Its an exquisite experience, I can’t recommend it enough.
If you enjoyed Undertale, play OneShot. No question. Its splendid.
Night in the Woods is a joy as well, it makes me nostalgic for a childhood I never had. Must-play.
Stray - you are a cat doing cat things in a broken future. Splendid experience.
Mirror’s Edge is a game I think everyone should experience at least once. It’s beautiful.
Celeste - it has the best tuned difficulty curve I’ve seen in any game, and it wants you to succeed. It also tells a really beautiful story. God the platforming is good. Its so good. By the end of it, you are doing things you never thought you’d dream of doing. You’ll feel like a speedrunner with all the little movement tricks you’re able to do.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a thought provoking masterpiece and a little spooky.
QA is part of the game development process and its supposed to happen before it reaches end users. They’ve made some good games but they can’t act all surprised that selling a game and letting users be free QA doesn’t cut it.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice had such a vivid portrayal of auditory and visual hallucinations and the psychological aspects thereof, as well as being rooted in genuinely spooky themes. Playing it in the dark with headphones was a truly psychologically scary experience and it didn’t really rely on jumpscares for the scary factor. ( which to me is a huge plus )