Steam's Year In Review thing got published yesterday, prompting me to face the reality that I had played 108 games this year. That is a lot of games! Granted, a lot of them were just me opening something up to see if it would make for a good stream, but that is still a lot, especially considering this year might be the busiest I've been in a long while.
As per the title, the second half of my GOTYs (the first, about 2023 releases, can be found here) is about pre-2023 releases that I only got around to this year. Since there were a lot of those - at least like 50 on Steam alone - and since I played a lot of really good games this year, what was meant to be a top 10 has turned into a top 13. I guess it almost evens out with the first list being a top 8...
Games marked with a lil ๐บ icon were ones I streamed over on my twitch channel.
13. Far Cry 2 ๐บ (Ubisoft Montreal, 2008)

I've always been curious about Far Cry 2 for its kind of paradoxical existence: despite being developed and published by Ubisoft, it has somehow spawned so much insightful and interesting games writing over the 15 years of its existence (recently I've been thumbing through Ben Abraham's Permanent Death) that it's really hard to not think there must be something compelling to it. I never managed to stick with a full playthrough myself, though, until I committed myself to streaming the game. Now I can proudly say: I kinda get it! Especially for 2008 this must have been a really exciting game: open world, for one, with a believable-enough dynamics, and a big-budget game that actively "gets in the way of" having fun - guns get worn out and jam, you have to deal with the malaria mechanic, you're always scrounging for resources while dealing with constant AI attacks. Of course, I put "gets in the way of" in quotes because to weirdos like me, having to deal with those limitations and irritations is the fun, and it's clearly a big part of what captivated Far Cry 2's fans back in the day. Playing it now, though, it felt like once you see past the scenography of those mechanics and just go "what if I didn't do all of that", the game doesn't resist you all that often, at least on Normal difficulty, nor does it provide you with anything else past that experience.
In retrospect, Far Cry 2 ends up as satire of every Far Cry game that came afterwards: nearly all the named characters are terrible people, none of the missions you do are in the service of anything good, and the state of the game world by the end is neutral-to-worse compared to how it was before you showed up. That the game at least makes some effort to prevent you from "having fun" on top of all of that is commendable, even if it doesn't fully work.
12. Kane and Lynch 2 (IO Interactive, 2010)

Now here's how you do a game that dislikes8 the player. What an ugly, spiteful little experience this was. Streaming the entire Kane & Lynch series with my friend Akiaji Margo was a great time. The game's intentional "low bitrate shaky phone video" aesthetic was so effective and the netcode for online co-op was so bad that I kept forgetting I wasn't playing Kane & Lynch 2 through Parsec, which we had to do for the first, local-only game. Ending about as abruptly as it starts, filled with overwhelming post-processing (putting mosaic censoring over a headshot makes it feel infinitely worse than just a blood decal on a head model), Kane & Lynch 2 is as short and grody as the nude asses of the game's protagonists that you have to stare at for a good 40 minutes in the middle of the game.
11. F.E.A.R. ๐บ (Monolith Productions, 2005)

Rounding out the 00s shooter block of the post is F.E.A.R. - a game that, on one hand, has this veneer of being a scary 'paranormal ghost girl' game, and, on the other hand, has bullet time and three different kinds of slide and jump kicks that not only instantly kills any enemy in the game but also makes their body cartwheel across the screen if done at the right angle. There's a gun that shoots inch-wide metal spikes that will nail enemy ragdolls to walls, making them vibrate against the geometry in that familiar Havok physics way. Despite only having like 3 different enemies, each fight feels really fun and dynamic, since the maps are really well-suited to getting outmaneuvered and playing flanking games with the AI.
10. Lost Technology ๐บ (Studio 4D, 2017)

The basic premise of "indie Total War-like" is very good on its own (Lost Technology is based on an earlier indie strategy game from Japan called Vahrenturga, so it's more of a Vahrenturga-like, but the Total War shorthand is maybe more immediately understandable), but the faction design is the thing that really sets it apart for me. You got a couple of normal-ish humans, elves and dwarves (as I said on stream, I like at least a couple normal guy factions to make the weird guy factions weirder - this is a thing Warhammer Fantasy does really well), then you got a faction of magical bard frogs, whose campaign story is written by Hato Moa, a bunch of differently-animalistic furries and scalies, the mafia (which is not the same as the faction that is just called Crime)... Maybe my only complaint is that the endgame is almost entirely decided by how well-leveled your hero units are, and which hero units you have - there are certain combos that let you completely crush any battle with a party of 2, while many others are near-useless.
9. Alan Wake 1 (Remedy Entertainment, 2012)

Alan Wake 2 apparently being an outstanding acheivement in games writing has prompted me to finally play Alan Wake 1, a game that's been sitting in my library ever since its brief music copyright-related delisting 6 years ago. It's a game I always meant to get around to, since I consider myself a Remedy fan, but I just never found the impetus for it...
It is a testament to how well-written Alan Wake 1 is that I stuck through to the end of the main game and both of the DLCs despite it being maybe the most insipid gameplay experience I've had in a very long time. Thematically the mechanic of shining a flashlight on an enemy before you can shoot it is great, but fights are both too frequent and too populated (a complaint I also have about Remedy's later release, Control, though the combat in that game is far better). The slow pace of "burning" an enemy made fights with even a handful of weak enemies feel drawn-out and tedious. Coupled with the extremely slow-to-respond character, I really don't know why I didn't just knock the difficulty down to Easy and focus on the writing. Which, just to reiterate, is really good, almost surprisingly so for a game that spends its opening hour just saying "hey we really liked Twin Peaks".
Also, RIP James McCaffrey. Hearing that guy's return performance for every Remedy game I've played was always a treat.
8. GTFO (10 Chambers, 2021)

There's something really unique about playing co-op games that are so demanding on the cooperation front that you end up completely subsumed into "The Party" as a single function-performing aspect. I love being the bioscanner guy in GTFO. I'd love being the computers guy, interacting with the pseudo-UNIX terminals that you have to use to figure out mission objectives, but I play this game with someone who willingly taught herself Dvorak, so I'm usually outclassed for that job. I take some solace in shining a heavy duty floodlight at her working during mission downtime, making the screen unreadable with glare. I really want to play more of this game, but I supposed the hardest thing with co-op is always the scheduling.
7. Killer7 ๐บ (Grasshopper Manufacture, 2005)

I've watched Killer7 in LP form several times, so I've known it's a good game for a long while. Fortunately, it's been many years since those LPs, and I can be very forgetful, so actually playing the game felt very fresh. Killer7 is still Killer7, even in 2023: a very compelling example of how well videogames are served by limitations, and of the fact that stories can be infinitely more compelling if you don't spell everything out. I'm finding myself trying to angle this blurb into the position of "well I wasn't crazy about Killer7", but I'm pretty sure I added like 8 sound redeems (and one outfit!) from the game to my stream after I beat it, so I guess I liked it...
Also, I would like to note that I cleared Sunset without understanding how the character unlocking system worked, so I had to beat the boss without Kaede, which involved a really lengthy and stupid game of hide and seek. I think I almost resorted to mouse aim in a time of darkness, but I stuck it out. One of my greatest gamer moments of 2023.
6. Parasite Eve 1 ๐บ (Square USA, 1998)

Parasite Eve has always had that air of "some people really like this one", a category that formed in my brain in the early 2000s, one defined by a sort of incuriosity - actually getting a Playstation and a specific game was out of the question back then, and PSX emulation seemed like a distant dream, so for years I settled on just knowing these games through their reputations on forums, never seeking out footage or more specific writeups about them, eventually filing the Suikodens and the Parasite Eves of the world in some distant mind-cabinet. It's always fun to dig back in and actually play one of these myth-games, and Parasite Eve 1 was no exception..
Square's development teams were crushing it on the Playstation 1, huh? The banger Yoko Shimomura soundtrack serves as a perfect wrapper for the very late-90s type of cutting-edge-science horror, set, very uniquely for an RPG, in then-present-day New York City. Aya Brea and her partner Daniel are simultaneously some of the coolest and funniest protagonists in recent memory. The gameplay is merely "okay" - it seems like it could get great, but it's an ATB game with a single party member, and it takes until the postgame for the combat mechanics to start getting complex, which feels like a Square design classic. As a mechanics enjoyer, it's kind of a shame, but not a huge negative for a game whose number one strength is its atmosphere.
5. Europa Universalis IV ๐บ (Paradox Development Studio, 2013)

It feels like a satsifying closing of a chapter that this year I managed to break through into EUIV, a game that has always been one of a handful of bogeymen used to scare would-be mapgame enjoyers and grand strategy novices. I remember times before Stellaris, before Crusader Kings 3, looking at EUIV screenshots online and thinking I might just be built too different to enjoy these endlessly complex games... Look at me now! Thanks to the frankly huge amount of learning resources people have made over the years, I didn't even need to do any false-start poking around to get used to this game: my first campaign, which I streamed the start of, was playing as the Aztecs, unifying Central America and the Caribbean, choosing to end after a suboptimal (but successful!) expulsion of European colonizers from the region. I sometimes wish EUIV had even a fraction of the roleplay flavour that CK3 has, but I understand why it doesn't, and I'm glad that I have both games to enjoy depending on what mood I'm in.
4. Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin (Edelweiss, 2020)

There were a couple weeks in the middle of summer where I just completely inhaled this game. I'm really impressed with how well the sidescroller and farming sides of the game were integrated into each other - in something like Rune Factory, it can feel like you're using farming/crafting to leapfrog progress in world exploration, whereas in Sakuna it felt like a much more gradual and organic relationship between the two. It's an extremely charming game in every regard too. Making you put together a dinner menu each night (you can automate it, but why would you?) to set up the next day's buffs goes a long way in making you care about the quality of your farming output, but being able to sit there and watch all of your buddies eat each meal bit by bit over smalltalk is the thing that seals this game as something truly special.
3. Unity of Command 2 (2x2 Games, 2019)

I already wrote a fairly sizeable post about my time with Unity of Command 2, so I don't want to go too deep into specifics here, but I have to say I was quite surprised to see it as my fourth-most played game on Steam this year, apparently just an hour under Street Fighter 6. The more time I have away from UoC2, the more strategy/wargames I play, the more I'm able to recognize that this was not just a great entry point, but also a really remarkable example of the genre overall. The things UoC2 chooses to abstract and the things it chooses to make you do yourself meshed really well with things I find compelling in strategy. I'm glad to know that whenever I want more, there's a huge amount of DLC mission packs for me to go through.
2. Pentiment ๐บ (Obsidian Entertainment, 2022)

By all estimates, this was a game tailor-made for me. An adventure game set in 16th century Germany, styled entirely after illustrations and illuminations of the time, directed by a guy who apparently kept making editing passes because people kept writing meal scenes with potatoes in them. Every character's dialogue is delivered through handwriting, appropriately simple or elaborate based on the player character's perception of their erudition - not just that, but you get to watch the lines being written in realtime, writing errors made and then scraped off of the dialogue-vellum, small pauses to refill the quill with ink which you can anticipate happening by the gradual thinning of lines... The printmaker character, who foregoes all of that handwriting and prints his dialogue in movable type! There are a million things in this game, big and small, that would have left me slackjawed if I wasn't streaming my playthrough, that all weave this wonderful setting for a story that feels at the same time completely rooted in its historical context and talking about the present day, filled with a wide variety of characters that make me feel the same kind of kinship with humans of the past that I get from seeing a pen box from 13th century Iran or a set of dice from ancient Rome.
By all means, Pentiment should be my #1 game this year. However...
1. Vagrant Story ๐บ (Square Product Development Division 4, 2000)

It is really impossible to write down anything but Vagrant Story as my game of the year, unfortunately. Like Parasite Eve, this is one of those legendary "everyone talks about it" games that took me ages to get around to, but I'm glad I did. And I'm even more glad I got to do it on stream, co-hosted by dear friends and Vagrant Story superfans Monday Morningstar and Angelguts Eliminator, whose company and expertise helped me through the dozens of cube puzzles and gargoyle rooms of Leรก Monde.
I don't really know if there's much new for me to say about Vagrant Story. I've known about the game's reputation for years, having read many a staff interview or retrospective detailing the development and all of its clever technological tricks - squeezing a rim lighting effect out of an engine with no lighting capabilities, for example - slowly building up its reputation in my mind to something I really had to be in the right mindset to appreciate. I'm starting to realise there is almost never enough pre-heating you can do to really get that "right mindset" - you can read about Vagrant Story as much as you want, the expectation you make in your head will still get blown away within the first 20 minutes, before you even get control of Ashley. Experiencing the work itself is often the best thing you can do to give yourself the right mindset to experience the work.
Every time I think about the game - the character designs, the incredible environment art, the multitude graphical tricks around every corner, the too-complicated-for-its-own-good weapon crafting and honing systems, the fact that they got all of this to fit in under 100 megabytes - I get an intense mix of amazement that this game got made at all, and of jealousy of getting to work in a development team where every person involved is a complete pervert of their own field.
