Well, it seems unlikely that I'm going to finish anything in the next week, and of all the major GOTY candidates, I've played, uh... checks notes literally none of them! Well that's gonna make this list more interesting. Also making things interesting is that I don't think I've played anything that really wow'd me this year. Even the games I did love come with some pretty huge caveats or are otherwise smaller games that aren't really competing in that same arena anyway. So with that said:
- P4G
- Master Quest
- Theatrhythm
- Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
Paranormasight is a neat little adventure game that takes place in 1980's Japan as nine strangers try to kill each other with their curse stones to obtain the Rite of Resurrection. It's got some good horror vibes, and while it never gets any worse than "spoopy", it does have a few decent jump scares and the music does a good job of maintaining the mood. The detectives in particular have a really good jazzy theme, and the "things are spooky now" intense chanting music is certainly something.
The bulk of the plot takes place on a VLR-style story chart that works better than I expected it to, with a handful of puzzles where you have to coordinate people being in the same place or learning information on one route to use in another. It's never that complex and I really only had to reach for a guide when it came time to get the true ending, so it gets points for being mostly intelligible on the game side. The plot itself isn't the most interesting thing I've ever read, but it has a cool concept and that carries a lot of the weight here. Certainly, I've spent 10 hours on way less interesting games.