As I sat down to write this, I realized that this marks a decade of putting together my yearly top ten list for Giant Bomb. That includes a few years before I started working here, a few years after I left, and now—hey, I’m back! And as usual, my list is a mix of bigass AAA games and fun indie stuff. I guess the throughline for all of them is that they’re games where you do a bunch of shit instead of listen to or read a bunch of shit. Anyway, here’s my ten!
I don’t know a lot about cults, but I feel like they’re generally frowned upon. Whenever I see a headline about one it’s always regarding a bunch of weird sex stuff or a mass suicide or something uniformly unfortunate. That’s why I really enjoyed the chance to be a benevolent cult leader with no ulterior motives. Me and my followers just hung out in the woods, played dice games, and frequently had dance parties and big feasts. They also gave me a lot of money but no one seemed too upset about it.
While the actual combat and action portions of the game aren’t anything to write home about, I really enjoyed returning from my excursions to see what each new day brought to my camp. Everything was usually cool, and I only sent people to prison if they were being an egregious asshole. It was a good time for all in my cult, and it makes the top ten even if I wish it had more on the cult management side and improved upon or omitted the other half of the game.
First off, I fully understand that this game kind of sucks. The camera can be janky as hell, platforming can feel imprecise at best, and the open-world feels pretty lifeless and looks pretty generic. THAT SAID, you can run really fast and grind and bounce on a bunch of shit. There’s something about that speed and motion that lends itself really well to an open world – even a relatively boring one.
I’ve always been a big fan of being able to turn my brain off and just do a bunch of mindless collecting or platforming, and that’s pretty much all this game is. It requires almost zero brain activity and just enough lucidity to hit some buttons and hop around. If you can pull that off, then you can have fun grinding on sky rails and jumping on robots for as long as you want. It’s *maybe* a 7 out of 10 game but I still want to keep playing it.
8. Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope
I was so surprised by how much I enjoyed this game that I decided to write up a review of it for this website. You can check that out if you want my full thoughts, but I’ll just say that I came in with zero expectations. I thought the original Mario + Rabbids was totally fine but ultimately didn’t grab me enough to stick with it. Despite assuming this would be the same case, Sparks of Hope’s engaging battles kept me interested and I wound up thoroughly enjoying the entire experience this time. That Edge character sucks ass, though.
With its top down perspective and dungeon-heavy campaign, you’d be excused for thinking that Nobody Saves the World is a Zelda clone. Some of that structure may be present, but the real hook of the game is the huge variety of forms your protagonist can take. Each of them has a number of useful buffs and attacks, and it really starts to get fun once you gain the ability to slot them into other forms. Dungeons frequently feature specific types of enemies or hazards, and it’s a fun puzzle to look at all of your unlocked abilities and try to concoct the perfect build to overcome them. There’s virtually no downtime in the game, either, as at any point you’re working on a handful of different quests tied to your form’s ability.
It’s simple, breezy, and one of those games where I genuinely had a hard time putting the controller down.
Tinykin checked a LOT of boxes for me within minutes of playing it. You’re a tiny character in a big world. You can grind on rails, wires, and platform edges. You get a floaty jump thing that feels kinda like FLUDD from Super Mario Sunshine. You can throw a bunch of little dudes that follow you around like Pikmin. Every level is jam packed with personality, collectibles, and hidden items. Your mobility options aren’t complex, but everything feels just right and the levels are a joy to explore. I had so much fun with this that I started up a second playthrough immediately after ending my first. It came out of nowhere for me, and you owe it to yourself to check it out if anything I listed in the last paragraph speaks to you.