Baby’s second GOTY at Giant Bomb! Wow! It’s happening!
Honorable Mention: Save Room
Hey man, this is cute. It’s a bunch of puzzles based on the Resident Evil 4 briefcase inventory system. It’s a bunch of em, it’s cheap, it’s something I didn’t know I wanted so bad, but I did.
Honorable Mention: Tinykin
If you take Pikmin and Chibi Robo and subtract the time limits and stress, you get Tinykin. It's a really lovely game with tight controls and satisfying collectibles. It also manages to have rather sprawling levels that don’t feel overwhelming, due to its usage of speedy and logical traversal via silkworm rail grinds. Each level has a great sense of momentum and a flow that just feels good. It’s a bit shorter than I was hoping – about 6 hours – but it was a very pleasant time overall!
Except there was that one level where I think I crossed a picket line and worked with the bad guys to stop a strike? That was mildly off-putting. I’m a little confused about why they went in that direction for a cutesy game like this. (For what it’s worth, this is not the reason Tinykin didn’t rank on my list!)
DA GOTY LIST
Ooh, what a neat thing this is. It’s not a card game, it’s a Cheating at Cards game. It’s got a bit of a WarioWare-but-more-tactical/deliberate feel to it, as you have to recall and pull off various distraction and slight-of-hand techniques in your “rob from the rich to give to the poor” scams. I haven’t beaten it (too many games) but I’m itching to go back and fleece a whole bunch more aristocrats.
This little weirdo hit me by surprise and left me wanting more. It’s a strange little indie jam where you play a spy, pretending to be a pizza guy, infiltrating a club to extract another agent. That’s as normal as the game gets, because what follows is a dice-rolling, role-playing, strategy game where you load up your die with pizza ingredients to affect the outcomes of whatever weird crap you’re doing. Cooking a stew, DJing, shmoozing with other people, enduring lasers, whatever. Your fate is in the pizza dice. It’s definitely a short game, but the mechanics were novel and the style was the kind of garish I can get behind (like Cruelty Squad, which is not made by the same developer). Really I just want another mission in this same world. Or a bunch more. Please make more of this weird thing, whatever it is.
Also leaving me wanting more was Cult of the Lamb, which charmed me hard and fast. It’s a bit short and a bit easy for someone who’s into Binding of Isaac and Hades like me (uh, then again, I didn’t play on the hardest difficulty or anything, just Normal/Medium) BUT the potential of this game is through the roof with regards to DLC. There’s already a bunch of cosmetic DLCs out for the cultist cuties and such, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an expansion is in the future of this game. And I’m totally there for it, ready to be worshiped by adorable animals all over again.
This originally was at number 5 but then I thought… This game’s had enough praise, let’s boot him down a bit and give some other very ambitious (but less AAA) games a place to shine. Am I grading on a curve? No, I’m grading with my heart.Shame on me - I got distracted after beating the Fire Giant and didn’t actually beat the damn game. I’ve been told I’m practically spitting distance from the end of Elden Ring, but I fear that my reflexes have probably atrophied to the point that getting back into it, this late in, would simply not work out. :( That being said, Elden Ring was (like everyone else says) a crazy triumph of “fuck around and find out” gameplay. Even a person like me, who was formerly scared off from ever playing a Souls game due to the “get gud” mentality found immense thrills in it (I have since been told that “get gud” is “a joke,” but my almost 2 decades of being wrecked at Smash Bros. has irreparably made that phrase an immediate morale-murderer. Please respect my Gamer Feelings on this matter.)
Yummy yummy numbers go up get da gems.