- Wildermyth
If Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous was an all-you-can east smorgasbord, a big old feast with a zillion classes and races, a ginormous campaign, and an entire light strategy game tossed on top, then Wildermyth was a tiny little experimental pop-up restaurant that only serves a handful of dishes each day.
In many respects, Wildermyth is minimalist. Art? Simple and cartoony. Animation? Basically paper dolls. Voiceover? There isn’t any. One race, three classes, random abilities on level-up and a bare minimum of items and armor. You can’t even trade items between characters in your party.
But this is a case where less is more. Not being able to swap items in Wildermyth felt like blissful freedom after spending literally (and yes I literally mean literally) hours shuffling items around in games like Pathfinder or Divinity 2. Having a choice of random abilities for my characters on level up did remove the ability to micromange my teams - but it also gave me a wider variety of teams than I would have made if left to my own devices (and, again, saved me a bunch of time.) Wrath of the Righteous was a more comprehensive game in terms of features, but Wildermyth was more fun because I spent my time playing the game instead of slogging through UI and looking up how things worked.
Wildermyth is also innovative: it is the first game I have ever seen that created a unified whole out of randomized roguelike elements, procedural storytelling, and (in the campaigns) traditional storytelling. It made me care about my characters, even when they were involved in randomized anecdotes. It had a legacy system that worked both in terms of game function and storytelling fiction, with you creating an extensive pantheon of heroes young, old, and passed into legend.
Wildermyth does have its flaws. It really could use a few more items and armor pieces, a few more map objective types, a couple more things to do on the overland map. And it does rely a bit too much on what might be termed “wistful indy poignancy” in the writing. But the first objections are me being left wanting more, a sure sign a game has done its job successfully. And the second is something I never even dreamed I’d get out of such a game. Who ever thought they’d be getting wistful poignancy in a rogue-like?
- Valheim
On the one hand it’s “just” a Minecraft/Terraria clone; on the other, it does so well what many other attempts have done so poorly. And it felt polished, balanced and fun even when just entering Early Access. Indeed, it felt more like a finished game than Minecraft has ever done. Edit: Yeah, OK, according to the rules it doesn’t technically qualify. But I’m still leaving it here, because I protest the rules - some Early Access games are more complete than some technically released games. (E.g. Valheim vs. Solasta.) And a bunch of games spend forever in Early Access, so by the time they’re technically finished the world has moved on.
- Hitman 3
Normally I hate repeating content in games - even in good games, like Outer Wilds. But repeating content in Hitman is a pleasure, as you invent multitudes of ways to do in your targets. A bunch of games have talked the “multiple ways to achieve your goals” talk over the years, but Hitman actually walks it (assuming your goals are to kill someone and escape, that is.)
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
The fact I liked the little pop-up restaurant better doesn’t mean I don’t like tucking into a big old smorgasbord as well. To enjoy a smorgasbord, though, you need to accept that some of the vast number of dishes it offers will be much better than others, and that some are best skipped entirely. No need to even try the sushi station, er, I mean Crusade mode.
- Dorfromantik
This gets the Islanders award for a game where the number of hours played show I liked it far more than my subjective impressions do. My subjective impressions say it’s a pleasant landscape-building puzzler that, as someone says above, maybe needs a tweak or two. The number of hours played says its deeply engaging game that gets its hooks in you long-term (while at the same time being super chill and relaxing.)