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Elden Ring
Same great combat and enemy design we’re used to from a Souls game but set in a huge world that’s fun to explore. Most games I get too impatient to explore thoroughly, but not this. This is my favorite Souls game so far for a first playthrough, but due to the size of the world and me needing to ‘explore’ the entire world again on subsequent play throughs, I feel this isn’t as good for multiple runs. -
Marvel’s Midnight Suns
Not a Marvel fan, but enjoy some deckbuilding and tactical combat? This game is awesome. I still enjoyed the characters and story of the game. I even enjoyed the Abbey stuff, except for needing to collect resources, which I barely did. I would have been cool with it if we just needed to find the resource and then get a steady income from it - but don’t waste the player’s time and add the busywork or needing to run around and revisit plants to pick. -
Citizen Sleeper
I never would have thought an adventure game would make my top five, especially a scifi / cyberpunk one, but this really drew me in. Heck I had this at #5 but after staring at it, it didn’t sit right with me. Every character I met was interesting and I wanted to see how they would interact with my time there. The dice aspect of it was interactive enough to make me feel like I was playing a game and not just reading a story. The game did a great job in the first part of really creating tension and making me concerned about how I was going to get my character through it. -
King Arthur: Knight’s Tale
From here on down are games I thought were very good, but don’t really think of as exceptional. This game had great atmosphere and solid tactical battles. What brings it down was the uneven difficulty. I didn’t make it all the way through because battles were either very easy or very hard. I tried switching the difficulty level but couldn’t find the sweet spot. -
Tactics Ogre: Reborn
I didn’t think I’d like it as much as I did due to the visuals, but the game offered pretty solid tactical battles with impactful skill choices. I think it is the first JRPGish game where I liked the story too. I ran out of steam in the 4th chapter when Midnight Suns came out, and it’s a little daunting to think about jumping back in, so I don’t know if it will get finished.
Honorable mentions
Railgrade: Fun ‘train’ game that is lighter than many of them, but challenges the player to meet the objectives quickly. Sometimes the time feels a bit stressful because there isn’t any pausing to build or consider things, but so far the missions have been easy to win, but not always easy to get the best rank.
Rogue Legacy 2: I think an improvement over the first in every way except for 2 things. There was a later level that was kind of frustrating. Also, the final battle was just too difficult for me so I noped out. I hate leaving games hanging, but I just couldn’t do it. I even finished Hollow Knight with it’s one crazy hard area, but i couldn’t do this.
Hard West 2: Another game with fun tactical battles a good atmosphere. Some battles were a bit of a slog and it started to wear it’s welcome out a bit, but still worth playing.
Vault of the Void : Fun deck builder a la Slay the Spire, but didn’t hook me like STS or Monster Train.
Power to the People : Fun builder where you supply the power to cities as they grow and pop up on the map. Enough irritations to keep it from getting into the top tier, but still worth playing just because it is kinda different than other builder games.
Isle or Arrows : Not the best tower defense, but it strays enough from the formula to make it worth playing. A bit too much randomness and constrained building space. It feels like luck has a lot to do with success.
Eh, these were OK: Dying Light 2, Knotwords, Urbek City Builder, Dyson Sphere Program, OOTP 23, Sniper Elite 5, Escape Academy
I could have skipped these: Triangle Strategy, Pentiment, Stacklands, Two Point Campus, The Gunk, Tunic