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Exapunks Competitive coding pushes a certain button in certain people that Zachtronics now has down to an art. A game about fork() and data broadcast channels, and old hacker magazines and body hacking. Loved every minute, many of which were just staring at the screen willing a more efficient solution to emerge.
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Celeste Fantastic 2D platformer with minimal controls (move, jump, dash, grab) that need to be combined in a huge variety of ways, in a series of small, hard, imaginative puzzley levels.
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Return of the Obra Dinn I’ve only started it recently, but the first impressions were so strong I had to put it in the top 5. Striking to look at, and a bunch of novel (to me at least) ideas driving the gameplay. (EDIT: Since I wrote this, I’ve completed it and bumped it up from 5 to 3. Superb stuff. As @TimJames says below, it does a very good job of at least making you feel clever. Go in as blind as you can.)
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Yoku’s Island Express One of those pinball-metroidvanias you see so many of.
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Gris A fairly standard platformer with some light puzzles that also happens to be the most beautiful game of the year. If you think gameplay and graphics are completely orthogonal, and consider yourself to be hardcore enough to ignore the latter when evaluating games, then this isn’t the game for you. Treat it as a 2D walking simulator if you want. But it is just stunning to look at, and sometimes that’s enough.
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Beat Saber. I can’t dance, but this game makes me think I can, for short periods of time at least. Very satisfying VR implementation of lightsabres slicing blocks in time to slightly cheesy music. Maybe would have been GOTY if it had official support for custom songs, a la Audioshield.
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Bacon - The Game. Mobile one-touch game where you flip bacon onto things. Helped queues in theme parks seem a lot shorter when you need to keep three daughters amused, the value of which cannot be overstated.
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Diablo 3 Eternal Collection (Switch) - First time playing Diablo 3 for me, somewhat confusing to start with, a lot of fun and distilled and balanced to the Nth degree, but I couldn’t help feeling it was slightly hollow at the core of it all.
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holedown. Terrifyingly addictive Peggle / Breakout / RPG-lite upgrade system on iOS that I had to uninstall in order to get on with my life.
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Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Some parts were very evocative of the whole bedroom coding experience. But not much in the way of replayability.