Blue Prince
You, the great-nephew of the late Herbert S Sinclair, stand to inherit a 45-room mansion. Except there’s a catch: you’ve got to find the hidden 46th room to come into your new property. What follows is a game of laying out randomised tiles to make a floorplan, solving puzzles in each new room, taking a certain number of steps each day, before starting over the next—all to learn the secrets of this weird place. If that makes Blue Prince sound like a board game, then rightly so. But this is a board game that breaks well beyond the confines of its own box—to deliver revelation after revelation long after you’ve set foot in Room 46. One of the best games I’ve ever played.
Donkey Kong Bananza
Even alongside Blue Prince, the highlight of my gaming year was the release of the Nintendo Switch 2. There’s little to beat the ingenuous thrill provided by a new Nintendo console and the anticipation of dozens of terrific games to come. And although the Switch 2 doesn’t yet have a masterpiece like its predecessor had The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, this new Donkey Kong comes pretty close. Here, the great ape’s destructive force is turned into something constructive and new, as you tear apart each level with his bare hands. Rocks go flying. Platforms collapse. The dust rarely settles. It should be far too messy, but Nintendo’s world-beating designers make sure you never lose sight of their purpose.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
The best genre in games is moving your little soldiers around little maps and squaring off against little enemies in little turn-based battles—aka, the tactics genre. Think Fire Emblem. Or Advance Wars. Or, indeed, the brilliant Final Fantasy Tactics, which, if it isn’t quite the primogenitor of the lot, has certainly spread its genes about since it was first released in 1997. And now Final Fantasy Tactics has been re-released for modern consoles. It’s still as deep and as satisfying an experience as it was almost 30 years ago—half a Games of Thrones-esque tale about warring kingdoms, half a game of chess—but now it looks prettier and has been streamlined in all the right places. A perfect game to settle into during these colder months.
Ghost of Yotei
My starred review scores for the Daily Mail are never wrong. Never. But I feel a light pang of what other critics must call “regret” when I consider how I scored the year’s two big action-adventure games set in feudal Japan: Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Ghost of Yotei. The former received five stars from me and the latter four, when perhaps—just perhaps—that should have been the other way round. In any case, Ghost of Yotei is the one that’s more stuck with me (and which I’ve been drawn back to over the Christmas period), and it’s done so despite (or perhaps because of) its easy familiarity. Yes, it’s much like its predecessor, 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima. Yes, it’s much like any game that has you questing across an open world. But when the world is this beautiful, when the combat’s so rewarding, when the baddies are so deliciously villainous, why mark it down?
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Where Ghost of Yotei offers ease, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 offers struggle. Here you play as Henry, a blacksmith-turned-knight in medieval Bohemia, who’s left stripped and unweaponed soon into the game—and you’ll feel much the same for the rest of it. Even when Henry does get a sword back into his hands, the combat is so involved—a complicated ritual of steps and diagonal slashes—that it’s often better to avoid it altogether. But rest assured: this is not a punishing game. Quite the opposite. Its depth and complexity simply give real meaning to your choices. Want your Henry to be a silver-tongued gadabout? A stony-faced man of action? Or someone else entirely? It’s all possible in what is the best and most enjoyable roleplaying experience of the year.
Monster Train 2
Another sequel, and another that builds on the platform established by its predecessor. But what a platform that was! The original Monster Train, which had you recapturing hell from the forces of heaven, is one of the games I’ve played the most, well, ever—because it’s so darn compulsive. Its card-based play, coupled with its start-all-over-again-from-a-position-of-greater-knowledge approach to dying, somehow forced you—sorry, me—to always take just one more turn. And now Monster Train 2 comes along with better theming, more cards and grander strategic options. I’ve lost my life all over again.
The Outer Worlds 2
And yet another sequel that builds on the platform established by… yadda, yadda. Although, in this case, the end result is more surprising than those reached by Ghost of Yotei, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Monster Train 2—since the original Outer Worlds, released in 2019, was little more than an okay RPG with irritating satirical pretensions. The satire remains in The Outer Worlds 2, an adventure set in a corporatised cosmos, but it’s much cleverer this time, as is everything else. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything that hasn’t been polished to a new sheen. The colourful worlds are wonderful to look upon and explore. The weirdo characters are great in conversation. The shooting is weighty and wowing. What a year it’s been for The Outer Worlds 2’s maker, Obsidian—who also published the nearly-as-good Avowed for those who prefer spells to rayguns.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
There are much better games than Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo on this list. There are even much better games off this list (sorry, Silksong). But there are very few that beat it for sheer enjoyability—particularly, I suspect, if you’re a gamer in their thirties or forties who grew up with top-down Legend of Zelda on the Game Boy. From its pixellated aesthetic to its 1990s mallscape to its eponymous yoyo (wielded by the main character, a teenage bat), Pipistrello is a throwback game that takes its inspirations as seriously as it takes itself unseriously. If only all nostalgia were as zany.
The Séance of Blake Manor
It’s been heartening to watch the rise of the detective game in recent years. The trend probably began with Return of the Obra Dinn in 2018, then continued with all-timers like Paradise Killer (2020) and The Case of the Golden Idol (2022), before going stratospheric this year—with half a dozen titles that could have been on this list, including The Roottrees are Dead and (a free itch.io release) Type Help. In the end, I plumped for this, The Séance of Blake Manor, which is often too generous with its clues and prompts, particularly if you’ve played similar games of deduction before, but is impeccably moody and literary, even. The titular séance, it turns out, isn’t just about communing with the dead—but disinterring uncomfortable truths from Ireland’s past.
Strange Jigsaws
I’m grateful to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who recommended Strange Jigsaws on his podcast Triple Click—otherwise I would have missed it completely. It’s a truly small-scale indie game that delivers what its title promises: a bunch of really strange jigsaws. Or perhaps that should be jigsaws within jigsaws within jigsaws? You’ll soon discover here how far a set of simple mechanics—turning pieces and matching them to others—can be warped beyond recognition. Suddenly, textures on the screen that didn’t seem to be jigsaws reveal themselves to be just that. Puzzles start layering on top of each other. It’s maddening in the best possible way, like an MC Escher sketch. Honestly, if you don’t consider yourself to be a “gamer” in the usual sense but do want to try one thing on this list, please make it this.