A Green Mushroom

Splatoon 3 is both good and disappointing at the same time.  At its core, Splatoon 3 is a solid game.  It still has lots of fun with squid kids, octolings, and fresh styles. All the fun from the past Splatoon games is represented here and there are nice quality of life features that are notable improvements as well. But, unfortunately, it doesn't actually do much new.  There's new gear, a new single player campaign, and one new (time gated) mode.  Besides that, it's basically the same game as Splatoon 2. So, although the core gameplay is fun, this one ends up fairly low on my list since it's not really doing anything new: Elden Ring Xenoblade Chronicles 3 FFXIV Endwalker Citizen Sleeper The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Horizon Forbidden West Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Pokémon Legends: Arceus Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition Cult of the Lamb Neon White Halo Infinite Vampire Survivors Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Playdate Seas

Kaichu is a cute and lightweight game about Kaiju dating.  You take on the role of a Kaiju looking for love.  The core premise is that Kaijus date through destroying landmarks together. The gameplay quickly shows itself to be a fairly simple game about trying to guess the right answer for compatibility on your dates with other Kaiju.  It's not a complex game... but it's cute, it's cozy, and it has a lot of heart. This one was a quick hit but I had more fun with it than I thought I would.  It ends up near the bottom but... not in a bad way: Elden Ring Xenoblade Chronicles 3 FFXIV Endwalker Citizen Sleeper The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Horizon Forbidden West Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Pokémon Legends: Arceus Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition Cult of the Lamb Neon White Halo Infinite Vampire Survivors Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Playdate Season 1 Immortality Cyberpunk 2077 Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels DLC Triangle Strategy Mario S

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 blew me away in a completely unsuspecting way.  I love a good JRPG but had previously bounced hard off of the first two games in this series.  This one looked like it had some good quality of life improvements and the story hook was more interesting than the previous games, so a few friends were able to convince me to give it a shot. I'm so glad they did.  After about 70 hours and rolling credits, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is currently sitting as my runner up game of the year right behind Elden Ring: Elden Ring Xenoblade Chronicles 3 FFXIV Endwalker Citizen Sleeper The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Horizon Forbidden West Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Pokémon Legends: Arceus Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition Cult of the Lamb Neon White Halo Infinite Vampire Survivors Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Playdate Season 1 Immortality Cyberpunk 2077 Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels DLC Triangle Strategy Mario Strikers: Battle League Multi

Playdate is a weird one to cover in this list since it's a game system and not a game itself.  But I decided to wrap in all of "Season 1" as an item on this list. If you haven't heard of it, Playdate is an experimental 1-bit handheld game console that came out earlier this year.  They have a cool site that gives the basic rundown so I won't reiterate all of that here. I've had a lot of fun poking around and playing on this console.  I've played a bunch of games I downloaded or bought from itch.io but I've now also completed their full Season 1 content which is why it felt like a good time to add it to the list. Season 1 is a set of 24 games that were included with the purchase of the console.  Each week on "new game day" they deliver the next 2 games to your console.  That must mean I've had this for about 12 weeks.  The games themselves ranged from tiny arcade games, to full on adventure games, to little experimental music generators. 

Immortality is a hard one to write about so this may be short.  But, I have to say something about it become it is most definitely interesting. Immortality is an FMV game, but you discover the FMV clips through free association of objects that you click on within any given freeze frame of any scene.  The scenes themselves are clips from a series of made up unreleased movies that all star the same actress. On it's face, the game is about uncovering movie clips and mentally putting them together to see this actress's career.  But, underneath, there's a ton of hidden stuff going on.  There's a whole secondary story that I didn't stumble onto until I had uncovered a large majority of the clips. This one is really strange but is so unique that I needed to acknowledge it in my list.  Personally, I was pulled into the game for one session where I played through the entire thing until I hit credits.  I have a feeling this will be some people's game of the year this year

Tinykin is an interesting game that I almost chose not to write about for this list.  You'll see shortly that it ended up near the bottom of my list.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was doing something interesting that deserves some acknowledgement.  And that was my goal with this running this during the year.  I wanted to highlight my favorite games while also highlighting games that ultimately didn't click with me when I tried them but were doing something noteworthy. Tinykin reimagines what a Pikman style game can be and do.  That's the reason I wanted to give it some acknowledgement.  Pikman doesn't have many games like it and all of the Nintendo Pikman games follow a very similar formula.  You collect Pikman within a level and have to accomplish some collecting objectives within a time limit. Tinykin takes the core idea of Pikman, that idea of gathering a small army of different and useful creatures that follow you around and are at your co