https://stevegaynor.com/home daily 1.0 2025-12-18 https://stevegaynor.com/favorites daily 0.75 2019-06-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561326848714-UZK6Z89LFVRKDRD51KPB/ware_building_stories_Alan_Trotter.jpg My favorite things - Building Stories, by Chris Ware. A graphic novel in sixteen distinct pieces, delicately expressing the lives that dwell within one small apartment building in Chicago, Illinois. Sprawling and focused, immense and tiny; a stunningly human masterpiece. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561327261894-H53H60952973TJU8FN3G/mountaingoats-sunsettree_1800x.jpg My favorite things - The Sunset Tree, by The Mountain Goats. For years, John Darnielle was tormented by his abusive stepfather. With great boldness and vulnerability, the singer-songwriter uses this heartbreaking sequence of songs to work through his traumatic personal history, and the healing there is to do. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561327981065-306TP1TRBA9KHQ1S32LX/2428197-30.png My favorite things - Thirty Flights of Loving, by Blendo Games. Nearly wordless, a story told entirely through the player’s presence, their powers of inference, and the language of film. Equal parts audacious and understated. 20 minutes that will change your life. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561328621209-GROAUFHREA8MVC8QMNHH/lives.jpg My favorite things - Lives of Girls and Women, by Alice Munro. One of Alice Munro’s earliest, most novelistic works describes the arc of an ordinary woman’s life via a series of achingly immediate vignettes encapsulating so much of the mundanity, elation and quiet sorrow that comprise the ineffable business of living. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1618272113117-3NW0311IJXV5959OIGT0/Screenshot+2021-04-12+170141.jpg My favorite things - Metropolitan Diary Trillions of indelible little moments occur in New York City every day. This is your weekly snapshot of just a few. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561339055275-ECFEPJATMYTN06J12FG1/qerHRi.png My favorite things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561339064398-YPMVUO9QK35FAT6P0KKE/By63yu.gif My favorite things - Little Party and Packing Up the Rest of Your Stuff on the Last Day At Your Old Apartment, by turnfollow. Two small, unassuming games about small, unassuming things: one, a single mother hosting her teenage daughters’ friends for an all-night art-making sleepover. The other, that moment you move out of a cheap little apartment, maybe the first one you had in the city, maybe as your college years are winding down— an apartment that, despite its ramshackle anonymity, has nevertheless become a home. These are games of knowing quietude and familiarity, interactive memories of moments you’ve almost lived. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561337495431-HRL064PAB6J3YGAK1AUN/s-town-itunes.jpg My favorite things - S-Town, by Brian Reed, Serial, and This American Life. One day, John B. McLemore contacts the radio producers of This American Life regarding an alleged murder cover-up happening in his hometown of Woodstock (henceforth, Shit Town), Alabama. What follows is a seven-part audio portrait of a truly unique individual, a man out of place and out of time— an intricate memorial to someone who was loved more than he could have possibly known. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561339960668-JDK06K7ANWFQ6WRCYFX8/apartment_1960_three_sheet_original_film_art_2000x.jpg My favorite things - The Apartment, by Billy Wilder. Near the end of his vaunted career, Billy Wilder produced what has to be my favorite film of all time. This love triangle drama set in 1960 Manhattan centers on the star-crossed relationship between insurance agent Jack Lemmon and elevator girl Shirley MacLaine. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and shocking in its tiny twists of the knife, this film is everything. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562370132743-B4EDW8SJYJ0NJKZB5OWO/kiki%27s+delivery+service.jpg My favorite things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562429320779-60PGV2JY1UZBEKCTF756/mononoke.jpg My favorite things - Kiki's Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Kiki is a little witch who has to leave home when she turns 13, to find a town to adopt as her own. Ashitaka is a boy banished from his village when he’s marked by an evil force. Miyazaki’s films are about outcasts— loners who don’t want to be alone, trying their best to connect with others and make it however they can. So many of Ghibli’s films are wonderful, but Kiki’s, for its smallness and empathetic heart, and Mononoke for its sweeping but thoughtful and melancholic journey, are the ones that never leave me. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561849795604-DXK7372ASM0ZHI9SJ33J/20180113-cowboybebop02_full.jpg My favorite things - Cowboy Bebop, by Shinichiro Watanabe and Sunrise. Cowboy Bebop is a real stand-out: Science fiction set in a world that’s deeply considered, strangely familiar and constantly surprising. An action-adventure story that’s all about what makes its characters who they are. An experience that is by turns completely thrilling, endearingly silly, and incredibly moving. It’s our immense privilege to be gifted just a little bit of time with the crew of the Bebop. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732698713101-M1Q46DN5XMNSKX23ML0C/s-l1600.jpg My favorite things - Full Throttle, by Tim Schafer and Lucasarts. “Whenever I smell asphalt, I think of Maureen.” A biker noir that ends on such a pitch-perfect note of bittersweet melancholy, it’s stuck with me for 30 years. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561843617465-5Y04N9VEGWAMUH7NM53I/159312-the-silent-hill-collection-playstation-2-media.jpg My favorite things - Silent Hill 2, by Team Silent and Konami. ”In my restless dreams I see that town, Silent Hill.” Video games, being simulated experiences you exist within, are suited better than any other medium to convey the disorienting liminality of inhabiting a dream. These are places you are but really aren’t, actions you control but only through their own strange internal logic, events you experience very directly but that never actually happened to you. Silent Hill 2 exemplifies the unease of living on the edge of a dreamworld, expressing a unique brand of psychological horror that is at once unsettlingly surreal and deeply, undeniably human. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1561997704821-5DEEL14BRJEKVH8DSRBK/m_d47ab691-3706-45e0-8bbb-a9b7fc913674.jpg My favorite things - A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by Ana Lily Amanpour. It is ideal to see this film knowing absolutely as little about it as humanly possible, so I won’t go into detail here. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night plays with language, culture, film tropes, gender, and audience expectations with such a sense of quiet purpose that it’s impossible not to get swept away. Beautiful in every sense of the word. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562370639382-NDXZZEJOHY7TZYS4M2TO/hdyDI.jpg My favorite things - how do you Do It? by Nina Freeman, Emmett Butler, Joni Kittaka, and Decky Coss. A long-forgotten moment, beautifully presented. A memory that is too childlike, personal, funny and embarrassing to talk about, but through this tiny, perfect game, we get to re-experience. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562370065224-H83UE1W000G6T3PN1DZ8/beforesunrise.jpg My favorite things - Before Sunrise, by Richard Linklater. Just walking and talking. Two people spending one spontaneous, heartfelt, ordinary, unforgettable night together. Touching and genuine, Before Sunrise is a memory we’re lucky to share. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562429190204-WUH0HN0I8ZS0VJ9SLYXJ/Screen-Shot-2017-09-19-at-10.01.16-PM.png My favorite things - Butterfly Soup, by Brianna Lei. I’ve rarely laughed so hard at a video game, or been so unexpectedly moved. Butterfly Soup is exactly what its creator wants it to be— a hilarious document of the friendship between a group of queer young Asian-American girls who share a love of baseball and shenanigans. Vividly observed and transportative; as genuinely romantic as it is incredibly funny. I’m so glad this game exists. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562544466784-1MU2HQCVYGTOL8WTWJW8/1111002449.0.x.jpg My favorite things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562997227263-QK0F9Z1A8KSAEMQGJ5YA/supposedlyfun2.jpg My favorite things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562544467171-R38RJBC67XI78QYVGKRD/21643940459a.jpg My favorite things - Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I doubt there's much I can add about the work of David Foster Wallace that others haven’t already said. But know that I hold a deep gratitude for the endless curiosity, thoughtfulness, and empathy exhibited in his essays and fiction. Reading David Foster Wallace is a fundamentally eye-opening experience. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562520502099-PGSP3WNR4CPZ9XD7ZWF6/dZXK994.png My favorite things - Halt and Catch Fire, by Christopher Cantwell, Christopher C. Rogers, and AMC. I’ll admit that the first season of Halt and Catch Fire isn’t the strongest— and it’s because until season 2, the show is still trying to be something it’s not: a sweeping, award-seeking prestige drama. But seasons 2 through 4 of this sadly underwatched show transform into something else entirely, something more humble and self-assured: an amazingly deft and believable chronicle of five people making their way through the messy intertangling of shared lives and careers over the course of more than a decade. Halt and Catch Fire captures the way that ourselves and the people we know can change so fundamentally while also staying the same, how we walk criss-crossing paths we never could have predicted, and when we look back at where we started it’s impossible to imagine how we ever could have gotten here. But here we are, still, us. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562520664451-Z9BT3TFSFQAGY4VODWX9/1089707_111815-AP-Calvin-And-Hobbes.jpg My favorite things - Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. I am lucky to have been a child reading comics when Calvin and Hobbes was being published daily in newspapers, and when book collections of the strip were regularly released— books I received year after year for birthdays and holidays. Calvin and Hobbes has the quality that all truly great children’s entertainment shares: it does not, in any way or on any level, talk down to its audience. Bill Watterson believed in kids, believed in their ability to follow the muted irony, moodiness and occasional sorrow of Calvin and Hobbes along with the sight gags and big jokes. I am so grateful for the heart and spirit this comic strip always upheld, and to be able to revisit this touchstone of my childhood to this day. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1562543680968-35876TB5FR05R9T2M8W1/1200x630wp.png My favorite things - This American Life, by Ira Glass and WBEZ Chicago. This American Life has been on the air for almost 25 years, and in that time the show has covered an incredible range of topics. What I value so much across all this breadth of perspective is the personal lens through which each one is expressed. The show wants to help you not just understand, but to feel what each of these stories, big or small, means to the people involved in them— and for them to carry meaning to you, too. If you’re looking for places to start, I’d suggest a story about a group of boys discovering an abandoned house, and then revisiting the mystery of it decades later as adults; an examination of how one single hormone, testosterone, affects our bodies, our minds, and who we are; the time that Toyota offered to teach the American car industry how to modernize and succeed by converting a GM factory to Japanese methods, and the lessons learned and not; or the story of a phone booth where people pick up the receiver to leave a message for their dead loved ones, knowing the line is connected to nothing at all. Or start with host Ira Glass’s picks. There’s so much goodness in This American Life, from the small and heartwarming to the overwhelmingly immense; it reminds us just how much there is to our shared human experience that even a monumental undertaking like this doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of who we are. But it’s something. Disclosure, 2024: Long after I first wrote this, Gone Home was briefly discussed in the final Act of episode 821 of This American Life. I wasn’t aware this would be the case until after the show actually aired, because an email from a fact checker went to my spam folder Suffice it to say, having Gone Home mentioned on a program that’s meant so much to me for so long (and has directly influenced my own work in multiple ways) is a huge, and surreal, honor. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671424969399-GCXBIUYCA124U266VZ2P/SecretsHotlineLogo.png My favorite things - The Secrets Hotline, by Nick van der Kolk. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, sometimes profound, always surprising— an ongoing project collecting and sharing people's most deeply held secrets, revealed on their own terms. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671426167764-6RH24KUQ8L4VKEDUUEUI/image-asset.png My favorite things - Gekiga in translation, by various artists and translators. “Gekiga” is a subgenre of Japanese comics that originated in the late ‘50s through 1970s that can be considered in the same vein as “underground” and “indie” comics in the U.S., focusing on grounded, true-to-life, and psychologically complex stories by individual comic writer/artists. In the last 20 years or so a trove of classic gekiga from the genre’s formative years up through the late ‘90s and early 2000s has been translated and released in the West. The trend perhaps began most prominently with Adrian Tomine’s work at Drawn + Quarterly on three translated volumes of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s genre-defining short subject work: The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-bye. Since then another translator, Ryan Holmberg, has taken up the charge of bringing a vast quantity of classic gekiga to the West, most notably The Swamp, Red Flowers, and The Man Without Talent by Yoshiharu Tsuge, Boat Life by his brother Tadao Tsuge, and Talk to My Back by pioneering female gekiga artist Murasaki Yamada. These volumes all pulse with humanity and vital artistic authenticity. Seek them out if you can. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671928113759-L3ZD4732QLDMAL5SL766/2mEVBFsaPpECTc6HPG1pqQEOIsLecl_original.png My favorite things - The Criterion Channel In the Age of Streaming, where most everything we’re encouraged to watch seems to be driven by what’s come out this week and what’s being memed the hardest, I am so, so grateful to have Criterion’s library of beautifully preserved and conscientiously curated films at my fingertips at all times. It is something to truly rejoice in, a wonder of our modern world. A few of my favorite films on there, to add to your watchlist: Chungking Express, Cléo from 5 to 7, Hiroshima mon amour, Tokyo Story, Tokyo Drifter, House, Persona, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Breathless, Yi Yi, Stalker, Seven Samurai, Cure, Eraserhead. If that’s not enough, the Channel also has better than half of the 2022 Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films of All Time in their lineup. Now’s the time to start exploring. https://stevegaynor.com/favorite-games-2020 daily 0.75 2024-12-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1608959780918-Q9W2HSPWNZ9B903ZGO8U/maxresdefault.jpg My favorite games of 2020 - Half-Life: Alyx I never in a thousand years would’ve thought a VR game would be my Game of the Year, but all told, Half-Life: Alyx probably is that. My friends formerly of Campo Santo worked on this game, which was my motivation to seek out an expensive headset, overcome my ingrained VR skepticism, and dive back into the world of City 17… and while it may not have made me into a VR convert (the headset has gone untouched in a drawer since I finished my playthrough), it was definitely such a unique, clever, and memorable experience that it won me over completely in its own right. Half-Life: Alyx is strange, inasmuch as it requires some of the most advanced consumer gaming hardware available, and presents itself using such immersive, cutting-edge techniques, but at its heart it feels like an old-fashioned, even somewhat quaintly stodgy, singleplayer FPS campaign. You’ll explore sewers and factories and subway stations and apartment blocs while a friendly guide character talks in your ear. You’ll trigger enemy encounters in construction sites laid out with a convenient smattering of full-height cover. You’ll push forward through very pretty, largely linear tubes of content as new weapons, abilities, and enemies are introduced on a regular schedule. And the whole time you’ll be directly inside this gameworld, using a virtual reality headset and finger-tracking controllers to see and touch every inch of this virtual space in stunning, sometimes disorientingly-vivid detail, making this virtual world an almost tactile experience in a way that’s really hard to consciously process, much less describe. And then you’ll beat the big boss and see the final cutscene and win the game. It’s so odd, this very traditional gamer comfort food expressed in the most technically advanced way imaginable, a game that is both like something we’ve played dozens of times before, and unlike anything else we’ve ever played… but god damn, I liked it a whole dang lot. I dunno if H-L:A justifies the existence of VR all on its own, but I’m glad VR exists, so I’d have a chance to play it. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1608959780866-YP0XBLODV90L9VKO5TH9/603969861582284052.jpg My favorite games of 2020 - WORLD OF HORROR WORLD OF HORROR is one of those games that just shouldn’t exist, but I’m real glad it does. Some maniac decided that a great thing to do would be to fuse a really, really good imitation of Junji Ito’s horror manga style with a classic ‘80s-era Japanese PC graphic adventure, and then release that in the year 2020 (give or take— it’s been in early access since last year, and is still in the process of making it to 1.0) It’s one of those games that has influences so distinct and so idiosyncratic that there’s really nothing else like it, and you can tell that for the creator it’s a work of passion, possibly obsession. And, luckily, the game itself is a joy to play, weird as it is. Between the unsettling nature of its fiction and the anachronistic foreigness of the genre it revives, WORLD OF HORROR feels like something that’s been dredged up from another world, another time, and infiltrated our own world like some cursed video tape… and it’s one of the most unique, enjoyable games I’ve played in quite a while. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1608959782012-AKF0DZ9K82CR2UOE6MO2/Screenshot+2020-12-25+211328.jpg My favorite games of 2020 - If Found... I’ve never thought of myself as a visual novel-type person as I’ve always more naturally been in the systems-y or immersion-y side of what games do, but I’ve also always recognized that any game form can grab me if the content is compelling enough. This has been proven out by some of my favorite games in recent years including Butterfly Soup, Dream Daddy, Florence, and now If Found… a visual novel all about erasing the past to discover one’s future. It’s a very small, personal story from a trans perspective taking place in small-town Ireland in the 1990s. I loved the scale and specificity of the place and time and lived experience of it all; I loved how the hand-illustrated, moving, shifting visuals drew me into the story as an impression and a memory you’re digging ever deeper into while sweeping it away. It’s the kind of game that I’m thrilled was put out by (if I do say so myself) the most prestigious indie publisher going today, Annapurna Interactive, as it’s the kind of art game that, until recent years, almost certainly would have only existed as a self-released, possibly free game on PC. The recognition of the commercial value of something that in the past wouldn’t have been thought of as a “commercial” game at all is really heartening. The personal connection that players experience with If Found… is worth your attention, and it’s worth your money— it’s art that’s worth paying its creators’ bills, and allowing them to create more. Not everything about 2020 was so heartening (and that’s an understatement) but the fact that a small personal visual novel about a trans Irish teen can be a big, cross-platform commercial game release, supported by a publisher that cares and believes in this kind of work, is at least one little bright spot from the year. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1608960051003-OYRI3BDOGAOTPZZT7O1T/wo1.jpg My favorite games of 2020 - Wide Ocean Big Jacket I’ve been a huge fan of Turnfollow’s games for many years now, since playing their earlier, free releases Little Party and Packing Up. Speaking of small and personal, Turnfollow’s game are wonderfully minute in scale, thrillingly mundane and relatable— their best games are games simply about moments in life: some teens having an all-night art party at their mom’s little house in the woods; that moment you move out of your little studio apartment at the end of college, not sure what comes next but knowing you’re leaving this part of your life behind; and, with Wide Ocean Big Jacket, that moment as an adolescent you go off on a little trip that feels feels like dipping a toe into adulthood, an experience that’s strange and new and nerve-wracking and exciting not because it’s anything out of the ordinary in this world, but because it’s your first time experiencing it. It is yours. Wide Ocean Big Jacket is visually beautiful and simple in its illustrative style, and expresses a sweet, small, funny moment lived in an understated, moving way. I remember Wide Ocean Big Jacket’s little campsite and the boardwalk and the nature path and the beach like places I’ve actually been; I remember moments from this imagined weekend at the beach like I was actually there. And I’m grateful for it all. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1608964760666-R0VN8M9WWAONJ8U7P7XT/Eb_EgjWXgAAwvn7.jpg My favorite games of 2020 - Disco Elysium I know Disco Elysium didn’t come out in 2020, but I didn’t play it until this year. I’d been waiting for it to come out on consoles for some reason, but that still hasn’t happened, and I got impatient, so I just went ahead and grabbed it on the Epic Games Store— and I’m so glad I stopped waiting and got to it. It’s quite simply one of the most impressive, moving, fully-realized narrative RPGs I’ve ever played. It feels like the entire concept of computer RPGs was leading up to this. It’s incredible when you play something that justifies the existence of an entire genre, and feels like its next logical step. I could give the full rundown of what Disco Elysium is, but the basics: it’s a heavily stat-based isometric RPG, but there’s no combat as a core mechanic. Your stats represent elements of your personality, reasoning, and ingenuity, and influence how you interact with people in conversation and decisions and choices you’re able to make in complex situations. They represent not, say, the strength of your magic attacks, but instead things like your ability to bend people to your will via authoritarian posturing, or your intuitive connection to the hidden histories that whisper through the city. Disco Elysium is strange but relatable, alien but familiar, and the writing itself is a bravura display of incredibly well-wrought prose and dialogue, purely in these respects quite possibly the best-written game I’ve ever played. It’s also an inspiring instance of narrative, systems and spaces playing off of and with each other, forming a whole that is unlike anything a game has been before. It’s funny and heartbreaking in equal measure— I was brought to tears multiple times during my playthrough, not because of moments that were maudlin or “sad,” but because of moments that struck me so deeply in unexpected ways. Moments such as when I was able to save an important character’s life only because they’d grown to trust me so completely, even though I didn’t deserve it. Or the sense of overwhelming wonder and awe at a moment of revelation near the end of the game when I realized this fictional world I’d spent hours and hours living in contained layers of grace and possibility I’d long written off as delusions. In these moments, tears or no, I was moved, truly, in a way that I knew meant something. This mattered. Disco Elysium is profane and dark, but it is the opposite of cynical. It doesn’t look away from ugliness or suffering, but it knows that life in its world— and ours— is above all, beautiful. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1608964968823-UXAPH5T3F4FWUA47L746/20200918132732-1.jpg My favorite games of 2020 - Hades I’m friends with the folks who started Supergiant Games, the creators of Hades. I interviewed their narrative lead, Greg Kasavin, for my zine when I was in college and he was the Editor in Chief of Gamespot. We briefly worked in the same building at 2K Games; his encouragement was one of the reasons I worked there in the first place. And, as a friend, I can say that playing Supergiant games just makes me so, so mad. They are way too fucking good at what they do. It is infuriating. Can we just talk about the screen transitions for a minute? When you interact with the mirror in Zagreus’s chamber and in a split second about a dozen animations happen all at once as the UI displaying your progression choices flows onto the screen in a decadent burst of glints and swooshes. Everything in a Supergiant game, and certainly in Hades, is is treated with this level of luxuriously detailed refinement. Every screen effect and character animation, every lush, vivid environment, every burst of flame and whoosh of blade feels perfectly considered and expertly crafted. These people, again, are far too good at what they do. And, as their friend, I’m so, so happy that Hades has brought them a level of success that matches what they’ve always deserved. Sometimes, even if they have to fight through hell to get there, the good guys get to win in the end. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1608965514756-GYX2N3GRJ7G2CH9SW9Y5/Cyberpunk2077-Welcome_to_Paradise-RGB.jpg My favorite games of 2020 - Cyberpunk 2077 It’s hard to give Cyberpunk 2077 my full, unequivocal endorsement, but probably not for the reasons you’d guess, based on the game’s reception on launch. I’ve had extremely few, verging on zero, serious bugs occur in my time with the game; in fact I find it surprisingly stable, responsive and performant. That said, I’m playing on a high-powered PC with an Nvidia RTX graphics card, basically the optimal operating environment for the game. But for me, if anything, I’ve been very impressed with the game on a technical level. My qualms, really, are about elements of the world and tone that feel like they betray what is at its heart a mostly thoughtful, earnest set of characters and stories, often engaging with the conceptual framework of the cyberpunk genre in ways that are novel and worthwhile. But this is a game that’s at war with itself. The player-involved narrative content— what you do, who you meet, what events happen and how they play out— tends to be mature without being overly self-serious, well-considered as a rule and overall tonally balanced in a way that respects both the source material and the player. On the other hand, as you drive through this incredibly finely-rendered futuristic city, you’re constantly bombarded with ads about butts and dicks and MILFs and jizz and super gross joke foods and edgy suicide prevention parodies (!) and just endless puerile, juvenile stuff that someone thought was hilarious— someone who, it seems, had no idea what the entire rest of the game was like at all— and this constant overbearing presence, everywhere, just implodes the entire feeling of what this fictional world is. It’s like if the ads from GTA were in some completely different game, instead of GTA. It’s like the story you’re actually playing is Neuromancer, but every time you look out the window you’re seeing Idiocracy. I want to love this game from all angles. And I do love it, in most ways. I love the classic open world RPG feeling of always being like three layers deep into a list of things you want to do before you log off for the day— do side missions to get enough money so you can buy the sweet Akira bike, and then when you’re done with that you’ll start on the next main mission, but oh, on the way there this really interesting side mission opens up so first you’ll finish that up then get back to the other stuff and now suddenly it’s 1 AM, and you just want to play more, because you want more of what this game is, but you’ve got to go to sleep sometime, so you’ll come back to it tomorrow. I love that feeling, and in this game it feels natural and earned, not manipulatively deployed. I love looking at the architecture and the lighting and colors and the really wonderfully modeled characters. I love the absurd future clothing and I’m amazed that they managed to make the guns feel really good in what is under the hood a stat-based RPG, the kind of game where traditionally gunplay never feels good. I love opting into upgrade choices that allow me to be the guy who has slow-mo abilities, x-ray vision and a sniper rifle with bullets that home in on enemies’ craniums, sending said bullets whizzing in a 100-yard arc to delete said craniums from behind cover without said enemies ever knowing what hit them. I love how driving a motorcycle feels in the game— it feels amazing— and the sheer scope and scale of Night City and the surrounding environs. I love playing Cyberpunk 2077. I love being in it. I love finding out what’s going to happen next in the story. I love meeting new characters. And I hate, hate that it betrays itself by making its setting into a joke that doesn’t even respect what the game is really about. This rendition of Night City and the people and stories that live there deserves better. Perhaps one of the highest compliments I could give is that despite the fact the game is filled with a type of narrative self-sabotage I’m particularly allergic to, Cyberpunk 2077 remains by far one of my very favorite games of the year. Maybe, someday, somebody will release an AdBlock mod for the game, and Cyberpunk 2077 will be saved from itself. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1608965143468-3EXJWXSXEOD8BXGQ51VO/sc6lt6.png.jpg My favorite games of 2020 - Animal Crossing: New Horizons I’ve been playing Animal Crossing games for going on 20 years now. Animal Crossing is why I bought a GameCube. I was working at Circuit City, and became friends with a co-worker, Dan, and Rachel and I went over to his place and he showed us this really cute, strange little game, Animal Crossing, on his GameCube, and well, Rachel and I needed to have a little town like that of our own. We did our first full year loop of Animal Crossing when we were in college together at the University of Oregon, in our little college town apartment there. We did our second full year of Animal Crossing on the GameCube when we were living in the house where we made Gone Home, in the evenings when we finished working on the game for the night. We hadn’t played Animal Crossing since. Now we’re living in the house we bought after Gone Home came out. We have a little daughter, and she loves watching us visit our Animal Crossing town on our Switch. She shouts “ow-woo!” (owl!) at the screen to request that we go visit Blathers in the museum. She thinks it’s hilarious when he wakes up and goes “Hoo… WHO?!” She laughs and laughs. Playing a new Animal Crossing game is exciting, not so much for its newness, but for its familiarity. It is a homecoming. We know this rhythm, we know these creatures, we know this feeling, and this place. We live here, off and on, like these little animal friends do. We may go away at some point, like they do, but we’ll always be back. Animal Crossing has been a mile marker at three distinct phases in my adult life. When I play it I remember the person I was then. When I play it again someday in the future, I’ll remember the person I am, and Rachel is, and Juniper is, now. Our little animal friends will still be there, even if we’ve changed. We’ll be welcomed back home. https://stevegaynor.com/romantic-cinema daily 0.75 2021-02-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613336242242-5NMHXSQJZ8UAFUQ9D0SY/chungking-express-md-web.jpg Deliriously romantic cinema Expired pineapple, crying apartments, and one ticket to anywhere. Wong Kar Wai’s breakthrough film is a poetic, dreamlike snapshot of mid-90s Hong Kong , and the unassuming noodle shop that serves to intertwine the lives of a few star-crossed would-be lovers. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613339339184-9YVW37OXO7W6DL5XH3HZ/IMG_1298.jpeg Deliriously romantic cinema A low-rent, heartfelt film noir Bonnie & Clyde tale, featuring what may be cinema’s most breathtaking meet-cute. Originally titled The Female of the Species is More Deadly Than the Male. And for good reason. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613336349389-7QH0BR73CSEQ5M2XY6FP/flat%2C750x%2C075%2Cf-pad%2C750x1000%2Cf8f8f8.jpg Deliriously romantic cinema A French actress and a Japanese architect spend only a handful of hours together in Hiroshima, dissecting the intersection of their lives, the war, and how they’ve come to be two people who could fall so madly, deliriously in love. A defining pillar of the French New Wave; a tiny, short-lived tragic romance in the shadow of one of the 20th century’s most enormous, unfathomable tragedies. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613336593734-FYM7D7768OVAPMLBWIZ3/MOVCF1427__13398.1541945482.jpg Deliriously romantic cinema Until I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour, I didn’t know of a clear precedent for Before Sunrise. But the two films fit together like a glove— a man and woman cross paths, spend only a few hours in each other’s company discussing anything and everything about themselves, who they are, and who they might be— all the while knowing they’re soon to be torn apart by circumstance, perhaps never to see each other again. But the few hours they do have are what will last forever. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613337046713-XEJTNQILP7SDJJZZ27LI/MV5BOTAzZmI5ODgtYzYzZS00ZDQxLTk5NDItNzY3YjdhYjE3Nzk3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjc1NTYyMjg%40._V1_.jpg Deliriously romantic cinema She, a suburban widow with two grown children. He, a salt-of-the-earth homesteader in touch with his own heart. Their passion for each other burns— but what will the neighbors (and her ungrateful kids) think? Not even the the stultifying societal mores of 1950s suburbia have the power to keep them apart. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613336530541-XOU061DAIRXEUKBK7Y6B/flat%2C750x%2C075%2Cf-pad%2C750x1000%2Cf8f8f8.u1.jpg Deliriously romantic cinema Two young people drawn together by forces of fate unknown, to share everything— their bodies, their souls— but doomed to be stranded on opposite sides of a dimensional divide. A romance so pure and impassioned that space-time itself must bend to its will. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613336613868-WBXICV2VC44SM1AJEFSW/the-apartment-vintage-movie-poster-original-1-sheet-27x41-4519.jpg Deliriously romantic cinema Probably my favorite film of all time. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine are flawless as they dance through the pathos and joy of a relationship unformed. Directed by Billy Wilder at the height of his powers, focusing on one tragic, deliriously romantic story hidden in the heart of the big city. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613352510712-NMXCNFFREHXZMQY3NA8O/Eternal-Sunshine-Cover-1024x675.jpg Deliriously romantic cinema If your heart was broken, and you could remove all memory of that person from your mind, would you do it? And would the universe let you get away with it? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1613410346581-3XI51O2HNP293R9B6K5J/Screenshot+2021-02-15+093216.jpg Deliriously romantic cinema A sung-through technicolor dream of Paris, 1965; a woozy elegy to young love that could have been. There’s not another movie like it. https://stevegaynor.com/52-favorite-games daily 0.75 2025-11-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640023320897-KNR53VW6BTQ148P6IVUV/animal-crossing-nintendo-gamecube.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Animal Crossing (2002) A bustling little clockwork village, living at the same time, on the same day, in the same season, as our own. A little place you could visit anytime you wanted. It's still there, if you want to go. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1719713841900-4BQY2KQRX435LVFRLZ5A/33dda89a4b560a948fbe762ae0a027d3_1000+%281%29.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Anthology of the Killer (2024) An astonishing amalgam of walking simulator, Italian giallo, minimum wage ennui, absurdist humor, zine culture, Junji Ito, and post-everything societal critique, wrapped in an eye-searingly garish but strangely alluring hand-drawn 2D/3D art style. Anthology of the Killer is a definitive example of games as pure, out-there pleasure. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640023733895-VABQ2I3CSNSNCWC1S1T0/thebeginnersguide2.jpg 52 Favorite Games - The Beginner's Guide (2015) The Beginner's Guide is a game about game developers and game development, and about the blurry line between fact and fiction and self and identity. It is a visual, interactive epic poem, a feat of illusion. It is one of a kind. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640023972012-XIDPMCSQ1VW6PT42E1Q9/video_games_BioShock-4800.png 52 Favorite Games - BioShock (2007) The world of Rapture, and the character of Andrew Ryan, are indelible pieces of the video game narrative canon. It is an honor to have been able to contribute even a little bit to the series. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640024308167-6FOERDRFEE3FH5OWCZT7/Butterfly-Soup-gay-joke-screenshot.png 52 Favorite Games - Butterfly Soup (2017) There are personal games, and then there's Butterfly Soup. There are funny games, and then there's Butterfly Soup. There are heartfelt games, and then there's Butterfly Soup. There are other games, and then there's Butterfly Soup. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640024375991-WIDJQHK1O7SHOB9PVCQU/maxresdefault.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Crusader: No Remorse (1995) The moral ambiguity of playing as a fascist enforcer who joins the rebellion after being betrayed by his own overlords was uniquely compelling for the era. There's no light side/dark side points here— just how you choose to play your role. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1696176041953-XV8UEXR5JKXEXMWBH7LU/dark_souls_remastered_knight-wallpaper-1280x800.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Dark Souls (2011) If you asked me which From Soft game I had the most fun with, or would recommend you play first, it would be Elden Ring— but if you asked me which From Soft game I’d be coming back to 10, 15, 20 years from now, it’d be the one that changed it all: Dark Souls. Demanding, beguiling, confounding, and rewarding in equal measure, Dark Souls has more than earned its place in the gaming pantheon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640024573476-8FZYC1MQAAFBE504WTNK/dott.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Day of the Tentacle (1993) Along with Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle introduced me to the way that hilarious writing and stellar voice acting could elevate a production to another plane. The game's mind-twisting, time-jumping leaps of logic are in a league of their own. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640025374764-C925657DM3DWM8T0OZ4I/1_wOeIvBt04qap_EHy6BAJqQ.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Deus Ex (2000) Radically political before games touched real-world issues with a ten-foot pole. A game that feels as deep and expansive as the global conspiracies it wrestles with. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640024960013-92CZ4GXSTGRLZUWUZ842/McX15m2.png 52 Favorite Games - Disco Elysium (2019) Hands-down the best-written game I've ever played, period. Computer RPGs were invented so Disco Elysium could exist. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640025761374-66BPAYZ285S7U3BD8WE1/dishonored.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Dishonored (2012) A love letter to the Immersive Sim, by one of the founding fathers of the subgenre. An absolute triumph. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640026235190-A8NZ8CW5S3XG3IULYLRO/doubledragon.png 52 Favorite Games - Double Dragon (1987) Double Dragon was a kind of wish fulfillment for a nerdy, bullied, beat-down kid in the '80s-- that I could be cool, and kick ass. There wasn't a lot of "hardcore" or "badass" in games before Double Dragon; I reveled in its jump kicks and chain whips for all they were worth. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640026422541-TZO3EBUY5LYT2A8DBO79/1ee1d53583b64f4eba81969a3d1b1aba.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Dream Daddy (2017) The hook is that you get to romance a bunch of hot dads; the heart is a touching, too-real relationship between father and daughter. Gorgeous art, uproarious humor, and depth of feeling combine into something sincerely affecting. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640027013925-MM4IGZS06CZO65PQGSXY/1472424247-4196945375.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Dungeon Keeper (1997) In 1997, Dungeon Keeper let you be evil, and evil was good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1738776032472-6T6JPAD10JIVF6J0NXAP/Games-Elden-Ring-2.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Elden Ring (2022) “Dark Souls, but make it open world.” The fact that they pulled it off, possibly even besting Dark Souls itself in the process, demonstrate Miyazaki and the rest of FromSoft absolutely at the peak of their powers. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640100448027-TWKSHTVUEENPUKTDHCVW/23084068189_cba5fecff5_o.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Elevator Action Returns (1995) Alongside Metal Slug, this is the apotheosis of 2D side-scrolling arcade shoot-em-ups. Exuberant '90s anime style meets fast-paced, kinetic violence. As reboots go, this is one for the ages. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640027503780-GZO9LM7MMQA9QQPPVZTB/wnafXdPrSDLqXXGK2Y2h7Z.jpg 52 Favorite Games - F.E.A.R. (2005) The cheeky humor of No One Lives Forever was dissolved in acid, then sprinkled over the heart of this gritty, blood-soaked playground of bullet time and bicycle kicks. I couldn't be more grateful that my first level design job allowed me to run around in F.E.A.R.'s back yard. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640027612556-5KAIY0XN01BKOJF60SY1/maxresdefault.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Fallout (1997) Somehow, I was obsessed with Fallout from when I first saw a prerelease blurb about it in PC Gamer magazine. I downloaded the demo over dial-up, I checked the Interplay message board daily, I preordered— lucky me that it turned out to be one of the greatest, most unique and influential RPGs of all time. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640028009415-XITBFI5V80H5NN32P2JJ/fallout3.png 52 Favorite Games - Fallout 3 (2008) To me, Fallout 3 is about as perfect a modernized reimagining of a classic game as there can be. As a day zero Fallout fanatic, I was and am so thankful for this game. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640028409013-G04822BMQ2RQ7S1RUTH4/fatalframe.png 52 Favorite Games - Fatal Frame (2002) While the unique gameplay concept behind Fatal Frame-- using a haunted camera to fend off hostile ghosts-- is great, what I find really gripping about the game is its specificity: the collapsing traditional Japanese manor house you explore, the connection to local myths and rituals. Fatal Frame is not just something you play, but somewhere you go. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640028186643-RR0NWALK5H2TEM3TGKDJ/farcry2.png 52 Favorite Games - Far Cry 2 (2008) Much podcast has been spilled about Far Cry 2, but it's the combination of its influences and its ambitions-- to present a treacherous, grim open world that embodies the emergent gameplay ethos of the Immersive Sim-- that makes it truly sing, and live on far beyond its vintage. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640028793948-CWSFGXE3P8YRQP97DLJ0/DrhnQSmUUAA1Eue.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Firewatch (2016) There's something unparalleled about Firewatch-- the sense of place, the warmth of voice. A crystalline memory, its vistas rendered in Technicolor. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1718403220031-D4M3LV6FGAJJLX5ELNXW/s1.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Florence (2018) Sweet and simple, a beautiful little interactive graphic novel about the mundanity and romance of life. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640035859457-5IOLUBD0XHSQEOVUWBAT/full_throttle_remastered_011_-_vulture_rock_%28classic%29.png 52 Favorite Games - Full Throttle (1995) Probably the game that was the single most "important" to me when I played it, at the tender age of 13. It showed me how games could be a full sensory experience, with cinematic animation, awesome licensed music and a sweeping but personal story, brought to life with top-notch voice acting. Full Throttle changed everything for me. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640036204101-6ZOIZ1FVHJ4N8VW7YQ28/thumbnail-1.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Hitman/2/3 (2016/2018/2021) I was a devoted fan of the Hitman series from the time its prerelease demo dropped over Thanksgiving break in the year 2000. Almost two decades later the series truly found it groove, combining the best of its dark-but-ridiculous, open-ended-but-puzzle-like, completely unique, completely odd, completely charming style into a series of slapstick murder adventures beyond compare. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640036698078-J76BPB914F3B7AJ08U8S/hdydi.png 52 Favorite Games - How do you Do It? (2014) A private little moment, vividly remembered, presented with humor and grace. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640037002820-D22AXPDV0WJJ4EYI3UEE/ICO111.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Ico (2001) One of the earliest breakthrough examples of a commercial console game that really felt like "art." Its quiet confidence in the player would go on to inspire so much. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640037461256-RXZUPE75YM0UDG1VEQLF/i76.png 52 Favorite Games - Interstate '76 (1997) The Mechwarrior 2 engine was repurposed to spin a low-poly tale of bell bottoms, betrayal, and muscle cars beefed up with automatic weaponry. Hey Stampede, how about a poem? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640041878842-9KGVOCRCY5G5SYTU8E8Q/jadg.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games (1996) Dozens of volatile personalities clash and criss-cross amongst your roster, injecting vibrant humanity and surprising emotional dynamics into what could easily have otherwise been a de rigeur wargame. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640042854908-RU515K1F7UIPJG1HLJX1/katamari.png 52 Favorite Games - Katamari Damacy (2004) It's just kind of unbelievable that this was a commercial release way back in 2004, and a franchise-making hit to boot. The greatest video game soundtrack of all time is just the cherry on top of this heartfelt, iconoclastic creation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640043215122-JL8NM6OMXSFEPGM3OT6K/luckynwild.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Lucky & Wild (1993) A rippingly unique combo driving/lightgun/co-op arcade game that blends awesome early-'90s anime style with American buddy cop bravado. Experiencing it in the original two-person seated cabinet is a must. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640043314280-YH0R2FIT1BYVCW1XZPGR/171026-maniac-mansion-spot2.png 52 Favorite Games - Maniac Mansion (NES, 1990) The NES version was my introduction to the point-and-click adventure genre; thank god for a Nintendo Power cover story, and the video store down the street keeping their NES rental shelf stocked. A deeply strange and special thing to encounter when everything I knew was Mario and Zelda; a game that fundamentally changed me. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640049762002-GT42LOV1P73W0HDNRRQ4/mgs.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Metal Gear Solid (1998) What we have here is a triple threat: technical marvel, groundbreaking game design, next-level cinematic presentation; the original Metal Gear Solid presaged the following 20 years of AAA game development at least. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640050417259-3M5AA0XLZBOBQXE9W4BM/1659-aca-neogeo-metal-slug-x-screenshot-1507349493_1507349493.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Metal Slug (1996) The incredible craft and personality of the pixel art in Metal Slug was absolutely mind-blowing to stumble upon in a mid-'90s video arcade. Still unsurpassed to this day. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1718820047983-01S49QI68V1PXHAN1F88/MHSOTH52faves.png 52 Favorite Games - Murder House (2020)/Stay Out of the House (2022) If somehow a PS1 game could be played off of a grungy VHS tape you found while trespassing in the horror section of an abandoned, condemned video rental store, that would be Puppet Combo's games. At their best, they are truly riveting, sometimes uproarious, always terrifying odes to the lo-fi tension of horror games and horror films from yesteryear, whether it's Resident Evil meets Silent Night, Deadly Night meets the Easter Bunny with Murder House, or Thief: The Dark Project meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Stay Out of the House. The vibes are bad; the vibes are perfect. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640050653312-M5PUEYMYK5LHPJAGHHRF/348786-no-one-lives-forever-2-a-spy-in-h-a-r-m-s-way-windows-screenshot.jpg 52 Favorite Games - No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way (2002) The No One Lives Forever series was far ahead of its time, and the second game delivers on all the promise of the first. Cate Archer remains the forgotten hero most worthy of icon status. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640050879795-JJUE67BJKWCCD3KWPMGP/RyHhh2.png 52 Favorite Games - Packing Up the Rest of Your Stuff On the Last Day at Your Old Apartment (2017) Tiny, personal, deeply relatable— a moment in the turning point from adolescence to adulthood that we've all lived through, beautifully encapsulated. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640051291547-GK72GS4H2OXA9ZT4EIHS/portal_1.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Portal (2007) Short-form. Non-violent. Narrative-focused. All voiceover, no characters on screen. A clear personal inspiration; a sea change for the medium. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640051657765-PDU81387HB8PYMPS4VFF/ar1sncnddpk11.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Resident Evil (1996) A campy, terrifying, and utterly strange feat of commercial art that drew heavy inspiration from Alone in the Dark, filtered it through Japanese game design and George Romero's canon, and established an entire genre. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640051801140-ZFFEQXKFBB3LNWSJ9350/Capcom-lawsuit-Juracek-copyright-infringement-Surfaces-Resident-Evil-4-screenshot-leon-s-kennedy.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Resident Evil 4 (2005) Flawless. Revolutionary. Available on every platform the world has ever known. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Shinji Mikami and Capcom. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640055706736-68O9SD9OAQ3P63TX5UOH/River-City-Ransom-07.jpg 52 Favorite Games - River City Ransom (1989) As a little kid obsessed with Double Dragon, River City Ransom's layering-on of RPG-lite and mini-open-world mechanics were pretty horizon-expanding. My personal heaven would be visiting every little shop the game has to offer, forever. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1765181197048-HETE9C9LOR320FPFUXPH/routine-test-04_6390094.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Routine (2025) A stunningly-rendered, immaculately designed piece of retro-future perfection. As someone who’s run rekall for well over a decade, Routine is the playable embodiment of the exact aesthetic I dream of, executed to a level that can’t be improved upon. The vibes run from tense to terrifying; the visuals run from gorgeous to downright breathtaking. The game doesn’t hold your hand— you really are on your own, and it is exhilarating. As nightmarish as it can be, Routine is an experience I want to revisit again, and again, and again. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640062034483-E4L5OQZ85IUK6ZYMTBH2/sammax.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993) One of the most wry, funny, dryly absurdist adventures of all time, featuring pitch-perfect voice acting and comic timing that make it eminently replayable to this day. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640056529969-POMWQKOKGB6YZ4I1GZK4/45605-shenmue-dreamcast-screenshot-so-cute.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Shenmue (2000) At its best, a vivid little portal into the mundanity and wonder of another time and place— the Japanese suburbs of the mid-'80s. An extravagantly-produced slice of life like no other. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640061887067-J89E6E287RKZFZIRJ5PD/6cdafad9fbc5b5bed44658b7ffa4a065.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Silent Hill 2 (2001) "In my restless dreams I see that town, Silent Hill." And it has never left me. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1696175186076-MZL1XEHA84EEDP2GGMY9/tadaaaaaaa.jpg 52 Favorite Games - The Sims (2000) Systematizing suburban American consumerism and turning it into a huge commercial hit-- The Sims is either a bone dry social critique that went laughing all the way to the bank, or a simple product of its time and place. Astounding either way. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640062430555-USHQ3N2BG95XHR9SY5DM/036796.jpg 52 Favorite Games - State of Decay (2013) Much media has dramatized the zombie apocalypse; State of Decay thrillingly (and somewhat jankily) systematizes it, to harrowing, chunky, satisfying ends. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640062704757-GBZNL14I0CRGLVISHQXK/fVjfyp8PxsaF5Ry2TP8zPo-1200-80.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Super Metroid (1994) A practically wordless, perfect game. That a peak like this was reached as early as 1994 is simply humbling. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640062986662-6FCJ4NNPXTH76A0J9KXU/mission-failure.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Syndicate (1993) Being just 11 years old when the game came out, Syndicate was my first exposure to anything 'cyberpunk'— and so its diorama-sized depiction of brutal corporate warfare in a technodystopian future was an edgy revelation to me. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640063692649-KOKPXJEHBHNIY0GHREDJ/8fa54-shock011.gif 52 Favorite Games - System Shock (1994) Re-releases have made this early, and notoriously obtuse, Immersive Sim much more accessible, and I'm grateful for it— more people should be able to play through the origin point of so much of what was to come. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640063751395-TS0K2X4757C1UBU6D5QG/Screenshot__29_.0.jpg 52 Favorite Games - System Shock 2 (1999) The second game in the series, and the first developed by Irrational, brought heavy RPG elements ala Ultima Underworld back into the Immersive Sim— as well as a focus on narrative vibrancy that would fuel later efforts in the subgenre. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640064116794-4FCC8BIOW5F8CKEQWKAR/kieron-talks-thief-2.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Thief: The Dark Project (1998) Though Ultima Underworld and System Shock are the geeky progenitors, Thief is what I see as the true beginning of the modern Immersive Sim. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640064386566-4KJB5915WM5V9OCSZ74Q/thirty-flights-of-loving-wallpaper-13.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Thirty Flights of Loving (2012) Wong Kar Wai meets the Quake 2 engine, resulting in a feat of cinematic, interactive alchemy that will change how you see games forever. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640065005790-4LO6XFEODNEETT7983RK/Battle-2.png 52 Favorite Games - World of Horror (2020) A very overt… "homage," let's say, to the twisted manga genius of Junji Ito. World of Horror understands its source material so perfectly that it's almost like it was born of the man himself. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640065112738-PKW6QY0HNEHSDDE217R6/YAKUZA-ZERO.jpg 52 Favorite Games - Yakuza 0 (2017) The Yakuza series truly found itself (and its audience) when Yakuza 0 took us on a surreal, hilarious journey through the organized crime underworld of '80s economic bubble Japan. The series's long-awaited worldwide popularity could not be more well-deserved. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1640065185538-27A92BSWBXUOJWZW13J2/unnamed.jpg 52 Favorite Games - You Don't Know Jack (1995- ) One of the best reasons to invest in a CD-ROM drive in the mid '90s has just kept on going, irreverent, eccentric, and oddly educational as ever. https://stevegaynor.com/favorite-games-2022 daily 0.75 2022-12-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671920112780-RKWPJPIKWBWFIS69TCES/159088-games-review-hands-on-elden-ring-review-image1-8nisaeviok.jpg My favorite games of 2022 - Elden Ring The pitch is deceptively simple: “Dark Souls, but make it open world.” What’s incredible is that it just works, in a way that From Software makes look effortless. Along with being their most ambitious and sprawling title, Elden Ring is also the most accessible entry in their canon. Dive in. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671920760633-4RY0R6ZBSU0BC68RECLB/ss_91ca96c76b92b140ada9551a5dfe79966f762e5a.1920x1080.jpg My favorite games of 2022 - Murder House/Stay Out of the House I took a strange, circuitous journey to discover Puppet Combo’s games this year, and their uniquely grimy brand of PS1-style grindhouse horror really did a number on me. I played a bunch of Puppet Combo’s stuff on a gaming spree over the course of a week or two, and two of their games— Murder House and Stay Out of the House— completely lived up to their aesthetic’s promise. Murder House is a kitschy ‘80s slasher VHS in the form of the original Resident Evil; Stay Out of the House is Thief the Dark Project meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If any of that sounds even vaguely intriguing to you, dive down the Puppet Combo rabbit hole without delay. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671920852522-RKWRC3WVYE4TP8TA0UDB/ss_77dc7a0f67bdd66e78e355902e3fa98cf1003ad7.1920x1080.jpg My favorite games of 2022 - The Convenience Store/Closing Shift Chilla’s Art, the creator of lo-fi indie horror titles The Convenience Store, Closing Shift, and many others, has a lot in common with the aforementioned Puppet Combo: an ongoing solo developer working practice supported by a loyal Patreon following, a VHS-meets-low-poly visual aesthetic, and a deep connection to a very specific kind of horror experience. But whereas Puppet Combo is garishly pixelated and gloriously bloody— gameplay of an obscure PS1 game that was recorded over a worn-out VHS from a shuttered rental shop’s Cult Horror section— Chilla’s Art is CCTV footage of someone uncomfortably inhabiting the quietly menacing dark corners of everyday Tokyo. Chilla’s Art’s subject matter is as diverse as it is immediate, from the quiet plight of convenience store workers, Starbucks employees, and bullied schoolchildren, to the travails of those who care for the elderly or deliver packages all through the night. But their understated mundanity is eventually upended by creeping horror, whether that of modern Japanese urban legends and ghost stories, or simply the disturbing actions of people twisted by isolation and paranoia. This ever-growing library of small, dark games is a cold and unsettling little world unto itself. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671921353899-21NV3ZWCK0LNUQ2LQ6X1/1652719021433-gross-ship.jpg My favorite games of 2022 - Iron Lung/Chop Goblins I played Dusk, David Szymanski’s masterful ode to the Quake 1 era of PC FPS games, last year on Switch, and it blew me away. So I couldn’t have been more thrilled when he released not one but two lo-fi, short-form, self-published games on PC this year: Iron Lung, a claustrophobia-horror submarine sim, and Chop Goblins—Serious Sam meets Half-Life 1 meets Gremlins, or something thereabouts. Like an ideal dinner guest, they’re incredibly clever and entertaining while also knowing better than to overstay their welcome. The two games could hardly be more different, while sharing a common sense of ingenuity and purpose. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671921074081-JANAZC2DG12APYN256YB/IuHDCI.jpg My favorite games of 2022 - Butterfly Soup 2 Butterfly Soup is one of my 52 favorite games of all time, so I was very excited to find that Brianna Lei has released a direct sequel this year. As I started playing I found the opening scene or two a bit ponderous and started wondering whether a sequel to Butterfly Soup— a game that ended on a pitch-perfect note of bittersweet teenage metaphor— was really necessary. But by the end of Butterfly Soup 2, Lei had improbably, undoubtedly done it again, extending the first game’s metaphor, and its characters’ queer, immigrant-family stories, into an experience that once again ends with a heart-achingly perfect promise of growth, acceptance, and nostalgia for the moment the characters are living in, right now. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671920642736-TNBTF7PEUMK1W0X9DMN9/4-1-1920x1080.jpg My favorite games of 2022 - The Case of the Golden Idol The detective sim is one of the hardest things to pull off in a video game— because in a book or film, only the detective has to be a genius-level investigator, but in a game, you have to. Or at least the game has to make you feel like you are. Which is no mean feat, since if you get stuck you can just give up (or google a walkthrough…) and the outcome is foreordained anyway, so what’s the point of trying to figure it out yourself? The answer is that the act of figuring has to itself be so innately satisfying and enjoyable that you want to do the work for its own sake, like completing a challenging crossword puzzle, but for murders. And that is just what The Case of the Golden Idol does. As you comb through its tableaux of intrigue and deceit, you’re ever on the lookout for new concepts to plug into its mystery’s enticing blanks, methodically working toward that moment when everything clicks, and you’re on to the next case. Like a master detective, The Case of the Golden Idol puts all the pieces together flawlessly, and pulls off something that in lesser hands might seem impossible. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671921287173-0AZJ0RFCLHJHK8FQD50D/stray-midtown.jpg My favorite games of 2022 - Stray Stray is a cat game, and yes, the cat is cute, and it moves so fluidly, just like a cat really does— but what really stuck with me, down to its bones, is the city the cat so fluidly explores. How can environment art— and the environment itself that the art depicts— be this good? My mind kept flashing to Valve’s games as I played— the rendering, I guess, surfaces not overly specular, lighting soft but cold and clinical, textures just the slightest bit painterly— and that’s certainly no insult. I see myself coming back to Stray, years down the road, just to revisit that vivid and vividly-depicted place. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671921485171-02ENNACJ424DP1ZEPIRZ/27737291-6498-4bcb-b446-5b03ec419500.png My favorite games of 2022 - Citizen Sleeper Citizen Sleeper is one of my favorite kind of text adventures— the kind with stats— and it’s also in one of my favorite kinds of fictional milieu— grungy low-orbit cyber sci-fi, in the vein of Neuormancer or Cowboy Bebop— and it also features the art of one of my favorite character illustrators, Guillame Singelin. So what’s not to like? There isn’t much not to like, it turns out. Citizen Sleeper is the story of one down-and-out android— you— plus the interesting cast of characters you encounter as you just try to survive, and then maybe, if you’re lucky, even find your way to something a little bit better. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671927857082-4W720PFIIC7DPCGAQTEQ/Capture.PNG My favorite games of 2022 - Inscryption Inscryption is a crazy game, plain and simple. I had heard of it, but visiting the game’s website is what finally pulled me in and got me to play. Even the website is crazy. Head over there, click the “Exit Game” button on the screen (or interact with the little external disk drive there next to the monitor) and then just start exploring. If that doesn’t draw you in to whatever the hell Inscryption is, I don’t know what will. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1671922050339-ZYXO3XRXPCK38M8DRLHK/Tactical-Breach-Wizards-screenshot-2021-04-27-14-38-11.png My favorite games of 2022 - Tactical Breach Wizards (playtest) Maybe it’s a little unfair to include a game that’s not released yet, but I’d say that just the playtest build of a game making it onto my year-end list makes it notable in and of itself. Tactical Breach Wizards is a (deep breath) isometric turn-based supernatural/spec ops tactical roleplaying game— and it’s great. It’s already incredibly polished, balanced, thoughtful, and addictive, and it might still be in development for who knows how long. But as someone who was lucky enough to get to play it early, take my word for it: you’ll want to keep an eye out for this game. https://stevegaynor.com/newsletter-archive daily 0.75 2026-03-25 https://stevegaynor.com/favorite-games-2023 daily 0.75 2024-01-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182044145-PBF5AXB8YJQC3MG84QO0/maxresdefault.jpg My favorite games of 2023 - Betrayal at Club Low A number of developers have attempted the vaunted “one city block” game, famously described by Warren Spector a couple of decades ago, but perhaps none has been as successful as last year’s Betrayal at Club Low. It’s small, it’s lo-fi, it’s completely strange— and it completely successfully expresses the “immersive sim” ethos through completely unexpected means: not first-person skulking but a bird’s-eye view; not weapons and powers but dice-rolls nudged and tilted by the player’s choices; not a cyber agent or a steampunk assassin but a pizza delivery secret agent tasked with infiltrating a nightclub any way they know how— and inevitably that will involve the power of crust, sauce, cheese, and dance. Betrayal at Club Low is a compact game featuring an explosion of possible player paths, which makes replaying and experimenting less daunting and more rewarding than it would be in a much larger title. Its one-of-a-kind off-kilter sensibility manages to create its own internally consistent world, one where adding extra basil to your pie will obviously give you the edge you need to get the dancefloor crowd on your side, granting you access to the DJ booth that holds your next objective. It’s a thoughtful, singular, surprising, hilarious, and fully-realized game that won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the IGF for very good reason. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182043616-4QCGFCZSP9G6D1VPS2FM/Myhousepk3_title+%281%29.png My favorite games of 2023 - MyHouse.wad I’ve sung the praises of My House in the Fullbright Newsletter already, but suffice it to say, one of my favorite— if not very favorite— game experiences I had in 2023 was a free user-made map for 1993’s Doom II. It really bears avoiding all spoilers before you experience it for yourself, if you can: just follow the link (don’t read past the first few posts), download GZDoom, apply Doom2.wad, and play. My House is a trip down the rabbit hole, one that seemingly the further you go, the less there’s any end in sight. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182043399-UNDHLOJRSD4YK7E0084N/dave_the_diver_1.jpg My favorite games of 2023 - Dave the Diver Can a game be every game? According to Dave the Diver, yes it can. The core pitch is compelling on its own— by day, scuba dive to catch rare fish in the ocean depths; by night, run a sushi restaurant and serve those fish to your customers— but once you get playing, you find that Dave the Diver, incredibly, seems to quite literally have it all. Side-scrolling procedurally-generated fish hunting action and restaurant management sim, sure— but also equipment and ability upgrades. Crafting. Farming. Rhythm games. Every flavor of QTE. Photo challenges. Stealth missions. Visual novel sequences. Massive bossfights. (Sea)horse racing! Quests and side-quests . Bullet Hell! By the end I was honestly more surprised there hadn’t been an FPS level than if there had been one. But on top of all its jaw-dropping design maximalism, it’s just a darn good, entertaining, well-made game, unmistakably full of heart. Once you dive in, Dave the Diver’s massive popularity comes as no surprise. There’s more beneath the surface than you’d imagine. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182042734-JNNT4SGXP706ZHDINH2T/gloomwood-early-access-review-pc-key-art.jpg My favorite games of 2023 - Gloomwood Co-developed by the creator of Dusk, Iron Lung and Chop Goblins (the latter two of which were on my GOTY list last year), Gloomwood is clearly a game by people who love Thief: The Dark Project, for people who love Thief: The Dark Project, but polished up and reimagined to bring it lovingly into the modern day. Along with sporting an in-world version of Thief’s light gem (thank god,), it’s definitely got a healthy dash of Dishonored in there, and a knowingly retro-modern indie sensibility that gives it an identity all its own. If you love a game where your first instinct upon entering a new room is to crouch in the darkest corner you can find and listen for the tapping of a guard’s approaching footsteps, preferably while there are no more than a few hundred polygons onscreen at most— Gloomwood is the game for you. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182042598-A6RJNMMIJ5S0ZFB4XV8G/FARLoneSails-Screenshot01-SnowyLandscape.jpg My favorite games of 2023 - FAR: Lone Sails Most games I can think of that might readily be described as “meditative” tend to have more of a systemic focus— solving low-pressure puzzles, nurturing a garden or tending a town. But the moments that stuck with me most from FAR: Lone Sails, a linear, atmospheric narrative game, had a distinctly meditative feel, as you and your trusty vehicle trundle slowly across a calm, expansive plain, the camera pulling back so far that the movement from left to right is hardly perceptible, and the entire screen takes on the feeling of a washy landscape painting. The game is small, short, and quiet— completely wordless, in fact— but in those moments of meditative tranquility, it feels big as the horizon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182040724-WGUCR0GGDZDSKCOTYPMY/TunicManual2.jpg My favorite games of 2023 - Tunic I skipped Tunic, originally— doing a Link to the Past as a little fox wasn’t something I felt the need to jump on right away. But earlier this year someone was telling me about the game, and about how it centers on discovering secrets in a lovingly-crafted NES-era game manual that you assemble page-by-page as you explore— and immediately, I was in. And let me tell you, the manual does NOT disappoint. The illustrations are spot on, it’s inscribed with ballpoint pen notes here and there from the prior owner, and you can zoom in far enough to see the Ben-Day dots in the printing! Tunic is a game about love. Love for the games it’s in debt to, sure— which include not just Link to the Past, but Dark Souls and The Witness, among others— but love of the playing of these kinds of games in general, love of the sense of discovery and wonder that comes with them, love of the moments as a child when you were playing these otherworldly pixelated things that existed on the other side of your TV screen, cross-legged on the living room floor, scouring every page of the game booklet and the relevant issue of Nintendo Power, trying to unlock their secrets any way you could think of, your mom doing needlepoint on the couch with a cup of tea, incandescent lamplight filling the evening with a sense of warmth and comfort… Tunic is about everything about being that kid playing Nintendo, and being the adult, now, who used to be that kid, and all the space and time and bittersweetness in between. Tunic is beautiful. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182041156-XOY5NWZ2J1V641ZKGE0D/Key+Art+-+DREDGE+%28No+Logo%29.png My favorite games of 2023 - Dredge Well, somebody had a good idea. You know how in Lovecraft stories there’s like, decrepit coastal fishing towns that have been corrupted by the old gods? With ancient creatures emerging from the depths, and scaly fish people creeping amongst the wharves and pilings? And you know how fishing games are a thing? Alright, get this: a fishing game, but Lovecraft! And by god, it works! Dredge is clever, satisfying, and exceptionally well-made— and, perhaps unexpectedly for a fishing game, it has quite a well-wrought story that arrives at a dramatic, satisfying conclusion. I guess, along with Dave the Diver, Dredge is the second fishing-but-not-just-fishing game on this list. The year was 2023, weird, unexpected indie fishing games were having their moment, and I couldn’t have been happier. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182037840-JM10SCRM8F2VZKJZFU4T/NotForBroadcastReviewKRSOpinion-900x496.png My favorite games of 2023 - Not For Broadcast So, here’s another one I couldn’t have seen coming: TV newscast control room simulator. Not For Broadcast is an FMV game, but one where the full-motion video in question is in fact video in the fiction of the game itself: video on the monitors of the control room you’re put in charge of, as you choose when and what to edit into the nightly news, skewing the public’s opinion of the political upheaval of the day, resulting in far-reaching repercussions that could change the course of history in the nation and the world. At times the game is simply mind-boggling in its myriad branches and their knock-on effects; the sheer volume of unseen content in any single playthrough is staggering. And that’s what gives the game its power: that you feel you really are stumbling through an unpredictable sequence of innumerable possibilities, ending up inhabiting a reality that you most definitely had a hand in creating, but that you nevertheless could have in no way predicted. Surreal, funny, stressful, occasionally terrifying, and utterly, utterly unique. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182039566-57PK81R14HJCYR9E4WO6/draculaethumb-1692481849303.jpg My favorite games of 2023 - Quantum Break/Control/El Paso, Elsewhere I, like many people, it seems, didn’t pay a ton of attention to Quantum Break, the game Remedy released before Control, when it came out in 2016. It was an Xbox One exclusive that incorporated TV show episodes (?) between chapters of the game, and it didn’t seem particularly well received. There was other stuff to play. But late this year I was playing a daily round of Guess the Game, and the title that came up was Quantum Break, and I was like… that actually looks pretty sick. So I bought it in the Steam holiday sale— and you know what? This game rocks! I mean, okay, I’d have to say that the plot really doesn’t make any sense, as time loop plots often tend not to. And since I was playing it on Steam Deck, the TV episodes didn’t play at all for some reason, so I just kind of filled in the gaps on those myself. But the game itself is a lot of good, chunky, straightforward fun, using your time powers to get the drop on enemies and solve environmental puzzles, upgrading your powers and exploring new environments, playing through crazy setpieces like a tanker ship in dry-dock collapsing in on itself as you dive through it while pausing time to keep from being crushed by falling pieces of hull— and, having played it, Control, which felt like it pretty much came out of nowhere at the time, now made total sense. The highly mobile, guns-and-powers gameplay was nearly perfected in Quantum Break, and so could be dropped practically fully-formed into Control, merging with that game’s one-of-a-kind tone and sense of place and strangeness to create something truly next-level. I did play through all of Quantum Break on Steam Deck, which then gave me a hankering to see if I could get Control looking good and running at 60fps on there— which I did, and then, well, I’ve just continued with a full playthrough from there. For me, late 2023 was Remedy throwback time all the time. Which brings us to El Paso, Elsewhere, a game that is Remedy throwback down to its bones, an indie game that asks the important questions: What if Max Payne were a PS1 game, and had vampires? I really, really love the vibe of the narrative side of the game, the aesthetic of the cutscene visuals, the ethos behind the game being written, directed, and the main character voiced all by one person— it feels very personal, very individualistic, very endearing, very cool. I wish I could love the game part of the game nearly as much as the rest of it— with 50 levels of the samey, basic shooting, it would’ve overstayed its welcome at half its length— but El Paso, Elsewhere is still a game I’m glad I got to play, and that I’m more than happy to support. If there’s one game I wish I could have the experience of playing again for the first time a hundred times over, it’s 30 Flights of Loving— and El Paso, Elsewhere feels like one of those games where, even if it doesn’t approach those same heights, it comes from that same place, and I am so, so grateful to get a glimpse of that place again in whatever form it takes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182038796-34XH91R9HU8E1YGEIKZ8/super-mario-bros-wonder-review-header-2nd.jpg My favorite games of 2023 - Super Mario Bros. Wonder Mario games have always been about psychedelics, right? Eating amanita mushrooms to change size and gain powers, warping between worlds, encountering strange creatures that float on clouds and flap on wings they shouldn’t have— but with Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I guess Nintendo just went full-on, “the new Mario is all about trippin’ balls!” In every level there’s a “Wonder Flower” to find that upon touching it, the entire level goes completely off its rocker, warp pipes crawling along the ground like oversized inch worms, koopa troopas sliding up and down invisible ramps every which way, air turning into water so you start swimming where a moment ago you were standing, stampedes of wild buffalo-type creatures creating a living wave you ride on the crest of high into the sky, the player’s legs simply getting verrry loooooonggg— until the effects wear off and you’re back to the “real” world, looking for the source of your next trip. Here’s another thing I never imagined saying: the new Mario game is most definitely influenced by Dark Souls. If you’re connected to the internet while you play, you’ll see phantoms of other players traversing the level alongside you, just like you glimpse phantoms of other players moving through your world while playing Dark Souls; players can leave little markers anywhere they can stand that other players online can see, allowing players to help each other out asynchronously by leaving wordless pointers as to where invisible platforms and hidden passages are; if you fall in a pit or would otherwise die, you instead turn into a little ghost, and have a few seconds to touch a marker that another player has left behind, or touch another player’s phantom directly, to be returned to life on the spot without having to reset back to a checkpoint. It’s all very Soulsy, in a delightful and unexpected way. In adopting the realtime-but-asynchronous cooperation of the Souls games the new Mario benefits greatly, and proves that the design of all games, no matter how wide the chasm in style, tone, or content, truly is in continuous dialogue with one another. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1705182038584-OU48HAKV86YOPRT7IOF4/TLOU1-DS.png My favorite games of 2023 - Dark Souls Remastered & The Last of Us Part I Hey, speak of the devil: Maybe due to 2023 having been the 10th anniversary of Gone Home’s initial release, I spent some time this year having some real 10-years-ago hours, revisiting both Dark Souls and The Last of Us. In fact, I beat Dark Souls for the very first time this year, having made it as far as those goddamn lance archers in Anor Londo during my first playthrough 10+ years ago, and having made it partway through the game multiple times since then in the intervening years— this time around I played the Remastered version on Steam Deck, which made it easier to pick up and play when I had a little time to make some progress, and I think for the first time I didn’t take the Master Key as my starting item, which actually makes the game way easier to find your way through, since you don’t end up opening up a bunch of back entrances and shortcuts before you’re ready for them. I only summoned help for one or two bosses, I only googled where to go next a couple of times— and by god, I finally made it! And truth be told, it was incredibly satisfying to finally finish the game. I’d completed other FromSoft games before this— Bloodborne, Elden Ring, even got to the final boss of Sekiro (which happened right around when my daughter was born, so I never got back to that one…) but beating Dark Souls had its own unique feel of having gone through a rite of passage I’m thankful to no longer have let pass me by. And then, there’s The Last of Us Part I, the PS5 remake of the first game, which really just gave me such an appreciation for the power of the fundamentals when it comes to a game experience. Yes, The Last of Us has a great script, incredible performance capture, beautiful environments— but so much of the moment-to-moment is stripped back to the basics, just a simple, rock-solid core loop of quietly exploring an environment, finding some useful resources, having a nice, chunky combat encounter, hitting a story beat, and then doing it all over again (with the occasional big-budget setpiece thrown in at regular intervals.) Though Naughty Dog is known first and foremost as a “story” company, what I really appreciate is how much of the time The Last of Us just leaves you alone to play the game at your own pace, explore under your own guidance, and even in story moments how much it focuses on getting in, giving you what you need to know, and getting you back to player control as quickly and genuinely as possible. It’s a game that reminds you that not necessarily doing a lot, but doing it all incredibly well, serves the player far better than an experience with twice as much going on but half as much room to breathe. The Last of Us appreciates the player, and I appreciate it in return. https://stevegaynor.com/favorite-games-2024 daily 0.75 2024-12-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732918267317-5P5D8G41L4BL2EIPKV44/aotk.png My favorite games of 2024 - Anthology of the Killer As soon as I played its first episode, I knew Anthology of the Killer would have to be my game of the year. I mean, episodic gaming— remember that? I love the idea of episodic games! Games as episodes of a TV series, or chapters of a serialized novel, or, most appropriately here, issues of a zine. Games that can dive into one topic, explore it briefly and intensely, then move on before they overstay their welcome. Games that can gradually depict a larger universe and flesh out relatable characters without having to deliver “one big story” that knocks your socks off. I love that part of what Anthology of the Killer does— and I love its off-kilter perspective on the ennui of modern urban life, its garishly endearing art style, its wry humor and surreal tangents… Anthology of the Killer is the kind of game that makes me grateful games exist. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732916138787-9E5JKJZEGVA7ERN9JFKT/EN_Jusant_Standard_Hero_Background_R-scaled.jpg My favorite games of 2024 - Jusant A game can be just nice and beautiful. To climb, to discover new vistas, to contemplate. Art clearly inspired by Mœbius, gameplay inspired by the climbing in Shadow of the Colossus, Breath of the Wild and, I’m sure, real life. A marked departure for the creators of Life is Strange; a journey well worth taking yourself. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732916350077-PTOXFONIHHRMO2E24VHI/gmg.png My favorite games of 2024 - Discover My Body/Growing My Grandpa! I was introduced to the games of creator Yames via a collection of dithered, distorted gifs on tumblr— writhing humanoid shapes, strange terminology, corrupted graphics. It looked like if you tried to run a game intended for SVGA graphics on a CGA monitor, and the game was about some sort of dissection experiment, possibly being undertaken by the subject of the experiment itself. It was Discover My Body, a short, disturbing free game, which led me to Yames’s most recent and largest commercial game, Growing My Grandpa! The game is phenomenal, crossing Cronenberg’s body horror and fascination with medical and scientific experiments with a deep interest in folkloric rites and shamanism. The game is in something like the form of an early-to-mid-’90s point-and-click adventure with prerendered elements (perhaps a bit like The Dark Eye, but with less saturated colors and less outright claymation.) Yames’s games are such a pure lens into one person’s esoteric obsessions, and I couldn’t love them more for that. Follow his Patreon for updates on his next games, Father Turned Me Into Trees and Rivers and Plastic Spouse Interrogation. I mean, the titles alone… https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732916746495-12QGC661KPAH4W8VIEJY/buckshotroulette.png My favorite games of 2024 - Buckshot Roulette I don’t know if there’s ever been a good Russian Roulette game before, but there is now. And really, it’s a perfect topic for a video game: the rules are simple and familiar; there are obvious ways to add power-ups and other modifications; and it’s the kind of thing that almost no one is going to do in real life (for good reason) but that is safe and transgressively fun to explore in digital form. And Buckshot Roulette really pulls it off with panache. It leans into the grimy, edgy nature of the concept with cheeky aplomb and serves up an addicting game of chance and strategy that’s hard not to love. Its dithered, lo-fi graphics, tiltable odds-based gameplay, and gritty edge were among the many direct inspirations for the first entry in the Fullbright Presents series; I’m glad people are making weird stuff like this, so I can make weird stuff like that. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732916870895-NBHDARLVXA1QTIED81F2/animalwell.png My favorite games of 2024 - Animal Well The localized semiotics that video games are capable of creating are such a beautiful thing. Sure, gamers know that whenever you see a red barrel, it carries with it the affordance of exploding when damaged. But some games, like Animal Well, temporarily reconfigure our brains so that seeing a platform in a certain arrangement with a switch underneath it obviously means that what you need to do right now is deploy your yo-yo. A slinky, a frisbee, a bubble wand; in Animal Well, they transform from children’s toys into specific tools with specific applications, translating the gameworld itself into a system of signs that communicates to us what we can, and should, do, at any given point. The way that gaining an understanding of a game’s mechanics can turn any given frame from a static image into a complex set of functional instructions for how to interact with it is truly a glorious thing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732916571066-WGHD3LTDDPI3J74IHJZT/hrot2.png My favorite games of 2024 - HROT Quake, but make it Soviet! Many games that hark back to FPS titles of the 1997 vintage try to correct what are now seen as outmoded tropes: too brown, too punishing, too much reliance on searching for keys. HROT says: no! Browner! More punishing! More archaic! It shows that sometimes the old ways are still the best ways. And, fascinatingly enough, many of the locations in the game are based on real places in Prague and the Czech Republic, meaning that HROT qualifies as edutainment. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732917193941-KSK6D9OC9HYN77DMSRUN/jokers.png My favorite games of 2024 - Balatro What if poker, but for nerds? Poker with power-ups? Poker, but using the magic of computers to completely break the game, and by doing so, win. Who knew that a clever, funny, surprising, geeky, self-assured super-mutation of one of the most familiar card games in history would become one of the indisputable games of 2024? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732916580074-0EAF39S3O0Z3CODOESCO/mouthwashing.png My favorite games of 2024 - Mouthwashing A short, first-person sci-fi narrative game where a handful of crewmembers are stranded after a space disaster and must try to figure out how to cope and survive the fallout. They’ve been made obsolete, one of the last manned crews in the void; they have become expendable. As you explore where the crew lives and works you’ll discover what makes them tick, and have a hand in what their fate might be. You’ll be shocked to learn, dear reader, I liked it. There’s a layer of bleak, twisted surreality that suffuses the entire game, and lo-fi Dreamcast-era graphics accented throughout with some truly impressive shader effects. A messed-up, engrossing, memorable game, and just an aesthetic experience worth having, if you’re ready to get your hands dirty. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732916990817-PTJ8I16BZIP15Y51TGN6/squirrelstapler.png My favorite games of 2024 - Squirrel Stapler/Butcher's Creek (demo) It seems like it just wouldn’t be one of my GOTY lists at this point without some entry by David Szymanski, and here we are. Squirrel Stapler takes one of those deer hunting games you’d see sold in cardboard sleeves piled in a bin in the electronics department of Walmart and, well, turns it psychotic. Follow your delusion as you hunt for pelts to dress your blushing bride. It’s demented… it’s fantastic. And Butcher’s Creek is only a demo so far, but it’s a straight-up throwback to Condemned: Criminal Origins, hands-down the best melee-focused first-person action game ever, taking those Se7en-esque serial killer vibes and shoving them into a filthy basement under a shack in Appalachia. It’s pretty much Condemned, but yuckier, and I’m here for it. Thank you David, for making the pixelated nightmares I adore. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732917006798-PWG9MN0H5LDLLAJPU276/UFO50.png My favorite games of 2024 - UFO 50 Fictions within fictions: 50 fictional 8-bit games, created by a fictional game development studio, released on a fictional game console. But the true story behind it is heartwarming: two real-life childhood friends grew up making simple 2D video games together, and now, having become successful professional game developers in their adult lives, they pulled together a group of collaborators to create this expansive, inspired collection of wildly varied retro game experiences. Platformers, brawlers, shooters, a point-and-click horror adventure, head-to-head competitive games and quiet single-player puzzlers, UFO 50 has something for everyone. If you pick it up, be sure not to miss Fist Hell (more linear than River City Ransom, more systems-y than Double Dragon), Night Manor (an Uninvited/Shadowgate-like with Clock Tower vibes), Party House (a semi-indescribable strategy-puzzle game with randomization elements and a Maniac Mansion NES visual style), or Valbrace (a classic Wizardry-style dungeon crawler with Punch-Out-like combat mechanics.) Just like when you were renting NES games from the local video store as a kid, you won’t love them all, but I guarantee you will find something to love. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732917454961-J7EOE5SB5RNVHTVUGBSW/WoL.png My favorite games of 2024 - West of Loathing I’m late on this one: it’s not a 2024 game, it’s not even a 2020s game; it’s a 2017 game. And I did play the first chapter of it when it first came out, but I got out into the world map and I guess just fell off my horse and never got back on. Until now, that is. And I’m damn glad I did, because West of Loathing is one of the funniest, most joyful, silly, heartful games I’ve played, probably ever. The black-and-white stick figure art is often unexpectedly quite lovely to look at, and the humor has a kind of Mel Brooksian wackiness, but with a knowingly sardonic tinge that makes it land just on the right side of goofy. I loved it, every minute, and if you messed up and missed it first time around like I did, now’s a great time to go back and see how the west was fun* :) *An example of humor that would never make the cut in this game. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732917102963-KQG6X06LT7JX9RF2UNVP/GaGwhpXXYAAaZiw.jpg My favorite games of 2024 - Wild Bastards Well I’ll be danged, pardner, if we ain’t got another Western game on our hands! I didn’t actually know about Wild Bastards til I saw its 9/10 review in Edge Magazine* and so, being a huge fan of Void Bastards and Blue Manchu in general (founded and run by the co-founder of Irrational Games and lead developer on BioShock, Jon Chey), I snapped Wild Bastards up in a heartbeat. And I really, really enjoyed it. It takes the 2.5D brilliance of Void Bastards as its base and mixes in a kind of single-player Overwatch-y hero shooter approach? Throughout the game you’re doing the classic thing of rounding up your posse for the big final showdown, and each of the crew you gather has their own unique weapon and special power that they can fire off to turn the odds in their favor. It might be converting damage into healing for a limited time, it might be randomly deleting one enemy from the playing field (cross your fingers it’s the big armored tank and not one of the piddling little ankle-biters), and you can bring any two of the crew into battle and swap them out at will. The mechanical space is really enjoyable, and there are at least a couple of the characters you’ll likely develop a real fondness for. If you’re into combinatoric, -Shocky first-person combat and rogue-lite progression through a procedurally arranged Old West galaxy far, far away… well golly, pardner, have I got the game for you. * Did you know they still make those? Print magazines? I resubscribed to both PC Gamer and Edge this year, and it’s been really lovely finding nice surprises like these in their pages. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732917455549-R8N1CGOG8YB83HUG5RXB/vermis.png My favorite games of 2024 - Vermis I In a slightly unorthodox move we have an entry that’s not a game at all, but a physical guidebook for a game that pointedly does not exist. Vermis I is heavily inspired by From Software’s oeuvre reaching back to the King’s Field days and through to Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, but with a wretched, black metal, corrupted-pixels aesthetic that brings the experience of paging through this tome to another level. There are some really clever game design ideas in here; there are certainly some points reading through that you’ll wish this were a real game you could play. But perhaps, like so many games we read about in magazines and preview articles growing up, the Vermis we imagine is better than the Vermis we could play would ever be. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1732947746217-EQ6BZ120RZQOV7B3Y13M/stalker2.png My favorite games of 2024 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 While I haven’t completed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 yet, but I did play the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on release, and loved it, and made it to the end credits (no mean feat, frankly, considering its legendary jankiness and brutal difficulty spikes.) I’m loving S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 so far as well, and I know I’ll love the many more hours I’ll be putting into it. There’s just something it captures, the feeling of being a lone agent in an uncaring Zone filled with desperate characters out for riches and glory but who are also somehow the most downtrodden sadsack sons of bitches on the face of the Earth. Wide open fields, treacherous anomalies, thrilling freeform firefights in and around the rusted skeletons of the Zone’s crumbling infrastructure. It is the survivalist’s dream of what systems-driven first-person RPGs, immersive sims and what they’ve inspired (particularly Far Cry 2) have wrought. It is desolate. It is unforgiving. And somehow it is often strangely beautiful. https://stevegaynor.com/gotys daily 0.75 2025-12-21 https://stevegaynor.com/favorite-games-2025 daily 0.75 2025-11-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1764876959315-JCXZJ8SMN0N6ZRJP4PB6/routine-test-04_6390094.jpg My favorite games of 2025 - Routine A game could hardly be more made for me. An incredibly tangibly rendered retro-future moonbase filled with buzzing CRTs and chunky buttons— and where every room you step into is newly gorgeous, and newly menacing. The first full level is an ‘80s shopping mall on the moon— like if NASA designed the Nostromo, and it contained a neon-lit video arcade and was soundtracked by echoing, distorted muzak. My liminal, nightmare paradise. Routine may be the first truly perfect-looking game I’ve ever played, but it’s more than just looks (though just HOW incredible the looks are really bears repeating: every square inch feels hand-sculpted and considered to the finest degree, and the gentle VHS filtering adds just enough distance to make it feel somehow more photoreal than “photorealism” can normally capture.) But it’s also about the feel of existing in the place: everything presented in a way that’s completely physical, and completely hands-off. At first it’s easy to get stumped on what should be a simple obstacle, until you retrain yourself to stop thinking about how to progress based on years of ingrained video game logic and instead approach things as you would if you were really there, really stranded, really in that room, really on your own, and really had to figure out what to do based just on what’s in the space with you. And the whole game works this way. There was at least one later puzzle that I felt stumped and annoyed by and was on the verge of googling a walkthrough when I reminded myself: everything I need must be there. I need to think about it the way I would if I were in this situation and there was no walkthrough. And I had an epiphany and I worked it out. It wasn’t anything that was comically obscure or unfair; it was just something I’d overlooked. I hadn’t been thinking carefully enough. Putting myself fully in this beautiful, terrible place got me through. And the “terrible” part is because this is an Amnesia-like experience where you are being stalked by things that want you dead, and your only recourse is to sneak, and run, and hide. If you’ve seen anything about the game, you’ve seen the killer security robots that hunt you on stomping feet and scan the corridors with clacking red laser grids. But believe me when I say that much worse awaits you in the second half of the game, and it is exhilarating. My brain is completely cooked as far as being scared by video games goes; like someone who’s spent too many years and too many hours watching splatter films to be shocked by horror movies anymore, most horror games get an appreciative chuckle or a startled raising of the eyebrows from me, if that. Routine, however, is the first game I’ve played since probably Resident Evil 7 that gave me moments where I felt truly terrified, where just a glimpse or a whisper of something coming around a corner literally gave me chills and made my hair stand on end— where I actually felt scared. And I loved, loved, loved it. I did die a number of times, but in general the stalkers have a perfect balance of engaging you suddenly, chasing you but not too quickly, and losing track of you pretty easily, so when you break line of sight and hide behind something you’re usually— usually— safe. But you’re never quite sure. You’re never quite comfortable. You’re always on edge. And you’re always in awe: of how gorgeous the game is, how incredible it sounds, how confident and complete a production it is— that something like this could be accomplished by such a small crew over such a long time, to such an exacting degree. Routine is my game of the year, and the game I’ve been most wowed by in who knows how long. If any of this sounds appealing to you at all, please play it. If you’re anything like me, you will be far from disappointed. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762893758476-80IIAKD1AVPIAI7UAHHC/E8XpZtUGx6NDgtukMZiRVZ.jpg My favorite games of 2025 - Skin Deep Demos can be very hit-or-miss for me. Often I play a demo, it doesn’t click with me, and then if I do eventually play the game I end up loving it. Or, I play a demo, am over the moon for it, and then the full game leaves me cold. Skin Deep fits into the former category, to the extreme. After playing the demo, I just wasn’t sold; after completing the full game, I knew it would be a major player in my GOTY list without a doubt. So if you tried the demo and it didn’t hook you, give the full game a go. Skin Deep truly feels like the apotheosis of the Blendoverse. It has all the hallmarks of the last two decades of Blendo games (a strange and idiosyncratically twee retro-futuristic world of analog espionage and intrigue; bold color blocking; cats with cube-shaped heads) elevated to the form of a comedic, chaotic, systems-heavy immersive sim. And between its dense, compact, surprising mechanics-driven levels (highlights include spacefaring fast food drive thrus, an interplanetary post office, and a mech repair depot where, yes, you can repair and pilot the mech) are first-person story levels that match or rival the sheer pleasure offered by 30 Flights of Loving and the interstitial chapters of Quadrilateral Cowboy. As someone who’s been visiting the Blendoverse ever since the Citizen Abel days, this really feels like the completion of something. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762894517987-4N0O9MSE1H7OZFD6E32P/4hmPuufDgRAsjXKb9j74Xg-1920-80.jpg My favorite games of 2025 - s.p.l.i.t. Another year, another game by Mike Klubnika on the GOTY list— and not the only game he released this year, even! The dude is prolific, and incredibly inspiring; his work is often exceptionally dark but with a comic edge; his grimy lo-fi visual style and music/sound design are perfectly measured to express the tone his games are going for; and the games themselves are clever, surprising, strange, disturbing, and impossible to forget. s.p.l.i.t. is a spectacularly bleak, intense one-room game about pulling off— or trying to pull off— a cyber heist with life-or-death stakes. “Intense command line action” is a strange subgenre description, but that’s what this is; dust off your DOS prompt skills and buckle up, you’re in for one hell of a ride. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1763582001609-8OC3DJ9JZ0KUYRPBJ3N0/LornsHypogea.png My favorite games of 2025 - Lorn's Lure/Hypogea Megastructures are having a moment. Crumbling labyrinths of brutalist concrete, winding pipes and dangling chains, all at a scale that dwarfs the individual. Who made these places? What were they for? And how do you get out? Well… Lorn’s Lure: Imagine it: Half-Life 1’s jumping puzzles meet the inevitable part of a FromSoft game where you’re walking along impossibly skinny ledges wondering whether you’re even supposed to be able to get to this part of the map. That’s Lorn’s Lure! And it rocks! You’ll jump, climb, skid and clamber all over its decaying, unknowable megastructure, searching for— dreaming of— a way out. A beautiful, mysterious, anxiety-inducing, achingly solitary experience. Hypogea: Like the chill, relaxing PS2 platformer version of Lorn’s Lure. Has tasting notes of maybe Ico meets Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (minus the rewind mechanic)? Driven by a fun and novel traversal mechanic built around a staff you can use both for pole vaulting and grabbing onto chains and ledges. An essentially wordless game populated by an array of curious abandoned robots, the entire enterprise exudes an air of quiet wonder. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762896223496-WHMMCXUO6D4273VK1L6B/images.steamusercontent.jpg My favorite games of 2025 - Eclipsium Moreso than maybe any walking simulator I’ve played since Dear Esther, Eclipsium really is at its heart a “walk forward through areas” game— but what areas they are! You’ll pick your way through an ever-mutating procession of fever dreams and outright nightmares, accompanied only by your own unsettling FMV first-person hands. Many of the areas in the game especially later on are utterly mind-boggling, to the point where even with my going-on-20-years of game dev experience I have trouble imagining how they pulled them off. Gripping, bewildering, utterly beautiful in all its corrupted, pixelated, overly-posterized glory (remember when your Voodoo Graphics card would overheat and the screen would pop to EGA colors before shutting down? The whole game looks like that) Eclipsium is a series of bad dreams that make for a great game. Oh, and speaking of demos, the demo for Eclipsium is actually all unique content not present in the full game, so load it up first, think of it as a prologue chapter, and enjoy. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762897161119-2JLLT0XV0XU6CND6XYFM/PigfaceButchersCreek.png My favorite games of 2025 - PIGFACE/Butcher's Creek It would be hard to call the unexpected indie first-person Manhunt revival a “pleasant” surprise, but if you’ve been hankering for that certain mid-aughts brand of queasy, nihilistic splatter, 2025 was a great year. Butcher’s Creek is another banger by perennial honoree of the GOTY list David Szymanski. Creator of Dusk, Iron Lung, Chop Goblins, Squirrel Stapler— and now, a loving homage first and foremost to Monolith’s Condemned: Criminal Origins, but nearly equally to Rockstar’s stealth snuff film opus, and to the psycho-with-a-hammer-in-the-woods strand of low-budget video store exploitation fare. If you wished there was more Condemned without all that crime scene investigating and with more of a smirk and a touch of the old gods, take a trip down to Butcher’s Creek. Once you arrive, the population quickly begins to drop. Then there’s Pigface, the story of a ruthless assassin (are they an “assassin” if they kill everyone within a half block radius? Or is that just a hired mass murderer?) who’s called on by their anonymous handler to drag themselves out of their shithole apartment and descend upon rural meth labs, decrepit subway stations, abandoned motels, and other thoroughly unclean-feeling locales to clear out the bands of masked, heavily-armed dirtbags that dwell within. Simple but strangely satisfying first-person firearm-and-melee combat powers a pleasingly nasty romp through all the worst places modern America has to offer. Still in Early Access as of this writing, so if you can’t get enough, more is on its way. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762908947163-5PA9SUBKNHLQ5WFAL7LR/incision-thumb-1696362954962.jpg My favorite games of 2025 - Incision THE EARTH HAS BEEN HOLLOWED OUT, HOUSING A NEWLY FORMED STRUCTURE. THE SEA OF FLESH SPAWNS TOXIN INTO THE AIR AND THE FILTH SEEPS OUT OF THE FALSE-STEEL OF ITS STRUCTURES. THE RUST ORGAN SPITS ITS MOLTEN STEEL INTO THE VAST CAVERNS OF FILTH AND THE HOT AIR STINGS THROUGH MY METALLIC CHASSIS. This is just part of the load screen text for one of the early levels in Incision, a capital-B Boomer Shooter that’s deeply concerned with flesh, filth, and entire worlds made of both. You should play it. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762909725216-3R3372KXJJSMXC1ZY3F9/uCpo5GwYfneZtRTaPnhUSF.jpg My favorite games of 2025 - Caput Mortum One of a number of games on this list that I discovered via Alpha Beta Gamer’s YouTube channel, Caput Mortum has this fantastic look and feel that I would think of as something like Myst-meets-Amnesia? It has what feels like a very consciously mid-2000s visual style (the closest referent that jumps to mind is the visuals of Serious Sam?) and a really weird default control scheme (that you can thankfully switch to “modern” mode in the options) but it is, in the end, a first-person puzzle/horror game where you independently control the analogue position of your right hand to pick up objects, open doors, and at certain points even fend off shambling golems that would just as well see you dead as you delve deeper and deeper into a medieval alchemist’s subterranean lair. It has this wonderful, unearthly atmosphere to it, it’s never too terribly difficult but always weird and surprising in a kind of pleasingly low-key way, and it’s wrapped up in a few hours. I played, I think, the entire thing (give or take) on a single plane flight back from LA on my Steam Deck, and I couldn’t have been happier with the experience. The kind of game I wish there were more of. Utterly charming. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762910915368-F5FOK9JAV70VR4CST7CQ/Starseed+Dementia+11_11_2025+5_26_53+PM.png My favorite games of 2025 - Starseed Dementia Yames is one of the most absolutely vital game developers working today, and did you know you can get everything he releases as it comes out, along with really fascinating peeks into his process, for just $1 a month? It’s actually nuts. I’ve written about Yames before (specifically in last year’s GOTY list when I highlighted Growing My Grandpa!) but I’m just constantly bowled over by how he expresses his really specific, unique set of obsessions through what he makes. The images that appear and reappear include: being whisked away by an unknowable entity and having your body slowly transformed into something other than human; the clinical observation of bodily processes, dissolution and decay; folkloric ritual and myth made real; the horror of coming into contact with beings from across unfathomably vast spans of time that the human mind can’t even comprehend. To oversimplify, you could find Yames’s work at the crossroads of Cronenberg, Lovecraft and Svenkmajer, but his distressing melding of the medical, mythical and cosmic results in something completely its own, and that’s before even addressing his games’ impeccable aesthetics (magenta and lime color schemes, dithering and posterization to the point of images becoming dustings of stippled pixels, vocal samples that are so destructively distorted as to sound truly alien). You should subscribe to the Patreon (the only way, as of this writing, to get access to Starseed Dementia), and you should play everything Yames has put out publicly on Steam and Itch. Much like the protagonists of his games, to enter these worlds is to come back changed. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762911997171-K3R3QKL29517LVJ4QRYK/Dispatch-%E2%80%93-Telltale-reborn-as-a-workplace-comedy.jpg My favorite games of 2025 - Dispatch This is another one where my arc with demos steered me wrong: for whatever reason, the demo for Dispatch didn’t click for me. The cutscenes looked good but the actual dispatching felt a little thin; I wanted to like it, but I wasn’t hooked. Fast forward to the full game’s release, I started playing it after the 5th and 6th episodes came out, and reader, I binged them all in a day. What didn’t come together for me in demo form really, really does in the full product: the character art and animations are fantastic, the performances are great, it’s legitimately funny, often in a kind of edgy, profane, horny way— it has a surprising amount of bite, which is refreshing to encounter. Every time credits rolled I just wanted to hit that “Next Episode” button, and by god, I did! It’s a classic Telltale game with the production values of a high quality animated streaming series— and the dispatching gameplay is actually really addictive! I didn’t just want to see the story through, I wanted to come back to the actual gamey-game part again and again. And, who thought I’d be this into a superhero thing after what feels like a million years of Marvel movies, but they even managed to find a fresh take on cowls and capes. A triumph of a crowd-pleaser. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53c37cc8e4b0428793d8d4e0/1762912933751-LK6WQOK0MJTT2DDZCW0X/Ghost-of-Yotei-1.jpg My favorite games of 2025 - Ghost of Yotei Listen, you’re a cool sword lady with a wolf friend. You ride the horse and kill the bad guys and, most importantly, can dress up in lots of neat outfits. Sold.