Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, welcome to the final episode of this year, Game of the Year 2021. We’ve done it, we’ve made it. Yep, 52 whole episodes, we did it. We didn’t skip a single week, even when we were tired or extremely hot in the summer, we kept fucking doing it. Well done us. It’s a real testament to what two giant gentlemen can achieve. So yes, very good. So yes, Game of the Year 2021. This is, well, people know of our best games of the year episodes, how we do them. We do two top 10 lists, we count them down, the old borrowed from Chet and John’s sort of deal basically. And so this is an interesting year to do. So I suppose if we start with how was your year generally, and then I’ll talk about my year, we can kind of go from there before we dive into the specific games part of it. Yeah. Well, how was 2021 for me, Matthew Castle, outside of games? I just remember last year, I asked you about how your year was because of the pandemic had obviously been dominated that year. And like you had been through obviously job stuff. And like, you talked a bit about that, you know. Weird year this year, my first full year of freelance. It’s gone so fast, but it sort of split into weird phases where I had like minor obsessions. So I had a little job push very early in the year where I thought, oh, I’m going to really go for something. And I kind of like ended up sort of dedicating a solid month to that. And that didn’t get anywhere hilariously. And then for six months this year, I set up a podcast network at the Yogscast, which was a thing I did, which was strange. A lot of people don’t know I did that, but I was doing that. And again, a sort of freelance capacity. I’ve done a bit of games consulting. So I’ve actually done some mock reviews and things for secret games. So that was exciting. I’ve done my freelance. I’ve done some stuff for Edge and Rock Paper Shotgun. I’ve done this podcast. Lots of bitty stuff. And it’s sort of added up to a year that’s gone incredibly fast and doesn’t really have a character to it because of that. How is your year in comparison? Yeah, I mean, just from the experience of knowing you, the sort of you doing the podcast network stuff was kind of like the sound of the summer, Matthew Castle edition. That was the thing that we talked about in the summer months. And then, yeah, you’ve been doing other stuff more recently. My year was okay. I think that last year was obviously the start of the pandemic. So I wasn’t yet acclimatized to the kind of weird compromised life that makes up pandemic living, which is to say that you don’t feel safe going everywhere. And that feels like it’s unlikely to change any time soon. But I suppose like with restrictions lifting a bit, it was a slightly more normal year. I live in Bath and I worked for Future until November on TechRadar. And then took a kind of like a sort of big leap into working in GamesPR, which is what I’m doing at the moment. And that’s been very exciting, honestly. And like a kind of nice, refreshing sort of change to having a slightly different challenge. So Touchwood, very much enjoying it, going very well. And so that side of things aside, yeah, I got to go to more restaurants this year. Got to go to the cinema a few times. You know, feel like it’s a choice between getting COVID and seeing Spider-Man at the moment, which is tough. But you know, it’s like, it could be a lot worse in a developed country, getting all the jabs I want. And, you know, just looking forward to seeing my family. So yeah, it’s been okay. I think that when you get used to pandemic living, you sort of like tune out of the habit of, well, maybe some of the things you were doing at the start of the pandemic, you’re not doing as much. And so on the gaming side and the media side generally, that’s fed into things a little bit. So yeah, it was a weird year, but I would say a slightly better year than last year. And last year was a slightly better year personally than the year before, which was 2019 was like the Sammy Roberts version of that year when Princess Diana and Charles divorced and the Queen’s castle burned down. That was like the Sammy Roberts version of that. The Annus Horribilis. Yes, that was it. I knew that was a term, but I was unsure about pronouncing it. Well, no one wants to say, and I may have said it wrong, and no one wants to think about the Queen’s horrible annus. Yeah, very good. So yeah, that was my year, Matthew. I suppose then to move to the game side of things, was 2021 a good year for games? That’s the big question. I don’t think so. Well, maybe that’s unfair. I think it was an average year. Doing this podcast has made me realise when we go back and do the best of the year lists, there are certain years which I get so excited by and they’re just like an embarrassment of riches and it isn’t just nostalgia and hindsight. They felt exciting at the time. I think you can feel a killer year when it’s happening around you. And this just wasn’t one for me. I don’t think there was anything I truly loved. Like I didn’t play a single All-Timer, for example, and I think that’s probably reflected in my list. Maybe, is that a classic transition year? I was trying to think of the other transition years that I’ve covered in games where I’ve had that, being able to play lots of things. And I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s particularly bad on that front. Yeah, it’s a weird one. I think that it’s a year that didn’t have obvious winners, maybe in the way that we’re used to seeing obvious winners in different years for best games lists and stuff. Obviously, a lot of blockbusters are still moving back because of COVID production limitations and things like that. So the aftershock of that has seemingly led to this big glut of games coming early next year, which is very exciting. I don’t mind that so much. If anything, it’s kind of made me… It’s weird. What I thought about it, I don’t think there were many games on my list that I enjoyed as much as some of the games I enjoyed from last year. So Your Last of Us 2, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Doom Eternal, for example. Games where I thought those games were… Final Fantasy VII was flawed, but the other two, just really top of the line kind of games. I don’t think there’s anything on my list that I loved as much as those this year. Yeah. Which is not to say there are bad games on my list. Absolutely not. But it’s just, yeah, I guess to me, the winners seemed less clear-cut, you know. My top five I’m reasonably confident with. My bottom five could have been, like, probably about 20 different games. Like, I played so many eight out of tens this year. So many things which I was like, oh, that was really, that was fun. And I haven’t really thought about, or the idea of going back to doesn’t appeal, or things that I started off really liking and then just didn’t finish or, like, burnt out on. You know, you’ve been saying in the run-ups this episode how many more games I’ve played than you. If it’s games I finished, I’ve barely finished any. Just because I ran out of patience with a lot of stuff. I don’t want this to be, like, a Super Downer episode or anything. Games have kept me really busy and I have had plenty of fun with them. But it’s the difference between, like, a huge lake of decent stuff and a few absolute kind of knockouts. You look across the Game of the Year lists and every site has picked something different, pretty much, you know. Which is probably a good thing. I mean, that’s a bit more exciting. It’s a bit spicier. Yeah, for sure. And I still found some correlation between my list and, say, like, Polygon’s list or IGN’s list. And, you know, so there were definitely some favourites in there. Whatever that slightly indefinable quality is of a Back Page podcast game, I feel like we didn’t get many of those. Yeah. And I feel like some people, if you’ve got slightly different tastes, had a much better year. Like, I think, for example, Catherine, aka my wife, had, you know, seemed to have just a constant stream of kooky, cute, endearing indie things, which I sort of bounce off of a bit more. And I know that’s a huge generalisation, but there was a lot of, like, wholesome games this year, and that, like, isn’t entirely my bag. I occupy, I think, a quite awkward spot where I don’t really want to be panned to in terms of, yeah, this is nice, and I’m just going to be a happy escapism, la la la. But neither do I want things to be super grim. I’ve got a very small gap in between wholesome and unpleasant that I want to hit. So maybe my demand is just too much for this year. Well, the other thing, of course, is that it’s not necessarily a banner Nintendo year. I mean, definitely like some highlights, but it’s not like it’s not like the Breath of the Wild Mario Odyssey here, you know. One is coming. It will come. It has to come at some point. 2022, I mean, coming out of this year, if 2022 delivers what it should deliver, it could be like an all-time one of the greatest years ever and such a, I mean, such a sort of eh kind of place at the moment. Like it wouldn’t take much to kind of blow my socks off next year. I will say the flip side to all this, you know, I did discover my favorite sandwich in Bath. So like I feel like some bits of my life have gone better. Yeah. What are your five favorite sandwiches of 2021 Matthew? Can you recall them off the top of your head? I mean, my top one, I’m going straight in at number one because I don’t want to like tease anyone. Right. It’s, it’s the Southern at Intermezzo. Yeah, which is, which is coleslaw, green leaves and Southern fried chicken. Probably in the mix is the chicken Caesar bagel at the whole bagel. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Which is chicken, Caesar sauce, whatever that is. No one really knows. Some kind of mayo thing. It’s like weird mayo. Peppers and that quite hard lettuce. What’s that very uncompromising lettuce? It’s not Coz. Iceberg? I mean, that’s pretty… No, it’s not iceberg either. It’s got a kind of attitude. Uncompromising lettuce could be the name of our band, Matthew, when we hit the road in 2022. I’d rather have that in gaming gamons. Yeah, so it’s got a bit more of a sort of like green image about it, which is nice. I must admit, you know, it’s still like a subway chicken tikka footlong. A footlong is just so much fucking subway that is. That’s a lot of a lot of bread. Oh, I can handle it. My body doesn’t even acknowledge the six foot, the six foot, the six incher. I’ll hit you with my top five then, if that’s all right. Yeah, so my number one. People are actually listening for my number one is whole bagels, smoked salmon, cream cheese bagel. That’s like an absolute classic. Yeah, I must have had that about probably probably more than 100 times in 2021. That’s like, you know, when I was working in the future office, it was a convenient spot to hit up. Can I count the number two? Can I count the chaiwala onion bhaji wrap? I feel like that’s kind of sandwichy. Yeah, I think you can. Yeah, wraps, bagels, baguettes. It’s all in the mix. Yep, absolutely. That goes in there. The New Yorker in Temezo is in at number three. So a new entry at number four for the egg mayo sandwich at Pret a Monge. That’s like a fucking amazing egg mayo sandwich. I was like, that’s only 380 calories, which is actually pretty good. So yeah, that is like, that’s a very recent addition, but it’s become my favorite sandwich there. And yeah, number five, I think would be probably the Prawn Mayo M&S. Like, that’s still a kind of dependable. That’s my version of the Footlong. That’s like a dependable solid sandwich, you know, like no frills. They do like a deluxe edition of the Prawn Mayo sandwich. Sandwich doesn’t work for me, just like too much going on, like the source wise. It’s not quite working. Has it also got an uncompromising letter set? No, there’s… Oh, actually, I think it does have green something in it, yeah, like… Green something? It’s over designed, Matthew. It’s over designed. It’s like, you know, it’s the sandwich equivalent of having too many UI elements. It’s very much that kind of thing. Is it the persona of sandwiches? Well, no, because persona has got like beautiful UI. Like a kind of FPS from like 2004, where there’s slightly too much information on the screen and it’s before they started making the HUD fade away a little bit. Yeah, so there’s your breakdown there. It’s the top five sandwiches, Matthew. That’s fantastic. I mean, you actually delivered the full five. I’d also just chuck in to fill it out. Not a sandwich, but I do like the chicken pasty at the whatever that pasty place is in birth. OK, well, I mean, there are a lot of them, but I think I know the one you mean. The one down by Marks and Spencer’s. Oh, yeah. That’s like you mean the Do you just mean the Cornish Bakehouse? Maybe it’s that. Yeah. It’s just a chain. That’s like saying I’m a big fan of the Griggs. Yeah. Well, yeah, I do like it. It’s good. One of my picks was a subway. The only problem with the Cornish Bakehouse is they’ve got this air heating unit above the door to make their shop nice and warm, but it sucks in all the air, heats it up and then shoots it straight down. And if you’re waiting in that doorway, it means you get just like a face full of pasty gas because it takes all the pasty particles from the shop and pumps it straight into one person. It’s unbelievably overpowering. That’s like a kind of a test of attrition to go into the shop. It’s like that put your hand in the box in Dune thing, but for pasties. It’s very much like a gum jabber of pasty shops. Yeah. So, I mean, just to be clear, though, I don’t look down on these chains. I still think the Greg Sausage Roll is the best sausage roll you can buy. That’s just like, that has not changed for me. Even though I did have one in London this year that was the size of a fist and cost about six quid, that did taste pretty good, like one of those fancy gourmet ones where it’s basically like a croissant that’s got sausage in it. So, Matthew, was it a better year for sandwiches than it was for video games, is my question to you? Yeah, because I got to go to some shops, I discovered my new favourite sandwich. Like the fact that my body has only gotten fatter is a testament to like the quality of eating. Well, not the quality, I guess the quantity. Yeah, it’s been, I’d say a good year for snacks. I mean, all joking aside, you and I really could do a like a Patreon bonus show that was just talking about food that we ate in the last month. That’s like a thing we… Yeah, but I think people might expect something a bit more like gourmet and foodie rather than like a chain pasty. Yeah, it’s got like, it’s a bit like that joking community where Len are the old man’s reviewing like frozen pizza. It’s a bit like that on YouTube. That’s very similar kind of vibe. So yeah, I think like to kind of underline my point from before that it’s just in terms of blockbusters, I don’t think it’s like a banner year, but the broader game gaming landscape, I don’t think it’s bad year at all. And I think the point you make about your wife is very well observed there. Like I saw Catherine kind of talking about games all year, I’ve been following RPS’s advent calendar thing, and just kind of like observing the different stuff in there and definitely no shortage of cool things. And like I follow loads of people have been talking about games all year. So in terms of gaming habits, Matthew, this was quite an interesting subject last year, because I think I was asking this because the pandemic hit and so how are you responding to it? Did your gaming habits change at all this year? How did that manifest in the way you were playing games? So I still have this this weird schedule kind of controlled by freelance, which I’ve said this a few times before, but it really does dictate what I’m playing and like what I can focus on. So a lot of it was governed by that. I don’t know if this is just a reaction to the current times, but I found myself getting quite impatient with stuff. Like I was more comfortable to just bin things off and be like, nah, this is like wasting my time, which normally I don’t. Normally I am better at finishing things. And I don’t know if that’s like a life’s too short kind of reaction to what’s been going on. I mean, that would be a bit more of a poetic answer. But truth is, I have spent still most of this year sitting around on a sofa watching TV and being lazy. It’s not like other elements of my life have become supercharged, but for some reason gaming definitely did. I had a huge gaming push when the Switch OLED came out. It just re-energised me a bit and got me excited about Switch and just games in general. For some reason, something switched in my brain. Like, oh, I just want to play loads of stuff. And I started finishing games that I hadn’t finished on Switch, partly because I wanted to see how they looked. But it was almost like the burst of activity that didn’t happen with the new console launched last year happened with Switch OLED for me. And it maybe means my list skews a little late in the year. I still haven’t seen that in action, actually. But when I was at your house, you were like, oh, you’ve got to see Metroid Dread running on this thing. And you definitely seemed very excited about only one. So it seems like that was a good purchase for you, for sure. Yeah, it was just fun. It was a fun thing to buy, you know, at that time of year, not a lot of exciting is going on. So just be able to one big indulgent purchase. It kind of reawakened the Nintendo like fanboy me, you know, which a lot of people would say didn’t need reawakening. A lot of people say it probably needs shot, but you know, it’s more powerful than ever. Well, yes, that’s good to hear. I think that I was curious as well, did your replaying habits change as a result of making this podcast? Because I’ve talked about this before with me, but I was wondering with you. It seems like you did a lot of research for Zelda and Ace Attorney episodes in particular. I mean, I played hundreds and hundreds of hours of Ace Attorney this year for that podcast. I mean, in terms of time investment for like, you know, I feel like I squeezed weeks and weeks of work into an absolute solid diamond of a podcast. If we’re allowed to say that about our own podcast, I am genuinely really proud of that episode. I think it’s a really good intro and celebration of that series. Oh, yeah. And, you know, came from the mania of playing it, which I feel like I have to do because you set a very good standard for this in terms of like, you’re always playing little bits and bobs. You know, I can kind of I sometimes see like, you know, on Discord, like what you’re playing or something. And I know that you’re you’re doing some like mega prepping for the episode and it makes me feel bad. No, a lot of it ends up being quite surface level though. I think you did such a like, like a deep tissue deep dive with the Zelda and Ace Attorney and I didn’t do anything on that scale. It was more like I did a lot more mopping up. So when I played a bit, but I played about four hours of the third age to talk about that. That’s hardcore. That’s like hardcore for like three minutes of content. That is true. Yeah. I guess I was also justifying a foolish purchase on the year before. But yeah, I think like, I don’t think I put more effort into that than you. I think your effort is just concentrated in a few key areas. And so that certainly helps. And so yeah, like you might, that’s definitely affected what I’ve played this year. Also people coming on and talking about things influenced what I played this year. This is the year I got into Yakuza, for example, because Phil came on and talked about that. And yeah, for that episode, I played a bunch of Yakuza Zero and then I played Yakuza Kiwami straight afterwards. So and I’m eyeing up Kiwami 2 now for next year. That’s probably something I’ll tick off. And so and also Jeremy came on, of course, talking about immersive sims. So that led me down the Deus Ex path, which ate a big chunk of time. I actually had two weeks off between working at Future and my current job in November. And I have no memory of it except for finishing Deus Ex. I can’t tell you anything else I did. There was about 18 days there, and I don’t recall anything else. I just did that. I think I said to my girlfriend, I’m going to go to a coffee shop today and just read comics all day. And I never did that. But I do remember being like, Merge! at the ending of Deus Ex, and that sums up my year pretty well. Well, I think that’s a good use of your time. So it brought you a lot of happiness. It brought you some good Twitter traffic, I thought. Yeah, because everyone else was like, everyone loves to see someone else loving Deus Ex. Yeah, my community team was very happy with that engagement. Did you have any games that popped off you on Twitter this year, Matthew? Blorko content aside. No, I’m just Blorko now. I’m just over-showered by Blorko. That’s all I will ever be. I’m not very good at games tweeting. I should do more of it. Yeah, I think people, I think if you just tweeted about some like old GameCube games on the reg, you’d get some good engagement, you know. But, you know, hey, something to think about for next year, maybe. Yeah, yeah, maybe. Thanks. No worries. So a big thing that changed me this year actually is I stopped playing live service games quite as much. So… Yeah, because last year this was like, that’s my just memory was you just played Destiny and I swear there was something else you were playing. Apex. Apex, that’s it, yeah. So you’ve kind of weaned yourself off or was there just not, were fewer people playing them or what was the deal there? So with Destiny, I played so much of it in like one space of time, like hundreds of hours and did a bunch of the raids. And then a new expansion came out and it didn’t have like loads and loads of like stuff I obviously wanted to do in it. I’ve been hoarding all these different guns from past expansions that were about to be put away in a vault or something for Destiny 2. And then this expansion came along and I wasn’t quite digging it in the same way. So I kind of phased that one out and then that coincided with having quite an extended break from Apex Legends. Picked it up again this summer, but never developed the same pandemic thing of like messaging Phil Savage at 1am and going, hey, do you want to jump on for a few games? And then just playing till 2am, which is all I remember from summer 2020. Very unhealthy habit. This year has been a lot more regulated, I would say. It’s mostly been contained to Monday nights with a bit of spillover to a Saturday or Sunday, but generally speaking, nothing too unhealthy. And that’s good, because I think this podcast necessitated that. If I was just doing that, then I’d never get to talk about any other of the cool things I like to discussing on these episodes. So I think I would say like I do 25% of that that I used to. Had a bit of a GTA Online phase this year, ticked off the heist they added, Kaio Perico, and did that a few times with Phil and Tom, my regular group, and also where we did the Diamond Casino heist in that game. I feel like I’m relatively up to date as of the latest expansion release, which I’m still yet to play, but I’ll give that a go. That is all I will speak of on the subject of live service on this episode, Matthew. So none of them have made it into your top 10 again? No, I decided this year to actually like axe that. I actually considered doing a revised top 10 from last year just because I’ve played a bunch more stuff from last year that I wish I’d put in there. Right. But I do want to put people through that. I just would have had Hades, The Last of Us 2, and Ghosts of Tsushima in there. Otherwise, it would basically be the same list, so there you go. Maybe there’s potential. This is probably a terrible idea, but when our other game of the year list gets up to present day, maybe we could overwrite them with what we now know about those years. I’ve thought about that, you know. I think that’s a good show. I feel like I could definitely take a better swing at 2020 now than I did 12 months ago. Yeah, I think it’s just because we’ve done all these episodes on years like 2008 and 2009 where I know the game so well. It’s like they’re much more authoritative and valuable episodes, I think, whereas our 2021 is just completely hobbled by the fact that I wasted the year on Apex Legends so I didn’t have time to play Animal Crossing, you know what I mean? That’s why it was so vague. You were like, I think I lived on an island with a pig. Anyway, it was the fifth best game. Yeah, I mean, some of my entries today might be a bit like that, but we’ll see. So I suppose Matthew, one more question to ask before we get into the break. Did any type of game specifically make sense for you during this year? Like, I asked this last year, again, because of the pandemic, but was there any kind of type of game you gravitated towards this year? Anything that you kind of like you found yourself doing more of? That sweet spot I mentioned earlier of like not too twee, but also I didn’t want anything too edgy. I got a bit kind of a bit tired of things that didn’t feel particularly satisfying to play. There’s lots of stuff which I tried and didn’t make my list because they were sort of artistically beautiful or narratively profound, but the actual doing just did nothing for me, left me really cold. Like my games are quite, they’re quite traditional gamey games this year, I think. For me, I just, it’s tough to say really. I would say that like big blockbusters are things I just tried to tick off this year. I tried to just like chain a whole bunch of them that I hadn’t finished before, just to try and get a bit more on top of them. I was trying to like cap off all the stuff from last generation. I felt like I’d missed a little bit, so Yakuza, Ghost of Shima, Last of Us 2. That was all sort of part of that same- And Deus Ex. Let’s get that one. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so that was all kind of like part of the sort of same initiative, I guess. But like, yeah, no specific type really. No specific genre, I should say. Sort of always a broad mix with me. I would say like you though, I bounced off of a few games that fit that description. That were either like quite twee or nice, or were like big on narrative and didn’t quite work for me. Like there was a bunch of those games I played for about 45 minutes to an hour and a half. And then I was kind of like… Yeah. And there are a lot of game pass victims for me this year where I was like, nah. And then they’ve been in like people’s top 10s. I’m like, hmm, did I get that wrong? I know what I like. Yeah. It’s that kind of confidence of knowing exactly what it is that you’re interested in. And like, when I look at my list, it’s like it’s full of stuff that kind of fits me really, and what is what I like. In fact, there’s one game on there, I’ll go into it, where I was trying to play two other games that had been heavily recommended this year, and I just could not click with them at all. So I’ve been them off and played this other game and found it effortless to just lose three hours to that game. And I was like, okay, well, this needs to be high up then. And that’s that’s an example of like, just letting the habits drive things as opposed to playing things. I feel like I’m obliged to play, you know? Yeah, I think that’s well put. That’s that actually sort of summarizes what I did. I think I also benefit from the fact that Catherine is like playing games all the time. And I feel like I absorb a lot of stuff. I don’t know, you’ve got to play things to get the feel of them. And often some games don’t make sense until they’re in your hands. But I saw, you know, I watched many hours of things and sort of decided on that. That isn’t my cup of tea. Or I don’t think playing this for myself would make a huge amount of difference here. So, you know, maybe we can get some of those. I’m hoping that neither of us has picked something the other is really down on. I think I’ve got one that you’ll be down on. We’ll be civil. This is a celebratory contest. This is not one of our many contests. This is not a competition. We’ll save those for the Weedraft next year. I am interested in which of our lunchtime lineups you’re more interested in. So do let us know who had the best top five sandwiches. I think I’ve got variety on my side. But then, you know, people do like Subway, so it’s tough. So drop us a line at backpage.com on Twitter. So yes, Matthew, let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back with our top 10s, yeah? Welcome back to the podcast. So, The Best Games of 2021, according to us. So, completely subjective lists, as opposed to one big brain trust coming up with stuff and having arguments about them, which is basically my memory of doing this in media. So, yes, much more kind of like personalized picks. So, Matthew, before we get to the top 10s, last year, I asked you what the most disappointing game of 2020 was, and you said, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and I said Marvel’s Avengers. I thought it was a fun thing to kick us off. So, this time, I’ll ask you what was the most disappointing game of 2021? Do you have a choice for this? It’s sort of between two things. One’s very niche, which is Famicom Detective Club on the Switch, which, you know, feels like it should be aimed at me. It’s detective fiction. It’s a Nintendo classic that’s not previously been available in English. Also, it was beautifully made, but it’s just so old. It’s just that the structure of it, that kind of old school text adventure, it has gone on to inspire many other games which have improved on it in pace and whatnot. But if you’ve played Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, Zero Escape, it was just so creaky. I couldn’t deal with it. A more mainstream disappointment was probably the GTA Definitive Edition trilogy, whatever they called it, which it feels a little churlish to say, it wasn’t like it was majorly hyped up. It wasn’t like we waited a year for this thing and it was a bit duff. They announced it and a month later, it was a bit flat. But I was just disappointed that it wasn’t treated with more care and attention because I was just really, really up for it. And they’re really important special games and deserved a bit more love and respect than they got, I think. I think that Famicom Detective Club’s an interesting one. If you want to hear what Matthew thinks of that, it was on our Best Detective Games episode that he talked about that, I believe. The one that Andy Kelly was on, really good episode. And yeah, I must admit that your thoughts on that just really put me off, because I thought the idea of just, there are so many visual novels you can play now, like so many high quality ones, and like on PC and Switch and different formats. And like, there’s no real reason for you to play that one, even though it was a cool thing that they kind of excavated, you know? Glad they existed, but maybe existing alone just isn’t enough to make it an exciting proposition. Yeah, it has got amazing production values. Like it is, it’s arguably like one of the prettiest like visual novels ever made, I think. But just so flat for me, but so it goes. Yeah. What about you? What was your major league disappointment? Do you know what? It sounds a bit harsh, because I don’t think it’s that bad, but like Aliens Fireteam Elite was it for me? So I played this on Game Pass this week, actually, for the first time. And like, I guess I was hoping for something. First of all, I didn’t know it wasn’t first person. That was on me for not researching it. I guess I’m not a games journalist anymore, so I don’t have to do that. You were like, who’s this man? Why am I following this man? Oh, wait, it’s the person. I thought this dude was getting up on my grill. Like, it looks nice and everything. And I like, in principle, the idea of a Left 4 Dead game that’s got aliens in it is good. And I was kind of hoping that alien isolation wasn’t the last time we would ever see that license kind of used in games. It’s not that bad. It’s probably like a seven out of 10, but it’s just, I just really thought, I think alien isolation has rewired my brain to think, I want the heft and the fright of these things. And then this game just dials them back to, that basically you just shoot them as they come down corridors and they die straight off. Which is, that is the difference between alien and aliens. That’s fair enough. But I think I just wanted a bit more of a threat from them. And I think they’re just a bit, they’re very disposable enemies. And I thought, didn’t quite do it for me, Matthew, that one. So yeah, incidentally, I did try and play Avengers again this year. And there are things I like about it. They did a very nice PS5 version of that game. Really runs nicely. And you know, it’s cool. They’ve added different characters and stuff. People seem to like the Black Panther things and all that. But I think like, it’s still not quite enough to make it essential, really. You’re still collecting like knee pads for Black Panther. You’re like, is this anyone’s dream? All right, let’s crack on with the top 10s then, Matthew. Do you want to go first with your number 10? Yeah, I’m going to kick off with Lost Judgment, which is the second of the Yakuza team’s detective spin-offs, where you play as Yagami, who is a detective instead of a thug, although he basically acts like a thug. He goes around and solves as many problems with fists as Kiryu, so you’re, let’s just split the difference and say they’re the same character. I was a little cool on the first one. I think it came up in our detective episode. We definitely talked about it. I can’t remember if, I think Andy Kelly rates a bit higher than I do. I never really felt like it kind of became a proper detective game, the first one. It always felt like a Yakuza game with a bit more kind of slinking around, taking photos of people having affairs. But then, you know, the crime you were dealing with was so Yakuza focused that it just ended up feeling like any conspiracy games, because the mainline games, they kind of are mysteries and conspiracies and they hinge a lot on on those kind of tropes. This one, though, I just thought the Central Mystery was way stronger. Like it has an impossible ish murder at the heart of it. Someone seems to be in two places at once that I was instantly like, OK, I’m into that. Yeah. You know, now we’re talking my kind of language. The story involved people outside of the criminal community. If anything, it was kind of about what happens when everyday citizens get involved with bad business, which I thought was was again, separated it. So that sort of strand of it worked for me. But what I loved about this game is that the storyline takes you quite early on to a school in Yokohama, which is the other area. This was the city which Yakuza Like a Dragon was based in. So basically reusing that map again and you go into a school and there are lots of ties in the main campaign there. But there’s this basically second campaign that runs in parallel with the first campaign where you are infiltrating clubs at this school to try and break down this sort of criminal mastermind who is basically playing havoc with loads of different things in the city. And these clubs are kind of like the side activities in Yakuza. Like, you know, there’s like a skating minigame. There’s like an e-sports tournament where you basically just have to play Virtua Fighter 5, I think it is. You’re playing it against students to kind of climb the ranks of this tournament. But it wraps these side activities in just a really satisfying narrative skin. And I thought it just held together and gave it this amazing structure. I found I was just really, really compelling. And you’re kind of paired up with these student detectives. They’re really sweet characters. It has this slightly Scooby-Doo-ish energy. Some people have said it rubbed them up a bit the wrong way or it sat a bit awkwardly against the quite serious main campaign that all these like dreadful ships going down and then you’re hanging out with these students like doing Robot Wars Club and things like that. But I just I thought as a suite of options and the way it kind of tied them together, I thought this was so much fun. So does the other component, the school component have like cutscenes and stuff alongside? Yeah, basically each club has like a problem it’s trying to deal with. And you have to basically advance and impress the club members by playing their particular minigame to earn their respect so that you can solve the problem. Some of these clubs, by the way, I mean, like it starts off with like a dance club and this robot building club and an eSports club. And you’re like, okay, fair enough, like three of these clubs, I can appreciate that these would happen in a school. But then it gets into the realms of like an illegal motorbike, you know, like road rage club. And you’re like, what? You ever signed off on this? This seems like a terrible idea. And you’re literally like smashing people up on a motorbike as you like run circuits the entire city. So it gets like super silly. It’s where the silly stuff in Lost Judgment really lives. And as you as you master the individual clubs, there’s then this overarching storyline about the big mystery behind the school. And, and that’s the stuff where you spend a lot of time with this, like the leader of the mystery club. I think maybe it’s just a bit of like wish fulfillment. Like, I would have loved there to have been a mystery club in my school and the game is super like crime story literate, you know, it’s basically a crime book club that solves mysteries on the side. So there’s lots of nods and references to like Japanese crime fiction or broader crime fiction tropes. It’s, you know, it basically felt designed for me. Yeah. So I think like the total disparity thing you mentioned, that’s just always been a thing in Yakuza. Like, yeah, everyone knows that’s the deal. Like the different tones set alongside each other, it goes from melodramatic to very serious to, you know, to very comedic and preposterous. I think this one, because it’s got kids involved. I think it puts some people on edge, there’s quite a lot of bullying stuff in the main storyline and some of it is quite unpleasant. I didn’t find it like offensive or too upsetting myself. I thought it was reasonably well handled, but I saw some people going like, it’s a bit off to be like, oh what larks, and then two seconds later you’re like, pile driving a teenager into a toilet or something. Which does sort of happen, I mean, it introduces this non-lethal fighting style where all the takedowns scare people into basically like fainting, which it kind of implies you’re meant to use that on the students. But you don’t have to, like you can give them the full force of like your flaming red tiger fists or whatever. You smash up a lot of teenagers. How else are you going to learn about the real world? Yeah, and they are like super pissy, they’re like a bit private school smug, so I don’t know, I didn’t feel too bad. I think the real mystery at the heart of this school is why are they still playing Virtua. I like this Sega version of reality, that’s good. So that’s cool. I think that this series seems to be in very rude health, like the Yakuza series generally, like it looks real shiny as well, looks as good as anything else really out there, and so good for them. But do you think it’s significantly better than the first one, Matthew? Would you advise skipping the first one? The first one’s still worth playing just because it’s got, you know, it has got its own subset of characters and it’s quite fun seeing them again and seeing how they’re used. I think I’m actually in the minority in thinking this one’s better. I think a lot of people really liked the first and found this one maybe a bit bitty. The school storyline stuff, I think you could actually miss it if you weren’t paying attention, even though it is half the game, which is maybe a flaw. You only have to do a couple of bits of it for the main story and then it kind of never forces you again and you have to basically keep chipping away at it. The further you get in each activity unlocks more activities, there are ten in total. I got the impression from some reviews that some people had only played the bit that the story had asked them to play just because they didn’t talk about, you know, it is like 30 hours of the game is there, you know, it’s a huge undertaking. So that’s a little odd and maybe a mistake, but if you listen to this podcast you now know that you are meant to engage with that side of the storyline and you can enjoy it. Three thousand people will know that Matthew now. Yeah, a thousand people. Really great fight choreography as well. This series I think is really underrated for the actual action choreography, like the little bits that play before boss fights or the quick time events. They look amazing. You sliding under chainsaws and like pipes going up and all these sparks flying off it. It gets you really pumped for a boss fight this game. Yeah, I thought this was so much fun. Okay, yeah, great stuff. That’s a great first pick and I’ve got both those on PS5 so I’ll play through them at some point. Yeah, very shiny. I remember you bought this because you were like, I need something to play on my PS5 the first time. So fair enough. So, my number 10. So it was going to be Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart but I thought I can’t do that to Matthew Castle. I think it just gets us off the wrong foot. You can do it. All right, I’m going to do it. So Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart on PS5. I put this here because if there’s one big shiny next-gen thing that happened this year, this was that thing. This was, you know, even if that’s the only level on which you enjoy this game, and I think there are other levels on which to enjoy this perfectly solid shooter-platformer. No, not as good as Nintendo platformers, Matthew. You don’t have to preempt it. I’m too polite. It’s fine. So I played through this with my partner, and it was just really fun past the pad game that every hour or so would make you go, whoa, how kind of like gorgeous it is showing you these cyberpunk cityscapes. It’s admittedly a bit front-loaded with how it impresses you, I would say, and it’s not that long a game anyway, but it’s like the kind of like whole portal teleportation mechanic thing is cool, and whether it’s just a magic trick or not, it does constantly impress you. And you do get the impression that like they just wanted to make something really big and shiny to show off what the PS5 can do. And this definitely kind of like fulfills that. I mean, I will say as well, like it is exactly the same as the old Ratchet and Clank’s really, like that that part hasn’t changed. Not very complex. But if I was a kid getting a PS5 and I got this, like let’s say buying a PS5 was a thing that was physically possible to do. I got and I got this on Christmas Day. That’s like a that is an amazing experience to have. That’s like such a kind of cut above in terms of like you don’t expect these kinds of games to be a sort of like powerhouses technically. And and then, you know, like I never really thought of like Jack and Daxter as being like showing off what the PS2 could do, for example. But like this is just like Insomniac showing off basically just to kind of behold very, very, very like a spectacular game. So while I do feel self-conscious picking it because of the old Matthew Castle situation with platformers, I do. Yeah, I don’t I don’t mind having this on here. I think Returnal was a better like demonstration of the PS5 overall just because the animation and stuff, but can’t say it’s a game I finished and can’t say it’s a game I love, but probably because it’s a bit too hard for old Big Sammy. Imagine getting that as your Christmas game if you’re an eight year old. They’re like, this is the one you wanted, right? The one with the really stern looking sort of Gwendolyn Christie look alike on the cover. It’s like, no, I wanted the rainbow colored Universe of Ratchet and Clank. It’s like, yeah, you asked for Skylanders, but we got you Dark Souls. It’s like that sort of thing. So yeah, Matthew, thoughts on me picking Ratchet and Clank? That’s perfectly fine. I know loads of people love Ratchet and Clank. All that happened this year is that I finished my first Ratchet and Clank game. I’ve only ever played levels here and there on old demos and things. And I’m just not a Ratchet and Clank guy, is the truth of it. I think it is a really pretty game in lots of ways. Like, when all the action is kicking off and like all the ammos and all the weird special effects, you know, when you turn people into potted plants and, you know, there’s like a mad ricocheting laser weapon and you can just make a lot of shit happen at once in this game, which feels quite next-gen. I just thought the actual level settings were quite tired for how pretty they were. Like, there was a swamp and there was like a mine and there was like a canyon with some pirates in it. I just didn’t feel like, like, holy shit. I felt like it was like a waste, a bit of a waste. And I didn’t like, I don’t like the writing in that game either. I guess you can skip that stuff. Well, like I say, do you agree that it’s kind of front-loaded, the spectacular nature of it? That opening like parade is definitely like the most amazing bit. That also feels like you get like the hit of the rifts, which is like the big thing in this, like the PS5 can load so fast, it can take you between worlds. But I didn’t think they lent into that much. Or not as much as they could have anyway. Yeah, I thought they over-egged that a little bit. But yeah, you are right, like you turn it on. If you want to see what your console can do, I mean, for sure. Yeah, yeah, it’s like a kind of like launch window game. I’ve never really been a Ratchet and Clank guy either. But if there was a moment where I felt like, oh shit, maybe I could be, it was watching that intro and then going into the kind of like sci-fi city and seeing all the shit flying around and all the different slightly blade runnery lights and such and the sheer amount of characters on screen. I don’t think it’s an amazing combat system. It’s just kind of overloads you with tools when you kind of fire them into groups of enemies. But it does occasionally have a nice bit of scale to it, like the combat encounters, I would say, just like a lot going on, a little bit of manipulating enemy behavior, and yeah, a bit of spectacle of nothing else. And so, yeah. God, that sounds like it’s full of caveats, doesn’t it? You shouldn’t, like honestly, I am definitely in the minority in this, looking at the reviews. I wondered if it was like, I just don’t have a nostalgia that I’ve brought forward with me that a lot of my peers seem to have. I do worry for anyone my age who’s like, I love these fucking characters. Because it’s just like a guy who’s like, I love you, my little robot friend. And the robot’s like, yeah, let’s go have an adventure. And that’s like it. And I’m not saying Nintendo games are any more sophisticated, but at least they have the good grace not to voice those terrible lines. That’s like hearing those lines is very different from reading them. Okay, yeah, fair enough. That’s fine. But yeah, Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, sort of like just scraping in the top 10 there. It’s graphics are go-go, come on. We love a bit of graphics. Well, I do think that there’s still something that can be done with what they do in this game. If the next one is just, we’ll take all of the stuff we did in this one, but everywhere we take you will be as spectacular as that opening city. That would be a good direction to go in. And we’ll do this kind of magic trick, fire through five different worlds in like 10 seconds thing on the reg. Just because I think it could go a bit sort of like full galaxy brain with it. And like you say, maybe it doesn’t because it kind of tails off into these more generic settings, you know? I would have loved… It sort of hints that there are certain enemies that live on certain worlds. But if they’d been pulling a thing from a reality into another… Like if they’d actually made the mechanic out of the rifts, that could have been really cool. And I don’t really see why they could… He said never having made any game ever. It’s like, I don’t see why they couldn’t have easily have done that. But, yeah, I don’t know. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. That’s a good place to leave it, Matthew. So what’s your number nine? So this is a bit of a weird one. This is an early access game that I only very recently got put on to. But I keep seeing Jen Simkins, formerly of Edge Magazine, now of Medium Your Local, has been bigging up this rhythm game, Rhythm Doctor. She has good taste. I tried it. I absolutely fucking love this game. This is like such a find. Like I say, an early access rhythm game on Steam at the moment. The whole concept of it is you work at a hospital where they sort of treat patients with rhythm. The levels are patients who are various different ailments kind of wrapped into their little personal stories. And it’s kind of about hitting the beat on like they’ve got a little sort of not lifeline, is it cardiograms? Like the heartbeat, the heart rate monitors. It kind of makes the mechanic out of that. And each ward of the hospital has like a gimmick to it. So in the first one, it’s you always hit the seventh beat. So it’s like six beats and seven, and then you hit that. And that’s all you have to do. It’s a one button game. You play it with a space bar and then in the second ward, it’s like a two beat. So it’s just alternating beats. And you again, you’re hitting the space bar. But it has the guts to have a really simple control scheme and just try and throw you off with like visuals and like mad rhythmic tricks. And it’s basically rhythm heaven. And I can’t believe no one else has made a rhythm heaven ripoff game. This is Nintendo’s classic Rhythm Tengoku, if you played the import version. That is one of my favorite series. And someone has just made an indie version of that. And it fucking rules. The music’s really good. The visual effects and what they do to try and put you off. Because, you know, all you’re doing is keeping a beat. That’s all you have to do. And so it’s basically just trying to throw all this shit at you. And sometimes that’s like with mad like music and animation tricks, like the interface like starts glitching out and you have to kind of like ignore it and keep the beat. But there’s other levels in this, which I don’t really want to spoil. But they do stuff I’ve like never seen a PC game do with like its interface. There’s something involving like minimizing the game window to try and put you off. I thought this was, you know, for an early access slice of this, it made an instant huge impact. This is really, really good. Wow, bit of the old eternal darkness at the end there, Matthew. You just don’t really want to spoil the tricks it does, but considering all you have to do is just keep tapping your foot. And it takes away the visuals from you in like really fun ways. Very, very cool. And the music’s cool. It’s got this other thing I really like that it’s got a level creator in it, which is basically the tool they use to make the game. So even though it’s an early access and they haven’t finished the campaign, there’s just loads and loads of user made levels to download on Steam. So it’s like massive. It feels massive. Like you could go in there and just spend hours going through all this stuff where I guess other people have either made the music or imported music. I’m done hard about putting an early access game on here because I think this will be phenomenal when it’s finished, which I don’t know if that’s planned for 2022, but it just it puts such a smile on my face. And I think the rhythm heaven kind of connection, it just really made this for me. I was like, oh, this is such a good model of game to kind of like borrow. So this is great stuff from Seventh Beat Games. Wow, over 12,000 Steam reviews over World We Need Positive. I’ve not read anything about this game this year. Yeah, I guess it is plausible to me that something like this could go under my radar now, just because when I was on PC Gamer, I feel like I was too aware of what was going on in PC Gaming to miss something like this. But now I’m kind of out of that sphere. Very easy for me to miss something like this. Not very expensive, just over 10 quid, I think. That’s the thing, I was just like, you know, I thought, Jen likes it, Jen’s got good taste, I’ll give it a go. Because I was feeling a little despondent about it. I was like, oh, my list isn’t very spicy. Played that and I was just like, I didn’t, I basically stopped searching. I was like, this is the stuff. Wow, yeah, okay, yeah. You’ve already made your list way more interesting than mine. This is like fucking, it’s hard to come back from this shit. No, it’s got some horrible oversights in it. No, so has mine. We’ll get to those. Yeah, so that’s a great pick, Matthew. I’m going to go pick that up. I also trust Jen’s taste and such things. So yeah, good stuff. Rhythm Doctor, okay, cool. So my number nine is a game called Exo One. Do you know this game, Matthew? Oh, this is the flying saucer, UFO? Yes, it’s like, yeah, published by Future Friends and I think mostly made by like one developer, I think it’s called Jay Weston. I may be wrong about that. This is Kickstarted. You play basically like a UFO flying over sci-fi landscapes and in each level, you’re essentially traveling to a kind of like off-world kind of rockety thing where you kind of like go onto this big blue bar and get shot off into the sky. And at which point, 2001, a Space Odyssey Stargate-style animations play out and you travel to a new alien world. And this happens while a kind of like loose storyline is playing out in the background. I believe John Ingold of, oh, remind me the developer, Matthew. Yeah, Inkle was a story consultant on this. And that story stuff is kind of like hangs in the background. But it’s mostly a game of like traveling across these alien landscapes and like gaining momentum by, you transform between this UFO and like a ball and you control the gravity of the thing. So you kind of like hold down the gravity button, shoot down and then like turn back into a UFO and then you’ll fly off like a ramp in just before, just in front of you. And then you kind of like, you can then kind of like keep dipping down and dipping up again, like sort of gliding off of surfaces, get more height, get like a speed boost from hitting a cloud in the sky, moving forward. If I could compare it to anything, it’s probably most like that game company’s games. Like it reminded me of like Journey and Flower combined, sort of. Just because there is this like background story element and really nice music and like it’s a very pretty worlds. But what you’re doing is not that involved in terms of interactions. It’s not like it’s scoring. Does it feel nice to play though? I think it feels really nice, yeah. It’s interesting because I saw like it got kind of like OK reviews from RPS and Eurogamer who said it was it. I think like RPS said it lacked friction. And it’s true. It doesn’t really have it doesn’t have anything to it. Doesn’t have like any huge stakes or anything. You can’t die. It occasionally has like different twists though. Like this one level where they turn off your ability to turn left or right. You still have to get to the end of the level. And the only way to like regain turning left or right. Is to the game basically hints to you that you’ve got to, despite the fact that you can’t turn. And you can’t gain enough momentum to actually take off. You have to basically get struck by lightning. And to make your ball fly as high as possible. In order to kind of like power up your spaceship again. So you can reach the end of the level. So it does have like parameter shifts like that. Or levels where you have to kind of like roll up a very narrow sort of like pathway in order to get to the finish line. It’s not very, it’s like two hours long. It’s not very long. It’s on game pass. You can just play it and then it’s done. I just really liked it as a kind of mood piece. And honestly, like I was really umming and ah-ing about this. Because there’s a bunch of games this year that I’ve played for about three or four hours that I considered putting into one of these slots. But I thought this was a game that I, like, haven’t adored. Like, some people seem to really like it and go to bat for it. But it’s like one of the only games of this length and type that did click with me this year. That I did just sit and play through the whole thing. And so I must have given a shit. Because I was like, I was tuned into it and I just thought, I thought it had really like a, just the atmosphere of it, that kind of unknowable sci-fi thing. I thought it did it quite well. Wrapped up in a very simple game that’s really just about momentum. Probably best compared to something like, I don’t know, like Tony Hawk or something. You’re just thinking about the arc of your movement and by the end you’re so good at the gliding mechanic that you can kind of pull up perfectly and your UFO just shoots up straight from the ground off of a ramp into the sky. You hit a cloud, you kind of boost in the air. You get some levels later on that are just full of clouds that give you this kind of supercharged boost and you can go really high and then when you drop and you break the sound barrier, the game gives you achievements for it. The screen sort of goes purple and like, and it feels, it just feels like just, it’s the kind of sci-fi imagery I just sort of like. And yeah, it’s just, it’s not afraid to be singular. I liked it. I think that this is a great game pass game. And so, yeah, it’s got in there. It’s like a bit of a heart pick, I suppose, Matthew. Yeah, I saw lots of like snippets of this on Twitter. Whenever I see images of it, I think, oh yeah, I should play that, that looks cool. Because just, it’s, you know, the different planets look, they look, the landscapes look so dramatic, you think. Oh yeah, like whatever that is, that looks different. Yeah, I just need to give this a go. I don’t know, I haven’t really. Yeah, I think that I can see why people thought it just wasn’t, it didn’t have quite enough tension for them or like whatever. But again, I did just think about how flower was to game about blowing around nice landscapes. And like this kind of feels in keeping with that a little bit, but it’s got a tiny bit more of a skill ceiling because of how you pull off the movement is sort of like, does require a bit of skill. Does it have an epic soundtrack? Yeah, really nice soundtrack. Yeah, really good. And like the story as well, because it’s kind of told with like sort of like these voices that might be backwards and then play backwards or something. But it just feels a bit like, there’s just a bit of mystery around the story about what actually happened. It does peel back. It’s not hugely satisfying like Taylor or anything like that, but it just, I think everything in the game just like goes, is pointing towards how do we catch that unknowable sci-fi thing, the kind of 2001, look at a monolith kind of stuff. Like that’s kind of what they’re going for. And also with some really nice alien worlds. It’s like there’s not much more to it. In each level, there is an optional item you can find that gives you, that usually gives your ship like a boost, that permanent boost it can take you into the next level. And reaching the point where they’ve hidden those bonuses is often like a challenge in itself, because you have to work out, okay, that’s up really high, but there’s not really anything around it that would suggest they can like glide up there easily. So you might just have to like dive bomb, turn into a ball from the sky, dive as quickly as possible, and then just like zip up at the last second, you might just get enough height to get up to like a cloud that’s nearby and from the cloud, maybe that can carry you up to the power up. And it’s a little bit of like puzzle element to it, not massive, but just another extra touch. Again, you’ll fire through the whole thing in like two hours, no problem. Sounds like a mega stoner game. Yeah, very much so. I mean, there wouldn’t be a reason to replay it really, but yeah, I liked it. It was cool. So happy to have it in my list and give it a shout out. Yeah. So what’s your number eight, Matthew? I’m sticking with space. This is another bit of a weird one. Opus, Echo of Starsong. That’s two out of three games so far I’ve never heard of. Exciting. Again, I cannot claim discovery rights for this one. This was celebrated a few months ago on Kotaku. I’m trying to think of the author. It’s one of their new writers. I think she’s called CC. Jiang, maybe? And she was like, oh, this is like one of my game of the year contenders. It’s a sort of visual novel, sort of adventure game. I think there’s too much interactivity to call it a straight visual novel, but there is a lot of text. It’s set in space. You are part of a crew that is trying to discover these sort of caves that are full of a precious, they call it lumen. It’s like an energy source, kind of a mystical MacGuffin thing. It reminded me a little bit of Dune with the spice. It’s kind of like this all powerful thing. There is this Dune-like element in that the character he plays called Jun Li is this son of a regal family who’s kind of been cast out of his clan. He’s now trying to find a mine to stake a claim to it, because that’s what’s really important in the fiction of this world, is like owning these mines. And he partners up with this girl who is a witch, which in their terminology is basically like a human radar for space, and she can find these rocks. So that’s the sort of narrative set up. She’s looking for these caves, he’s trying to kind of claim them, they work together. It’s almost a little bit like an incool game, a little bit like 80 Days, in that there’s a star map that you’re flying around, and your movement is sort of governed by resources, like you need fuel, and you can encounter random story events, which are all kind of told without VO, which is where it’s a bit more visual novel. There’s a lot of text, a lot of reading through speech bubbles. In those story events, you can kind of risk certain outcomes, you can kind of gamble on trying to get something good. Sometimes you get damaged, so you’re trying to, like, manage the numbers of your ship. That side of the game isn’t too stern. I didn’t lose ever playing this game, but there is that slight incool thing of, like, where you choose to go, you may find an object, which if you take it to another location may unlock a certain narrative branch. You can’t change the overall thrust of the story, or at least I’m not aware that you can do that. But there is this sense of sort of like a light map-based game tied to narrative happenings, which in my head makes me think of incool. The key story beats, when you arrive at, like, important locations, they kind of play out in a sort of 3D but 2D style, there’s some very light puzzling built around this song mechanic which again isn’t too compelling in its own right, you just spin these dials to sort of match the resonance of your song with these door locks. What I thought this does really well in the course of about 8 to 10 hours, I felt like I went through it quite fast, it builds this entire universe, this entire culture around this cave system. You meet all these rival factions, you meet all these people and you sort of discover little bits of them scattered through space. I really like games which give you a big star map to explore and like every point you hit is like a little dose of lore or a little narrative adventure, a little thing happens and it’s reasonably well written but it’s just very very brisk and I played this after having seen Dune and maybe I was just in the mood for a Dune like thing but I thought the world building this was just absolutely phenomenal. It happens so fast and you get a real sense of the place, you get really invested in it. The story does tend towards sentimentality and morkishness but I really like the stakes, I really like the history of the world, you know, they’re like dots on the map. When you get there you discover these quite striking satellites and like half dismantled space stations, there’s like remnants of a war. I thought this was just a really great bit of storytelling. Wow, that’s like a great show, it looks really nice, I love the artwork, the art style. What format did you play this on Matthew? I played it on PC on Steam. The studio that made this who are called Sigono, they’re a Taiwanese studio, they’ve made two previous Opus games, they’re on PC, they’re also available on Switch. I actually haven’t played them but I’m going to go back, they weren’t as well reviewed in hindsight, looking back on them, but it feels like this is their thing, like they’ve made two other games about this sort of star map navigation. The graphics get much prettier with each game, but it’s clearly an idea they’re hooked on. I think they’re completely separate stories, I don’t think it’s a continuation, this feels very self-contained to me. But I just, yeah, this weird little studio making this sort of venture game sort of visual novel game, just keep plugging away at it and yeah, I thought this was sort of masterful in its own way. Fair play. It looks like it’s found a bit of an audience as well. Like, yeah, that’s, that’s rad. Well, great choice. I wish it was on Switch so I could just play on there, but like… I don’t know what the relationship was whether the Switch ports came later and like there is one planned. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything in there that wouldn’t work on Switch. Like it’s quite, it’s not like a system hog or anything. Okay, rad. Yeah. Great stuff, Matthew. You’re surprising me all over the shop. Oh, it gets, it gets a lot more boring from here on out. Well, it’s a good start anyway. So yeah, that’s, that’s top stuff. So my number 8, Matthew, is Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Ah, yep. So I, this, this is the one where I’m on the shakiest ground in this list, right? Because I’ve only played this for like seven hours. Okay. And it’s a 20 hour game. So I’m fully owning up to the fact that like the limitations of my spare time are at work here. I only just started playing this in the last week. But I’m like pretty confident about pulling in this top 10. It’s so my sort of thing. From the off, it has like, it’s very kind of naughty dog-ish actually, in a way that I wasn’t quite expecting. Just because I think I, I don’t know, I guess I always thought of them as the Deus Ex studios. I didn’t know what their approach to making a third person license game would be. But it wins you over so hard and so fast because it’s so committed to great storytelling and characterization. I think it like, it wins you around so much faster than that Avengers game does. Like it just, it knows what it wants to do. It sets up all the characters really well. The character interplay, I mean, the Guardians of the Galaxy, kind of a mixed bag of characters in terms of like, I don’t think they’ve got the stickiness of like, a lot of Marvel’s characters I think in about five or ten years, they probably won’t be a thing. And like they’re interesting and will fade away. I personally loved that first movie and I hated that second one with Kurt Russel. I thought that was, that’s like one of the five worst MCU films if you ask me. That’s a separate episode. Yeah, that’s the that’s one for the Patreon. So I was quite amazed to like, feel my love for the characters completely rejuvenated by this game. It’s just got such detailed characterization, does such a good job of setting up who Peter Quill is at the start. And then like, such a good job of like, of doing lots of, there’s just so much dialogue between the characters. And there are like loads of different like mini choices you make where you pick a dialogue option, and then it plays out differently. And that makes it feel kind of like super rich because they’ve, they’ve put characterization first and foremost, you only pay as Peter Quill in it. If anything, probably the weakest part of it is the shooting. It’s like, I don’t know if it’s like an amazing shooter. It certainly has some like nice movement and stuff, and like the commands to the different characters mean that like, you know, you’ll ask Rocket to do a certain thing or get Groot to take you over a certain obstacle, a bit like Mass Effect’s kind of party controls or like Final Fantasy 15’s, for example. Right, yeah. Pretty straightforward. So, yes, I am, I don’t know if it’ll like, it’ll completely last the distance. That’s like, it’s like a long running time, but I really love what I’ve played so far. There’s so much attention paid to like environmental detail. So many beautiful planets they take you to. Lovely settings. I just like, I just was not expecting this to be as good as it was based on how its reveal went early this year. So, yeah, I think it’s a real winner and like if you’re looking for that linear, nice looking blockbuster game this year, this is, this is, this is that thing. This is that thing you’ve been looking for, I would say. Any thoughts, Matthew? I’ve only played a couple of hours myself, but I found it super winning. Combat wasn’t really doing it for me, but if, if anywhere there is the, the, the, the, the deus ex-ness of, of this studio, it’s that, it’s like their attention to detail. It feels super complete, their eye for that world, like in what I’ve played, like walking around their ship, the detail of their like rooms, things like that. That, that feels to me like the same very careful eye that like made their deus ex games brilliant, I think is applied to this. That opening section, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, sort of opens on earth as a, as a boy, there’s like a little prologue. You’re listening to this album and it feels like they’ve made this whole album for this one scene and like you can read like the sleeve notes of the CD and this, there’s so much like hidden writing in this game. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, it’s pretty cool and it looks amazing. This is much closer to what I thought Avengers would be, I think, albeit with different playable characters like, you know, it doesn’t have, it still, it still has its own complications that don’t necessarily add to the game, but like it’s not a loot shooter, you know, it’s not that kind of style of game. It’s like it is a more familiar narrative shaped kind of like sort of action adventure game. So yeah, I think I agree with you. I mean, if you think about like the difference in this and Deus Ex, like as a studio to like adapt to making a game like this, enormously impressive, I think. Mary DeMarle, I think, is like the narrative director of this game, has written both of the Deus Ex games with Adam Jensen in them, has been at like Eidos Montreal since, you know, like 2007, and has written this phenomenal Marvel script, as good as the films, easily. And it’s all in a video game, and like, it’s the best part of the video game that it’s in, apart from maybe the graphics, you know. It helps that that first area has just got some like really epic architecture, and there’s these big bright pink criss, it’s really striking, like the art design of it as well. Yeah. Like, it’s interesting, you can’t help but play it and compare their versions of the characters to the film characters. And I must admit, like, I don’t know the comic books at all. And you know, it’s easy to go, oh, this feels a bit like Bradley Cooper’s Rocket Raccoon, and maybe they’ve just like both gone the same way with it. I really like, I’m bad with their names, who’s the lady alien in Guardians of the Galaxy? Gamora. She’s great, innit? I liked her characterisation in this or what I’ve seen of it, way more than the characterisation in the film. And there were some places like that where it did differ, and I thought, oh, this is his own thing, you know, it’s, I’m not a comics guy, so I don’t know if that’s just… No, I think that’s completely fair, like, it’s tougher for this than anything else really. If you think about like, think about the superhero movies like this, right, there have been three different versions of Spider-Man now, and like, you know, and different versions of like Professor X and stuff like that, so, or you’ve seen like things like the Spider-Man animated series or the X-Men animated series, there are loads of different Batman sort of actors, so when someone else takes on that role or there’s a video game version of that character, it’s, you don’t have to get over as big a barrier because you’ve seen different versions of that character you’re used to. With some of these MCU characters that are stepping into different media for the first time, it’s a lot harder, it was a lot harder for the Avengers, a lot harder, really hard for the Guardians of Galaxy because the very specific tone of those films, I could see why it would be silly of them not to tap into that, like the music and the kind of style and like the type of interplay. I think it uses that as a starting point, but then yeah, like starts layering in its own take on things and its own, I think it definitely has a different take on Star Lord as well. Like he’s not exactly the same and I think that really helps. You definitely have that baggage of familiarity, but once you push through it, you are rewarded for it, I would say. So yeah, again, though, I haven’t finished it. Maybe that’s shaky ground, but I couldn’t not give this game a shout out just because it’s so my sort of thing and it came along exactly when I wanted it and I want to see these kinds of games do well because they are perennially the thing that I get excited about in games. So yeah, Marvel’s Gods of the Galaxy, Matthew, that’s there. So what’s your number seven? My number seven is No More Heroes 3. Nice. I’m glad that made your list. I wondered if it would make the cut. I played half of this when it came out, was really enjoying it. I don’t know why I stalled on it. I think some work came up and I only finished this recently, which is why it’s actually so high because blimey, this game ends strong. If you’re listening to this podcast, you know that there’s a certain thing I like to see at the end of a game. This, you know, without spoiling it, maybe delivers on some of that fraud. This is a continuation of the No More Heroes series, which I’d sort of gone off a little bit with. I didn’t think two was as good as one, basically. I thought it. The bosses weren’t quite as memorable. It felt a bit impatient compared to the first one. I like the backwards bullshit and the amount of drudgery you had to do in the first one made the highs hit really hard and by removing the drudgery from the second one, it didn’t quite land as well for me. But this, I thought, was a huge return to form. I think this is the best Suda game since No More Heroes 1. Easy. I should caveat all this and say it’s a technical mess. You’re playing as an assassin, you’re working through these ranks of killers to basically become number one again. That’s the setup of the other games are set up here. The game is split between an open world, which is the technical mess side of it. It runs horribly. It’s really low resolution. It basically looks kind of broken. I could see a lot of people getting this and just bouncing off it so hard because it feels like it’s sort of taking the piss in a way. You’re like, yeah, this is so rough by even by like No More Heroes choppy standards. This is terrible. But where it counts in combat, it runs like weirdly 60 frames per second is super slick and does everything it needs to do. And that just had left such a positive impression. That’s kind of what won me over. I forgot how good No More Heroes could be basically. And this reminded me it’s not the most complex of combat systems. You know, you’re fighting with a lightsaber. But if anything, it’s simpler than before. You don’t have the high-low stance that you used to have. But it’s got such like energy and momentum to it. And you know, these shrieking death blows where you kind of whittle people down to the last bit of health and then like a big button cue comes up, you hit it and you do this sort of body splitting death blow. And then that sets off a fruit machine. If that lines up, it could give you like some mega superpowers and it escalates amazingly. You can go from quite a regular fight to just absolutely destroying everyone in like 10 seconds, if it goes well for you. That includes the bosses, which I didn’t think used to happen. It used to make you work a bit harder in the older games. But like genuinely, the last boss in this, I lucked out on one of those fruit rolls and it just destroyed him. And I didn’t think, oh, I fucked it. I thought brilliant. This is just so rad. It’s so fast and furious. So that side of it’s really satisfying. And then on top of it, it’s got all that super self-aware Suda 51 bullshit. You can go into a boss fight and maybe something will happen and you won’t fight that boss, you’ll fight someone else. Or maybe the format of the boss fight will change to an entirely different genre. I don’t want to spoil anything good. I’ll say there is one boss fight, which is a game of musical chairs, which had me just bellow with laughter when I saw what they were doing and how they were doing it. It just does something weird enough, often enough, that you’re constantly waiting to see what it does next. It really pulls you through. I think the general structure of the thing, that you’re working through these ranks of assassins means you always want to get to the next boss fight. It’s got this incredible pull, which is all this is true of No More Heroes 1, but I think he just rediscovered that. I think he rediscovered his weirdness. Ends on a super audacious note. Yeah, I thought this was so rad. That’s awesome because I remember the episode where you discussed it and I got the sense that you liked it but didn’t love it. And so it’s cool to hear that you went back and had the goods buried deeper into the game basically. I just think this I think some of the jokes he does and some of the things he pulls in this game are so good. There’s a really weird celebrity cameo, which I won’t spoil. Like the very final boss fight is a it’s just a beautiful like Nintendo parody. I think and if you don’t know about it, it just hits you and you’re like, this is so good. Like this is just this is exactly what I want from Suda. You forget that all that open world bit is like rough as fuck. You only remember the high points and this game is just like high point after high point, especially if you’ve played the series, you know, I think it feels like a kind of love letter to the whole thing. There are loads of callbacks. You know, there’s some bosses that come back in some fun new ways. If you don’t remember the originals, maybe refresh yourself, like replay them on Switch. The Switch ports are really, really good. Definitely the way to play No More Heroes 1 and 2. Play it all as a trilogy. This feels like just a great payoff at the end of it all. I have picked up the 1 and 2 ports, Matthew. So yeah, in fact, my girlfriend’s bought me No More Heroes 3 for Christmas. So how do you know you haven’t been shaking your presents? Have you? No, I mean, like we were at the point where we just issue each other lists now. It’s reached that point and there’s like, there are some surprise elements, but generally speaking, it’s a bit more prescribed, which is helpful for everyone involved, I would say. But yeah, yeah, great, great to have this on here. A pure Matthew Castle pick. I love that we’ve had no picks in comments so far, by the way. Yeah, I’m interested if we are going to have that much crossover, you know? Yeah, yeah, I think we will, but deeper into the list, that’s what I think. So my number seven, Matthew, this might be where we have some crossover, is Resident Evil Village. That isn’t on my list. Oh, so, an interesting one, because I thought we both love this about as much as each other, but then I think that on a replay, the magic of this dimmed for me a little bit. I played this with my partner, and it really is like a game that, when you play it for the first time, this survival horror adventure captures the essence of Resident Evil 4 by starting in this village, then takes you to a castle, much like Resident Evil 4 did, and kind of escalates in the way that that game did. It doesn’t reach the same heights, doesn’t have the same level of replay value, but has spectacle for sure. I think I just found the story element of it quite hard work on a replay. Just the whole Ethan Winters thing never quite worked for me. Funny as it is to see him lose his hands and fingers every 10 minutes. This game does have some amazing bosses for sure. But mechanically, it’s very simple really when it comes down to it. There’s not that much going on with it. Was a really nice showcase for the PS5 and admittedly, I think it never quite has… The thing that I think it really lacks is just the moment to moment experience of fighting basic enemies isn’t that good in this game. The werewolfy dudes who are coming after you, just not very interesting to fight. They don’t have the same tactile responsiveness as fighting the villagers in Resident Evil 4. Good headshots though. Yeah, good headshots, but not the same like shoot a leg down, do a kick. In that way, it’s a tiny bit of a step back. But that’s not to say the bits that were great about my first playthrough were true here, like the house with the dolls in it, still excellent. That’s a fantastic set piece. My partner was just on edge the whole time we were doing that. Doesn’t really hit those heights again. Found the big lake monster thing, a bit hard work on a replay, I must admit. I think it’s just because those puzzles, once you know the solution, it’s just a bit of a slog to get to that point. The tension dissipates a little bit. But I did replay it within about three months of my first playthrough, so I probably just did a bit too much of that. But I thought it would have been higher in my list at the end of the year and it wasn’t. How come it didn’t make your list, Matthew? This is what I was talking about, like a sea of 8 out of 10s. I think there’s a few other games that are maybe going to be on your list that aren’t on mine, that are literally space number 11. It’s a close run thing. I feel the same way about the game as you do. I love the doll house. I think the castle is a brilliant setting. The first half of this game, I think, is truly excellent. I absolutely loved it. I just don’t have much desire to replay it again. It’s just locked away as a kind of happy memory. It’s not a slight on it at all though. I had a great time with this. It gave my fancy PlayStation 5 headphones that I got, a surround sound workout, creeped me the fuck out in that spooky ass house. Yeah, I did really love this game. I think the best thing about this game as well is the pacing. It feels like edited. Pacing was always the residual force strength as well. The fact that this does that so well is great. It’s not that long. I like the structure of it. I like the kind of boss characters they’re daft, but that early scene where you’re suddenly in the room with all these people and you’re like, who the fuck are all these guys? That’s a really cool device. It does some really nice foreshadowing stuff. Maybe not all of it pays off in terms of not all the bosses are as interesting as the others, but it’s like the Resident Evil mode I like. It’s super cheesy. It’s kind of naff. Sort of having fun with it, though, so. Yeah, and it can be scary when it wants to be. Yeah, and it did shit me up at several points. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I will say after this on my list, every game from here is a game I love. So we’re still in the kind of like zone here, but we’re getting into the games I love from my number six. So what’s your number six, Matthew? My number six is Hitman 3. Higher on my list. Well, we will talk about it then. Yep, so we go to my number six, which is Inscription on PC. You played this? I have, it isn’t on my list. Wow, okay, I’m quite surprised by that. I wonder if I know why, let’s see. I’ve got to be careful talking about this one. Because you’re very familiar with the games of Daniel Mullins, right? Like this, you’ve talked about The Hex before, I believe. A game I went and bought after you recommended it on our Indie Games episode. And also Pony Island is it, the other one? Yeah, that’s the other one, yeah. Yep, so, you know, like these kind of subversive reality sort of like flipping games, kind of like genre crossing games, like they’re just, they’re hard, they’re hard ones to pin down, but like- I’d say they all mess with the like the fourth wall a bit. Yeah, that’s probably a simpler way of putting it. This is no exception. I won’t say anything more about how the kind of like wider narrative elements of it. All I will say is that you are in a house, like a cabin. There is a figure in the dark playing a card game with you. And you play these cards, they are like animal cards, like rats and other kind of like creatures, wolves and like kind of scavenger type creatures. You play them against each other. In what I will incorrectly describe as a folk horror yugioh, just because I really liked that phrase today when I was like making notes. That’s not exactly what it is, but I just wanted to use that combination of words. I think that’s right. Maybe, yeah. But, and so it’s like, has a sleigh the spire type structure where you have a map in front of you and you are deciding where to go on this map. And this person you’re playing cards with will take on the different roles of characters as you go. I say person, there’s something you’re playing cards with. And if you lose several times, basically you are taken to this room and a photo is taken of you and then the game starts again. And you may see the card that was taken of your previous self in a future game of this card game. So kind of rogue-like card game structure. That’s one part of what the game is. Now, the rest of it, I’m not going to spoil because I would just say go buy the game. You won’t regret buying it and playing it. It’ll probably be on sale in the Steam sale. I think actually the Epic Games Store sale, I’m not sure if that’s still on when this goes live, but I believe that’s one of the games you can use the $10 voucher with. So you can get it down to like six quid or something, which is an amazing price for it. Matthew, I think that the opening hours of this game are the best thing that I played this year. But I didn’t think the rest of it was as good. That’s basically where I’m at with it. How about you? That’s why it’s not on my list. I hit a huge hurdle with this where it was cryptic and I just didn’t know how to progress. I kind of ground me down a bit. I’m not a big card game person. And so I can’t really speak to like where this fits in the grand scheme of like, you know, how it stacks up against your Hearthstone, Gwent, whatever, Slay the Spy, any of these things. But I did like the card game. I felt like I had some like mastery of it. And, you know, it’s kind of small enough to get your head around, but kind of deep enough to lose yourself in. There is obviously all this like mad other shit to the game. But I feel like when I got into that mad shit, my wonderment at how clever it was, was slightly diminished by like repetition of certain things. I think the fact of it is like, I’m well into the Daniel Mullins thing. You know, I’m a signed up Daniel Mullins stan. I kind of preferred like the Hex, because it’s got a bit more variety to it. It’s not as deep or as clever as what’s going on in inscription. And I fully understand why plenty of people have made this their game of the year, but I just, I like the variety because the Hex has got lots of different genres and almost like what happens in each sort of 15 minute segment of the Hex is almost like this as a whole game. You know, this is like a many hour version of that where it just keeps getting wilder and wilder. I just, I wanted the variety. I also just found it like almost like oppressively weird. Like I was never really in the mood to play this game because it’s so creepy and strange. That’s what I was talking about earlier. I was saying like, I just gravitated towards stuff that was just a bit more gentle. Like my head just wasn’t in the place to be fucked with this year. So sorry, Daniel Mullins. Well, that’s interesting because I think that this, like the mystery aspect of this in those opening hours just really caught me at the right time. Like I played like an hour or two of it. And then when I spent a Sunday with my girlfriend and we were talking about stuff and when she left, she was like, what are you going to do this evening? I was like, I’m just going to play inscription for the rest of the night. And like that, that’s one of the only times this year where I’ve been like so motivated to play something. I just like my next available moment. I have to be doing this and nothing else. But the thing is when I was playing those opening hours with the card game, as it went on a little bit, a little while longer than I thought it would. And I was like desperate to get to the next bit. But once it got to the next bit, I just realized I missed the opening so much. And I almost wish the whole game was the opening somehow. And like, it’s tough because the other aspect of that opening is you can walk around the cabin as well. And there are other interactive elements to think about and unpick, and that’s really nicely done as well. Really deeply atmospheric, deeply creepy, like you say. I was just absolutely in the right mood for it. So there might be, there’s definitely like a kind of, a sort of like subjective aspect to that of whether you’re in the right head space for it for sure. Sounds like you weren’t necessarily, but I was. Yeah, go on. Is there something feverish about it? There’s lots of stuff which is characteristic now to his games. Like if you have played his other things, he uses certain sound effects a lot. Like when characters speak, there’s this weird kind of, brr. It’s like a really cursed version of like what Rare used to do in Banjo-Kazooie. Sometimes you’re just really in the mood for that. And sometimes you’re like, oh, I don’t know if I can deal with this right now. So I really, I’m denied about putting this on a list. I love that opening section and it’s so clever and it’s so rich and yeah, I don’t dislike it. I just wasn’t in the mood for it. Yeah, I wish games could make me feel the way that that opening did all the time. Like that’s like lightning in a bottle for sure. And it did, this is the weirdest result of this. This game got me to dig out my copy of Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories on PS1 and start off- That is a forbidden memory. A fucking rock hard card game that I got quite into in the the noughties, much to my shame. So yes, that’s inscription. Joe Scribbles encouraged me to play that. Thanks Joe, I’m pleased. Oh, a man of impeccable taste. Absolutely, I’m pleased to take that off before we did this podcast. So what’s your number five, Matthew? Yeah, a very quick side note actually. So I was gonna bring up No More Heroes. In No More Heroes made me realize that I like a certain amount of weird, but not too much weird. Did you see anything of Cruelty Squad this year? Yes, actually, because of regular listener Robert Augusta Mayer, I think sent an email, which we’ll read out in the Mailbag episode coming up, about how that was his favorite game of the year. I saw it and I wanted to play it, but it wasn’t in a Steam sale when I went, when I was looking at it, if that makes sense. So I’ll circle back to it. I mean, it looked pretty out there. You know, I was playing No More Heroes, I was like, oh yeah, I really love wild games. I love it when games fuck with me. But actually, when a game really does fuck with me and is truly abrasive, I don’t actually like it. It’s too much, like I’m too much of a square for a cruelty squad is the boy I was gonna make. Where, yeah, so I’m kind of, I feel like a bit of a poser. Like I’m all like, yeah, I love it, I love it. He breaks the fourth wall, but not too much, you know. I think it’s- Just a certain amount. I think it’s also for you that you don’t always gel with things that are a bit too cursed. I’m not like a big David Lynch guy, for example. Yeah. You know? I can’t just go with the flow. I’ve not got much chill when it comes to surrealism. What’s your favorite Black Mirror episode? Maybe that will reveal something about you, Matthew. I quite like the music contest one. I quite like the one where the guy gets chased, the guy looks at something wrong on his PC, gets like hounded. I quite like that. They’re quite mainstream, I think. Well, I asked because I thought if he picks one, he wouldn’t pick one of the really fucking dour ones or the really weird ones because, I don’t know, maybe that would say something about your taste. I’m not really sure that that worked as a litmus test, to be honest. But nonetheless, a good aside in this podcast. Good try. Solid effort. So what’s your number six, Matthew? Wait, number five? My number five is Forza Horizon 5. Not on my list. This is just a really good bit of sequel making. I love Forza Horizon 4. I love Forza Horizon 3 as well. I think when we get to the respective years when those games come into play, they will probably appear quite high on my game of the year lists. This is Playgrounds open world car PG, where you poodle around in the most expensive cars ever made, enjoying the open world map and then going to events and taking part in more choreographed racing on that map. It’s gorgeous up there with Ratchet and Clank as one of the best looking games of the new generation. Car games, I think are always good for this because they’ve got incredibly shiny bonnets, which everyone knows is one of the watermarks for how good graphics are. The other one is water, water and car bonnets. That’s what I’m interested in. This is set in Mexico. I must admit, in the previews, I wasn’t really digging it. I didn’t really see the appeal of it, but actually it’s a really varied map. It takes you from deserts to sand dunes to jungles. It’s basically got this huge circuit of like seafront highways, which are just incredibly straight. So not maybe the most exciting races, but basically built for going at absurd speeds. This game goes so fast when it wants to. There are some absolute screaming road racing in this, which, you know, gave me like big burnout energy. So I’m super into that. It’s definitely the arcade end of the racing spectrum. It’s not total burnout, you know, you’re flipping cars and like the UIs exploding and setting on fire or anything like that. But it’s about as close as you get to that in this day and age. I just think it’s a really generous game. It completely lets you play it on your own terms. I think they finally got the structure of the game bang on. Maybe this is a bit granular, but in the past, it’s always had like variations of like you’re unlocking these festival sites, which is the Forza Horizon Festival. And as you do it, it kind of populates the area of the map around that festival site with various different disciplines. Here, you basically choose the order that you develop the festival in, and each festival site is tied to a discipline. So if you’re really into cross-country racing, which I am, you just build the cross-country stage and then it’s like here are all the cross-country races in the game. You can just play this. Like as your campaign, you can just do these races. So you don’t have to kind of like mix and match. I mean, the variety of stuff is one of its strengths. So I would argue that you should do that. But this game knows why it’s good. It knows what its fans want. It’s served up loads of that. It looked gorgeous. The only downside to it is I think the classical music radio station isn’t as strong as it usually is. That tells you a lot about me. That’s the station I listen to. All the others are a little bit like, turn it down. It’s too loud. It’s too loud music for my tastes, but yeah, I just, it’s like the only racing game I really like outside of Maricopa these days. So I just hope they keep doing it and doing it as well as this. Is there no Mexican version of Randy Newman that might be on the radio, Matthew? Is that not a thing? It actually doesn’t have a huge amount of like Mexican music in it, which is weird. It’s got like a lot of licensed, it’s like hospital radio, whatever that is. I’m not even gonna pretend I know if that’s a music label rather than being piped from a hospital, I think. That’s exactly, I mean, to say a lot about me, I thought you meant literally a hospital radio. Oh yeah, it’s not like Adele for Doris in Ward 5. He is Cliff Richard. I mean, you know, it’s funny, I played about three hours of this, right? And objectively, it’s fantastic. It’s exactly the kind of racing game that I do gel with. It was like one of three games from this particular console manufacturer that happened to be bottom of the pile in terms of my interests. And so it got submerged just very quickly. And I must admit, I know people bring up the tone all the time. I’m sure the tone is like spot on for the audience they want to hear, like younger people, all that stuff, you know, things I don’t understand as a millennial. But I just couldn’t quite click with that. It’s just not the music and the vibe and the cut scenes. I mean, I really admire the idea of like, building actual RPG quests that require finding a car and then someone will talk along the way and that’s like a quest you do. Like that’s like quite bold in terms of game design, I would say, in terms of like how you kind of make a game with cars. But yeah, admittedly, there’s just that slight tonal disconnect where I just, I kind of wish, I guess maybe when I was playing stuff like Burnout or Need for Speed like 10 years ago, maybe if I like there were slightly more of my wavelength than this is culturally. You were basically a huge DJ Atomicus there. Brutal. You’ve got that tattoo of him. Yeah, three of them. Yeah, you’ve only seen one of them, but yeah, so that’s… I hear that a lot. When people don’t like this game, the thing that, you know, not that you don’t dislike it or anything, but when people aren’t into it, it’s always they’re like, this is so obnoxious. It’s just a huge cheerleader for you. And I’m not like, I don’t love that. I’m not saying that’s what connects with me, but I’m quite good at tuning that stuff out because I fundamentally like driving a car really fast down a volcano and it looks amazing. Yeah. So I don’t really mind that at the end of the race, it’s like, you’re number one. You’re so amazing, Matthew. And you can input your name and it sort of says it and things like that. That’s fucking freaky when that comes out for the first time. It’s like, yeah, I don’t like this. You’re so handsome, Samuel. You’re like, what the fuck? Yeah. Why do you think I want to hear this? I mean, I do. Why? Yeah, but you know what, though? This was an example this year of how I saw… I found it very pleasant to see people being up on Xbox. I think that’s nice because Xbox has been really good this year and the hardware is good. The hardware is slightly easier to get hold of than the PlayStation hardware, which I don’t know if that’s a demand thing or just a supply thing, but nonetheless, that’s good. Game Pass is excellent. Game Pass had a fantastic year. This was where I felt like I started to see it all coalesce, where I saw so many people who had been dormant since the 360 era in my friends list come alive and were playing this and had times and all these different races. That was a massive surprise to me, but it really reminded me of what it was like during the 360 era where everyone was playing, like Modern Warfare or Halo 3 and that very specific time when everyone I knew was in their 20s and was hyper-engaged with multiplayer games. That was cool to see, but in a game that doesn’t require you to play multiplayer, that was just rad. So I did enjoy seeing that side of it for sure and definitely the spectacle of it and the kind of variety of cars and activities and the world, all very good, all objectively very good. If I’d have played more of it, Matthew probably would have made my top 10, but please see it on your list. Yeah, it’s just, I know, I just have history of this series now and it’s like, you know, I do not get excited for racing games, but this one is just, I’m good at it, not I’m good at it, but you feel like you’re good at it. It’s designed to make you feel like you’re good at it and, you know, I can win the races and I find it, I just find it very satisfying. You know, I’ll always have time for this plus like they have a really good track record for releasing like amazing DLC for Forza Horizon. So I’m like really, really intrigued to see where they take it because, you know, this map already feels like it’s got it all. So, you know, I can’t wait. What did they do for the last one? Was there a big DLC thing? The last one was the Lego one. Oh, right. Yeah, that was good. They did the hot wheels for three. That was crazy. Gave you that killer strap as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Orange is the new track. Which, yeah, yeah. So I guess that leaves Meccano or Kinect for this one. I wonder if they’ll ever go all in and do a big Xbox crossover and do like a Halo set. Because they did do the Warhawk, right? Yeah, something like that. I knew it would be… Yeah, maybe it’s too limited. You’re right. They probably would go with a racing thing rather than a game thing. Like a kart racing game with blinks in it, the Matthew Castle dream. Maybe they’ll do a fable crossover with their other playground buddies. Well, that’s something to look forward to later this year then. So yeah, good pick Matthew. So I guess we’re on my number five, is that right? Yeah. So my number five is Super Mario 3D World plus Bowser’s Fury. Is this on your list? No, this isn’t. Okay, so it’s the Bowser’s Fury part I’m putting here. It’s well documented, my love, for Super Mario 3D World. I’ve talked about it before. So Bowser’s Fury, kind of like a remix of the fundamentals of 3D World. It’s sort of like an open world Mario game, really, with a day and night cycle. And at night, Bowser emerges from this vat of black goo. He’s been infected by this thing. That makes it sound really sinister. It’s slightly more sinister than you think it’s going to be, I would say. So he emerges from this black goo and becomes like a kaiju size, basically. Just a giant monster. And then kind of chases after you, throwing fireballs at you and stuff like that. What he does in the map to chase you changes over time, actually, as you go through different phases of the game. And he becomes more of a threat. And what you can do to counter this is you get these items called cat shines, which there are all these like lighthouses dotted throughout the map. When Kaiju Bowser appears, all of the lighthouses get blacked out by finding the cat shine token. A lighthouse will activate. It will damage his health bar slightly and he’ll fuck off for the night. And that’s him done. So and then basically what you’re building up to is you’re collecting enough of these. To ring this big bell, you’ll turn into basically like Super Saiyan giant cat Mario. And then you’ll fight, but you’ll both be kind of like Godzilla size and you’ll fight in the in the map. And so in between, basically it’s structured as like, what if lots of different Mario 3D world levels kind of coexisted in this big watery map? And but but the magic thing about it is, I mean, there’s a lot of magic to this. I absolutely fucking loved it. Is that when you play through one of the like level areas, again, it will remix it with different objectives and enemies. So let’s say you want to let’s say one maps like one map starts with like one cat shine to get when you come back, you’ll see that there’s a second cat shine to get if you do a different set of different complete a different objective on the map. And then that might happen three or four times. And then the same area has then been remixed to be a different level, essentially, like several times over, just a nice little sprinkling of Nintendo Magic there showing you what they can do with the same space with a bit of variety. All of these places and the giant giant Bowser coming after you kind of coexist with no loading screens. And it’s actually like visually spectacular. I think that when Bowser emerges in the distance, I think it is slightly sinister because basically this like this dark shell rises from this pot of goo and then starts gradually spinning. And like, it’s like it’s like our night time is coming motherfucker. It’s got that kind of vibe about it. I like it should say that on the UI and what it’s a really experimental Mario game and like much more, much more of a viable proposition than I thought it was going to be. And like what’s what I will say about this is there are a bunch of games that will come will come up in my honorable mentions that I tried to play for this episode, found they were too dense, found I didn’t love them. I thought I’ll pick this up. Just see what I think of it. Boom, four hours just gone. And I just played it for four hours in a row and I just fucking adored it. And it’s not exactly the same as Mario 3D World because those levels are quite guided. The camera is put in a certain place. Like there’s a way you’re supposed to play them here. The camera is a bit more freeform. I would say it’s probably one of the shakier cameras of the 3D Mario games, because it struggles to keep up with the scope of the game that they’ve built for it. But holy fuck, Matthew, I love this. I love that they turned Nessie, the big dinosaur monster, into basically an open world transport vehicle. That delighted me. Love to see Nessie repurposed in such fashion. I think it’s so fucking good, Matthew. What did you think? Yeah, I thought Bowser’s Fury is absolutely amazing. This was on my list, but I decided that I liked hitting children more in Lost Judgment. So it didn’t quite make the cut. This was totally delightful. You’re right, the levels, you know, when you’re in them, you can see that they’re still sort of 3D world levels. But the fact that you are outside them and that they exist in this physical space makes them visually look more like galaxy levels because they’re kind of these abstract things hanging in space. That repetition feels a bit more like finding the stars in a Mario 64 level. It kind of feels like a greatest hits of previous Nintendo thinking shoved together. It’s definitely the most enticing bit of 3D world for me. It’s churlish to say, I just wish there was more of it or that it’s too short. Like, it’s pretty generous. It’s not like over in a couple of hours. It’s, you know, you’ve got a decent couple of sessions there. And it’s just you get through it so quickly because it’s just so easy to consume. It’s such a delight. But I did get to end of it and was like, ah, god, I wish I wish there was more of this and not 3D World, which is fine. Like 3D World is still fine, but this just eclipses it so easily. I’m not sure I buy into the whole. This is what the next Mario should be. I still, you know, I don’t think it’s as good as Odyssey, so I still preferred what they did with Odyssey and would hope they’d go more down that direction than this. But as a standalone thing, you’re right, I mean, that you talking about how sinister it was there made me think of getting back to the thinking of that gave us Majora’s Mask, you know, where you’ve got a team, you’ve got a lot of assets, they know how the character in the world works, and they kind of remix it. And this is a lot more remixed, you know, of 3D World than Majora’s Mask is of Ocarina. But that weirdness in tone, that experimental kind of like, ah, fuck, let’s just try it, kind of energy is definitely more that kind of thinking. I wish Nintendo would do this more with like other things they have. You know, you get the feeling these teams make these amazing games and then kind of move on from them too fast. If anything, this is the Nintendo team that doesn’t do that. They famously took the Captain Toad levels from 3D World and spun those out into a standalone title. They’ve proven themselves again and again that they like to play in a space, but why not play in Odyssey Space, say, for example. It’s fundamentally a good thing. I probably should have put it on my list. This is probably better than Lost Judgment. Yeah, I think like the difference here is just I love the fundamentals of 3D World and you don’t have that same love. And like I just yeah, this was married to a Mario game that I love. And I mean, what a great thing that they put this out so more people can play it, Matthew, because obviously the original was just out with you. So to most people, this would have been a new 3D Mario game that came out this year. I’m sure but like, yeah, and then to give this they could have just re-released it as is they’ve done that a few times with different games on Switch. But you know, they didn’t they just they were like here is a whole new thing. I agree with you. I don’t buy that this is a like a test bed for anything. I think it’s just them showing what they can do and having a lot of fun doing it. And yeah, and it’s just a real testament to their imagination. Just but I will say that the overall like pacing of an open world Mario game works really well here. Yeah, so great stuff, Matthew. Just like absolute delight. If you have a Nintendo Switch, just just get on that shit. It’s so, so good. So yeah, what’s your number four, Matthew? My number four is The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. I wondered if this would make your list because you said it was an eight out of ten when we last talked about it. So yeah. I was listening to the soundtrack when I was making this list again. I was like, you know what? This is just so good. I’ve got such happy memories attached to playing this game now, because there’s just a few things that happen in it where everything comes together, like the storylines, the character development, the art, the music, and the fan service-ness of it. It just it all clicks into place. It ends really strong. The last couple of hours of this game are really up there in terms of the shoot-a-koomi doing everything he does best. This is, of course, the Ace Attorney historical spin-off, I guess prequel, where you play as Phoenix Wright’s ancestor teaming up with Sherlock Holmes. I think your mileage may vary on this one. It’s what I’ve learnt this year from seeing other people who really like Ace Attorney play it after the reviews. I was intrigued to see how this one would land. Some people don’t like the characters as much. I think some people are surprised at how much is made of the Victorian setting. It really leans into the Sherlock Holmes stuff. Shichikumi is a big Sherlock Holmes fan and this is a love letter to that kind of mystery. So it has got a different character to modern Ace Attorney for sure. If you’re into that, as I am, you are going to fucking love it. I think the actual what they do with Sherlock Holmes is really fun. He’s just like goofball, idiot, but maybe genius. Hard to say, like they keep it pretty vague. He has this like mini game where he makes all these terrible deductions and you come in and kind of correct them for him. Not very difficult, but the actual set pieces where you do it are these like almost song and dance numbers where people are like tap dancing spinning around and there are spotlights. There is literally some tap dancing at the end of this game, which is probably my like favorite three minutes of any game this year. This is the thing that made me like punch the air when I was on a train because it was just so awesomely silly and perfectly executed. I mean, it’s a Shootakumi game we never thought we were going to get to play. Here it is, more Ace Attorney. Please listen to our Ace Attorney episode for more on this, but you know, I love this game. Yep, two games from Shootakumi in fact that we… Yeah, that’s greedy. This should probably be four and five. Yeah, that would make it a bit confusing. But yeah, it’s nice to see it on this list, Matthew. I did worry that you’d called on it a little bit. And yeah, but you know, again, I remind you, I came around your house early this year, you had loads and loads of freelance to do, and you told me I have put off doing all that freelance because I’ve played like 50 hours of this one day, and this was that game. So you must have loved it, you know what I mean? You can sort of sense every department on this game, like vibing with each other and everyone’s like putting their best foot forward. So even though it’s not the most complicated thing in terms of a lot of static screens, it’s quite visual novel-ish. It works very, very hard within that space. I think it’s got beautiful production values. I really like the mysteries. I really like the tone of it, the humour of it. Yeah, this is really good. I don’t know why I was… Yeah, I’m sure I’ve said this before. I don’t know what I was thinking when I had called on it. I think this one will hold up. Yeah, don’t listen to other people, Matthew. Just never listen to Twitter. It would be gross for someone like me to not put the Ace Attorney game on their top 10 of this year’s list. That is like not just looking a gift horse in the mouth. That is like chopping a gift horse head off with a samurai sword. It’s just… It would be unacceptable. So I just can’t. Very rich analogy there and a lot of violent imagery for me to unpack in that. Very good, Matthew. Yeah, I again echo that you should go listen to Ace Attorney episode if you haven’t already. If you’re not a fan of the series, it will make you a fan. Matthew is very eloquent on that one. Or you’ll come out of it going, yeah, this really isn’t for me. And you’ll listen to the best Sonic games episode instead. That’s cursed. So my number four, Matthew, is Halo Infinite. Is this on your list? This isn’t. Whoa! Key thing here, then, is I’m putting on here because of the multiplayer. I’ve not finished the campaign. I’ve played so much of this multiplayer, though. And this was absolutely the multiplayer experience I was looking for this year. A proper, like, bite-sized jump in, have a great time for like 10 minutes, kind of like phase-out kind of thing. Skill ceiling’s high, but not insurmountably high. I can actually play it. I can actually do well in a game, if I’m not up against some absolute fucking stinkers in our next box. I can play on PC or console. Good on either. I’ve got a 99… I bought a £99 Xbox One ages ago, and it’s steered me well through this year, actually. It’s been low-key been my favorite console this year. And Halo Infinite, yep. Just, you know, the campaign, I don’t have loads of complex thoughts about it. I’ve not played enough of it to comment on it, honestly. But 20 hours of multiplayer under my belt, I feel confident putting it this high on my list. Great feeling weapons, really nice maps. Just like I don’t really care about the progression system discussion stuff. Not really a sort of… I’ve already got a battle pass in Apex. Thank you very much. I can’t be taking on too much homework. All the helmets look the same anyway, so. I don’t care about, you know, what stance I’m doing at the end or whatever. I know, I don’t… That’s not to dismiss people who do care about that stuff, fair enough. But, like, for me, it’s not a big deal. As the large scale Halo combat you want, like, vehicle nonsense and, honestly, a bit too hard to kind of comprehend what’s going on, but really shines in the smaller scale modes and the capture the flag type stuff and the death matches. Really, really good. So and the oddball mode, of course, which is still fantastic. Finding the different bits of the map to go hide yourself while three incompetent people try and protect you from the coming horde of nightmare players. Great stuff. Matthew, I really want to ask you about this because you definitely play more of the campaign of this than I have. Yeah. And I wonder if that’s why you haven’t put this in your top 10. I think so. I’ve had a bit of a roller coaster with this campaign. I started off playing it and thought, yeah, it feels like a 343 campaign. Like it starts with a few linear levels, then it opens up a bit and it still wasn’t quite digging it. I feel like the combat felt nice enough that I actually… It’s a rare map clearing game where I don’t mind it because every icon just takes you to a fight and the fights are what’s good in this game. I just didn’t feel it was making any particular interesting use of the map. And then it hits this sweet spot in the middle of the campaign where there are two levels which are basically set in the open world. Most of the levels whisk you to an interior where it just becomes a linear level but there’s like a thing where you have to bring down these three big gun turrets and you can do it in any order and then there’s a thing where you have to go around lighting up these beacons to like unlock some mystical dude down. You know what Halo’s like, it’s an endless parade of like go to the ark to unlock the obelisk which will in turn power up the ring and you’re like oh alright, sure. And in those levels I just felt like it finally clicked, you know I had the vehicles, I was going around, I was just blowing stuff up, it was outdoors combat but it had the size and the scale beyond those smaller encounters. And then it just ends with this run of quite terrible linear levels again. I just don’t like the interiors in this game, it wasn’t really doing anything for me. Like I say, a real up down up down up down. There isn’t a single moment in the campaign where you feel like Fuck yeah, I’m part of this amazing force. It never has one of those Halo 3 levels where there’s loads of people travelling with you. It never has the multiple ships moving with you. You always feel very alone. And even if you’re having fun with one vehicle, you just feel like I’m just a lonely bloke in a tank. It’s got a very strange lonely energy to it. The campaign just didn’t quite click for me by the end and dragged it down, but I do think the combat works. This is really granular and it may be part of the problem. I think the game is way too generous. The campaign is way too generous with ammo. You never run out of it, so you never have to change weapons, which I think is a key part of the Halo sandbox. The sandbox isn’t just a power fantasy. It’s like a desperate scrabble for make use of what you’ve got. And it doesn’t actually ever do that. Like, I literally had a battle rifle, which is incredibly overpowered in the campaign, and I just carried it for hours and hours and hours. Every level has just these generic ammo boxes that refill your gun to max endlessly. And it felt like, why would I ever throw this thing away? And it made it a lot more one-note. Maybe I’m missing something here. I’ll admit, I was playing it on heroic difficulty, not legendary, because legendary is too hard. And then you could say, well, if it’s too hard, then obviously that gun thing isn’t a problem. But the sweet, the difficulty sweet spot I found, I soon found to be too one-note. And I’m not good enough to put it up higher. But you are right about multiplayer. The multiplayer fucking rocks. Again, this is one of many games which is game number 11 on my list. The tough thing here, Matthew, is I just don’t think multiplayer is part of your life in the same way it is with me. And, you know, and like, that’s the problem. I can see a future in which I keep playing this multiplayer. And I feel like when you jumped on with me, it’s probably one of the last times you’ll play Halo Infinite multiplayer, just in terms of like your gaming diet. That’s not like a criticism, but that’s just what I’ve observed in you. I think you are 100% right. You’ve got a much bigger appetite for this. I think there’s hope. Like, if I get into some more sessions with you, and I know other people, other friends are playing it, I’ve just, I’ve sort of fallen out of the habit. Like, it’s been years since I’ve properly played multiplayer anything. And it’s quite hard to get back into that mindset of like, oh, I’ll wait for some people, you know, I’m kind of like a, what am I going to do in this next hour? You know, I’m not very good at organizing that stuff in advance. I feel kind of bad about the campaign because there was a, there was a period where I thought it was just fly. I was like, I’m having a great time with this. And I tweeted like positive stuff about it and was like, yeah. But I kind of soured on it by the end. It’s just really one note that, that ring as well. It’s just the grassland and forest, but there’s no variety to it. People say it’s like the silent cartographer, but it is just like 20 hours of the silent cartographer. And it turns out there is only so much silent cartographer I can eat before I’m sick. It’s like a kid who’s like, when you go to Pizza Hut and they’re like, do you want infinite ice cream factory? And you’re like, obviously. And it’s like, you actually don’t. Or you going to Pizza Hut now, Matthew. Yeah, and going, do you still have the infinite ice cream factory? And they’re like, no, we stopped doing that in the 90s. Like, I’m hoping that they’re going to reveal that there’s like a lot more to this. They’re going to roll out more of the campaign. Here’s the snowy bit. And here’s some other bits. And here’s some like, here are a load of, you know, you can’t get Marines. Like, trust me, when you get the Marines and they sit on the gun turret, or they sit in your tank and they’re firing their weapons, that is still rad. I really like that. Filling up a Jeep with like a load of motherfuckers with rocket launchers, and then going and just torching a base. That is still good. But I want to see like five tanks, 10 tanks. I want to see an army of tanks driving up a huge open world mountain, rather than just me taking kind of quite nervous pot shots from afar, because otherwise my tank will explode and I don’t want to have to walk all the way back to get another one. Yeah, it’s a bit like playing Assault in the Control Room on Legendary and all your Marines have already been killed. I am, so no scarabs in this, right? No scarabs. That’s a huge miss as well. Complete side note, did you see the trailer for the game Ark Raiders at the Game Awards? I must have done. That, so it’s like, it looked like it was a co-op shooter. That looked like it was Fight Scarabs, the game, because there’s a bit where like four dudes were just like, a little bit like Monster Hunter Cross with Halo. And like the art style, like I’m not sure about it, but like it was, it kind of had that vibe of let’s take down a big robot-y thing. And I just thought, fuck, they just wanted to do the scarab set piece in a game. So yeah, disappointed that 343 has failed to acknowledge my love of scarabs, but yeah. They’ve got these awful boss fights as well. That’s the opposite of everything that’s kind of interesting and cool about Halo, which is like scale and like huge numbers. And they’re like deal with one thing, which is the same size as you, but it’s like a total fuck. And you’re like, oh, well that isn’t really what I come to. I don’t come to this game to be trapped in a room with like a really angry gorilla over and over again. Like some of them I had to turn the difficulty down just because they were handing me my ass. And I was like, this is just not the skill set or the creativity of approach that I want. I do not know why they are so hooked on boss fights in this game. There are loads of them, they’re like 10 and they’re all the motherfucker. Matt, the evening we played multiplayer this year was so fun Matthew, let’s definitely do that again soon. We should do that again, because the multiplayer is sublime. That’s what I was talking about when I said this list may sound more contrarian than it is. It’s not really, it’s just that I loved Rhythm Doctor more. I actually really like your granular criticism about playing by yourself and it feeling lonely. That’s exactly like the kind of very precise sort of observation that would mean something to me as a reader reading a review. I’m pleased to hear that. I will get through that campaign. I’m sorry to the listeners that I don’t have a big overriding take on that campaign yet. I will say it’s an open world game that you can clear everything out of in 20 hours, which I think there is something to be said for that. It’s very doable and the way it paces and spaces and counters out is very durable. It’s just like nothing emerges from that map. That’s the other thing. It’s very like there are fights here and nowhere else. This isn’t quite like if you’re going to build this open world, don’t you want to make more use of the potential of it? Matthew, this has been a really exciting episode so far. Very different this. It’s been a roller coaster. Yeah, it’s been great. I think there are still upsets to come. Yeah, I think so. I have a feeling that there’s going to be a game missing from yours that’s going to raise a lot of question marks. So what do you hit me with your number three? My number three is Psychonauts 2. Nice. I wondered if this would make your list or if it would be in the honorable mentions, but I remember you going to bat for it early this year. Fantastic. A 3D action platformer set in a world where you can invade the heads of characters and you go into their brains and you explore their mental landscapes where you try to fight their personal demons and cure their traumas as this sort of psychological kind of invader. It’s the concept of Psychonauts 1, which was made in a certain year here many years ago by Double Fine, which is Tim Schafer’s outfit. I feel kind of similar about this, how I felt about No More Heroes 3. This is just the best thing Double Fine have made since Psychonauts 1. This is just a team nailing what they’re good at. And it is beautiful. It maybe has some Microsoft money helping that. It has this awesome world design, like every brain you go into, you just can’t wait to see what they do next. You know, whether that’s an art treatment or a gameplay twist, you know, one brain is a kind of like mad, overcooked-esque gaming show run by kind of sock puppets. You know, another one is… Well, I’m not going to list them off. I don’t want to spoil them, but seeing what each thing does next is a huge part of the appeal as it was in Psychonauts 1. So it’s kind of pulling from the same kind of pool of ideas. But one of my big problems I have over the years is that, you know, given the power that people have to play with on PC and Xbox and PlayStation compared to Nintendo, that no one uses that power for, like, good in terms of, like, fun, colourful art, world design. And this is just someone… This is, you know, this is HD 3D platforming. It is gorgeous. It has this enormous scale to it. You know, you can… There are, like, apocalyptic scenes woven out of hair. You know, there’s a city set inside a bowling shoe where there’s a sort of bacterial fungal spray apocalypse about to kill everyone and you’re riding around on a bowling ball. It is just wild. It is like the wildest, most colourful stuff you will see outside of a Nintendo game. It’s one of the rare video games that’s actually funny. When you’re walking around the hub talking to characters, it kind of feels the closest we’ve had to a Tim Schafer adventure game in a long time. You’re not doing anything outside of talking. There’s not a lot of item puzzles or anything like that. But going through the branch and conversation trees and finding out what these characters are about, it just reminded me of how much his stuff used to zing in Monkey Island or Grim Fandango. It really feels up there in terms of the writing quality. It’s a gorgeous world, fantastic music. Again, just a team of where everyone is great and everyone is just putting their best work up on screen. It just sings in a kind of audiovisual sense, feels really nice to play. It’s pretty chunky, like it’s a good 15 hours and it’s constantly showing you new things. I love 3D platformers. I wish there were more of them that were as good as this. Great call, great addition. Every time I’ve seen footage of this game, like posted on social media this year, I thought, that looks so fucking amazing. Like, both imaginative but also just gorgeous looking on a kind of technical level on modern platforms. And it’s an interesting one because, Matthew, I felt like I couldn’t play this having not completed the first one. Right. And do you think that’s the case or do you think it can be enjoyed by itself? No, I think you can still enjoy it. I mean, there’s a lot of like callbacks and like the story does roll over. But if you’ve played some of the first, you’ve probably played enough of it to appreciate like some of the callbacks and some of the things they do here. I haven’t played the VR thing, but I watched it on YouTube because I want the Rhombus of Ruin that kind of comes between. That’s maybe important for some setup, I’d say. You can either buy that or just watch a little half an hour playthrough. Is that like an Oculus thing? Yeah, it’s a PlayStation VR, I think it’s on all of them now, though. It looked pretty cool, I just didn’t have access to a helmet at the time, so I watched it instead. Yeah, that had a lot of character to it. This is really great. The strongest thing about this game is just discovering what each new level looks like, so it would ruin some of the magic of it, just to list off, there’s this, there’s this, there’s this. But the surprises keep coming and it’s got like… It’s a game that is like surprisingly long. A sort of third act sort of feels like it sort of comes out of nowhere a bit and then there’s loads of really cool stuff, which maybe happened with the original a little bit as well. But you’re just like, fantastic, sign me up, I’ll play more of this. I hope they make Psychonauts 3 or another game like this. It made me realise how much I love like a big Double Fine production. Like I feel like between this, well I guess between Brutal Legend and now, they’ve just been making loads of weird little experimental things. Some of them land, some of them don’t. But even if they do land, they’re so sort of small and contained that they never really like explore the idea fully. I’d much rather they were like throwing everyone at this. I imagine plenty of people will disagree with that, but like, I think this has really paid off. Well, I am, you would expect that Microsoft acquisition would give them the capacity to do that in future, right? To like, to see this as a kind of idea of what they can produce. You know, I think like, you know, they were doing a lot of like, contract work as well, I think, probably just to pay the bills. Like it’s kind of a miracle that this such a weird outfit who has had these like, famous ups and downs with with how their games have been published and performed, you know, still last to this day, but I’m really glad that they got to this point. And they were able to deliver this because I think it’s just, it’s everything that’s good about these people and just really renewed, like in the same way No More Heroes kind of renewed my interest in Suda 51, I’ve just came out of this feeling like I’m so pumped again for whatever Double Fine do next. Yeah, another top game pass game and a good pick. Oh yeah, god, embarrassment of riches. Yeah, real good. I will definitely play that then at some point. That’s yeah, I’ve got to take that off. That sounds great. If you can, like, I’m pretty sure if you’ve got access to an Xbox Series X, I think that’s like the only version with HDR and it really pops with it. Okay, that’s not what I have, unfortunately, but I can play it on PC. Oh, sorry. You can play the drab version too, it looks great whatever, but it hasn’t got HDR on PC and it’s got just some really, like, crazy neon levels that just, like, really sort of zap with it. Damn, not getting the right purples with my GTX 1080 Ti, but yeah, good stuff Matthew. So, my number three is Deathloop. Is that on your list? It isn’t. I didn’t think it would be. I’m quite surprised by that, I’ll be honest, because I do think this was still a nine out of ten. Interesting to see the discourse around this change over time. I’ve seen nothing but complaints about the ending of this game, like the ending being very brisk, which it is. I think that my only real problem with this game is that the ending loop that you’re progressing towards only really plays out in one way. I think that maybe when we didn’t know as much about what this game was, the promise of it was maybe that it was more of a hitman-style game of optimization and rewarding different approaches and stuff, and weirdly, it’s kind of front-loaded in that respect. First of all, it is about figuring out how you kill them, but then it’s about figuring out what the one way to kill them is. And while there’s still a little bit of deviation along the way, a bunch of the targets get taken out in the same way each time, so it means that you don’t have massive incentives to replay the final loop of the game over and over again. I should recap here, actually, for people who still don’t know what the game is, but you are this guy called Colt, you wake up on this island, you have to kill the different visionaries on this island to basically stop the first day of this sort of utopian society, I guess, this first day from looping over and over again, and you remember what happened in the different time loops, so that’s the kind of premise of the game, but no one else around you does. Apart from this one other character called Juliana, you go and try and kill these targets, and Juliana will come after you at different points in the game and try and stop you. Juliana can be controlled by the AI or by a human player, and so that can be quite an unpredictable challenge. A really cool element to the game, a cool wrinkle. It’s set in this very beautiful kind of like The Prisonery, kind of like 60s genre film TV infused world. Is there a better way of describing that, Matthew? Is there a word that… No, I think that’s right. It’s kind of a slightly psychedelic spy thing, 60s, sort of like The Avengers or The Prisoner. Yeah. The Avengers with the go to the top of the bowler hat, not Thor. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very much that kind of vibe. But like, it’s like a shooting game that’s quite acrobatic. It’s got a lot of the kind of, it’s by Arcane Studios, it’s got the Dishonored style movement, like the blink ability is literally in this game basically. You level up your powers as you go. You get different powers in order to take down these visionaries who are your targets. And as the day loops, you come back to the same areas over and over again and piece together different bits of the story to progress you to that final loop. And I really loved it. And I think that is my only drawback, that it doesn’t have a massive amount of reasons to keep replaying the final loop. But I thought the rest of it was terrific. So Matthew, how come it didn’t make your top 10? So I haven’t finished it. Oh, okay. Right. Fair enough. Because I got bored. Oh, okay. I haven’t quite finished it. I felt like I was getting really close to the end. And I just ran out of interest in doing the thing over and over again. I do really like this game. I just loads I admire about it. I think as a production, I think it’s gorgeous. You know, I love the lore of the world. It’s partly that thing you said about it became apparent quite soon, like the direction the main mission was going in and that it made a lot of it feel kind of like weirdly meaningless because you’re like, well, I know this isn’t it. You know, this is just on the way to the thing they want me to do. And I didn’t feel like I meant I felt like it was almost like making a few too many connections for me. Like, I don’t think I worked out a huge amount in that world, like, considering how complex the structure is, I didn’t think it was actually that clever with it. I can’t quite put my finger on it, which is obviously terrible, as an alleged games critic. I think part of the problem I have with it is that the whole thing is built around those visionaries. But because there isn’t like, you know, there is some stealth, but often like you meet them and it’s kind of just like all out action, you know, I didn’t feel like I got a huge amount of time to like, learn about them like in the flesh like you do with a hitman villain. I wish it was a bit more hitman-y. I wish you got to spend a bit more time around them in a non-combat way that you could sort of see their behaviours. I felt like I learnt about them from like email logs and messages and like lore dumps from like reading documents or whatever, rather than in the game. They’re quite, considering they’re at the centre of it, they’re quite unknowable weirdly. Yeah. It’s, it’s, that’s like my, that’s probably my big criticism of it. And I didn’t feel the same way about the Dishonored people, because I felt like I was slinking around the Dishonored villains. The Dishonored villains aren’t as interesting as the characters here, but given how interesting they are, I’m surprised they didn’t land better for me. Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. There are some of them who you only really meet at one point in the game, and then there’s like a very automatic way that you take them out of the story. That happens with a couple of them, so yeah, you might get close to the guy in the recording studio, for example, he’s one that you kind of only really meet once, and once you’ve done that part of the game, there is one button you press basically to stop ever meeting him again. So that’s kind of a fair point. I would say it helps that you get the sense that the island is theirs and you’ll hear different characters when you go to different areas at different times of day. It’s not like the world building is so good that you are exposed to that still, but I think that’s a fair point. I’m still wrestling this one, I need to finish it and maybe finishing it will bring it together. I absolutely loved the first five hours of this game. I thought when it was establishing its rules, given that it is quite out there and the game behaves in some weird ways, I love the tone of it. I love the writing of Colt and Juliana, I love their interplay. I feel like I know them really well. Once that stuff filtered out a bit more and it just became about me and the game going through systems, it lost a little bit of interest to me. It may just be like the gamble with this structure of game is that I think you can make the campaign like worse for yourself. Like if you do things in certain orders, like if you hit certain highs early on, you can basically sort of max out or finish certain narrative strands of this game quite quickly and then you can get hit with a strand of something you’re not as interested in and that’s the risk it takes. It’s quite hard to talk about this game without spoiling elements of it, but I feel like there are certain parts of the… there’s certain things you have to do to get there that aren’t as interesting as other things. They just bunched up for me, which is kind of like bad luck game, I guess, but it happened. Yeah, maybe it’s like a slight sort of sag in the final third as you try and figure out how all the pieces on the board kind of fit together. I’m not turning my nose up at this. This is the one I was really worried that you were going to be like, oh, you’re just trying to be a fucking Drarian with this. No, not at all. Because loads of people I respect have given this a 10 out of 10 and they’re like, this is my game of the year. I get the impression of all the games reviews I’ve read, if any game was an all-timer for some people this year, it was this. The effusive praise that I read for this game, I feel like it has just gone to certain people in a way that it didn’t with me and I’m a little bit jealous of that, obviously, and I’m sort of sad that no other game quite did that for me. But I just think for my money, I much prefer Dishonored 2. I just think that’s a more interesting sandbox in terms of the powers and the pacing of it. But that’s okay. They made both those games. They’re not a bad studio. Dishonored 2 is probably one of my top 10 games of all time. I think Dishonored 2 is a 10 and I think this is a 9. That’s where I can establish that. Like I say, very close to making it in. But I just had to get wanky and talk about Opus Star Song. No, I mean, I like that on this podcast, you never bullshit. You’re always like, these are the things that I believe. And that’s fine. I just wrote a list of like, I have to have this in it. Like, I want to talk about this and celebrate it. And I got to 10 before I’d hit this game. So it was like, well, I feel like I should say more nice things about it to balance that out. Yeah, I do still really like it. It’s really, really cool. Like it’s the that world building, you know, why I don’t think it necessarily serves the characters as much as I’d want. Like they’re fascinating characters. It’s a fascinating world like the archaeology of this island, the way there’s been all these tiers of different organisations there over the years and you’re unpicking all this stuff. Like no one else does this stuff this well and at a triple A level and is allowed to like do it on this scale and with this budget. One hundred percent. I cherish this studio and I love that this game happened. Yeah, I have plenty of moments in this where I just thought it was spectacular. Like the party sequence in this that occurs in the nighttime in one area of the game and how that kind of like ties into the final loop is really, really good. I had one. I found a way to basically like kill either using the kind of chain sort of like ability managed to kill two targets and like an entire roof full of enemies with like one one bullet basically. That was amazing to watch. Nice like I just and like just going back into that party over and over again to see what I can do to flush out the one target and all this stuff and like and what the best the most efficient and quietest way of killing them was like they gave me those kind of immersive sim feels used as some of the same parts as Dishonored in different ways. And yeah, I really liked it. The Juliana stuff is one of those things where if I had fewer games to play, I’d have played more of it. But what I did play of it I very much enjoyed. I enjoyed rating other people’s games. That was a really cool mechanic. I’m pleased I got to try that out. I like that she had her own kind of progression system. Yeah, I don’t know if it needed to be more involved than it was, but I certainly enjoyed the threat of having other players invade my game too. That was a really cool idea to implement to give it a bit more spice. It meant there was always a sense that it could go wrong, but not in a way that was unfair to you as a player. That must have been a careful thing to balance. And I had fantastic music as well, so stylistically different to Dishonored. So much to appreciate about the very untriple-A style of game they made here. So yeah, worth celebrating for sure. But Matthew, I am absolutely at peace that it’s not in your top ten. So I can’t even think what your number two and one are. It doesn’t come to mind. I guess if it’s new Pokémon Snap, that would be a surprise. But why don’t you hit me with number two? My number two is the Outer Wilds expansion Echoes of the Eye. Ah, nice. Of course. Yeah, forgot about this. I always feel it’s a bit cheating when it’s like an expansion or DLC to something which was your game of the year, because you’re like, congrats, you made more of my game of the year. Like you had a head start. This is a new chunk of game for Outer Wilds, which is the time loop space exploration game where you have 22 minutes to make some progress in a solar system before the sun. Yeah, it goes supernova, destroys everything and you wake up back on the first planet. I was really intrigued how they were going to add anything to this without unbalancing this incredibly tight collection of connections between the planets. It’s not a game you could just shove something in and hope it would work. The way they do it is they add a new self-contained ship that you’re exploring to this. I would say jump ahead two minutes if you want to avoid total spoilers on this. So I won’t go into it like massive detail, but they add a new location. It’s an interior location rather than the planet, but it has this amazing sort of living element to it in that there is a river at the heart of it that you can ride around. It is an incredible structure. Stepping into this DLC and seeing like where it was set was probably like my game moment of the year. If I haven’t already said that about something else in this podcast, which I think I have, top two for sure. It is a sci-fi concept I’ve seen like faked in a lot of games, but here you look up at this thing and go, oh wow, you’ve actually built this thing. It is one of the most impressive sights of the year and full of the same puzzle exploration that I love in Outer Worlds. It’s still stuck in the same 22 minute time loop as the rest of the stuff in the game. So it has the same structure where you go in, you learn a little bit more and then you come back and you use that knowledge to go forwards. It’s like a Metroid where instead of upgrades, you use knowledge, you get knowledge and you use that knowledge to get further. Like it gear gates with facts, which I think is fascinating. It’s something Deathloop does a little bit as well, actually, but I think it’s, for my money, executed a little bit more cleanly here. On top of being an amazing location, the story and mechanics of this particular location mean that it is multi-layered in some very, very clever ways. There’s a hint of inception to something it does. It’s scary as shit in places, weirdly. It becomes a horror game for a stretch. And when it kind of punches through that horror game and you realize there’s something else beyond it, it really has to be seen and played to be appreciated. Tough on this, because I’ve still not properly played Outer Worlds beyond the first couple of hours. So I’ve not read much on this. I read your piece about it because you didn’t spoil any of it and it was an excellent piece of writing. And so that was good. But when I’ve seen it on Game of the Year lists, I’ve been avoiding reading the blurbs because I kind of want the surprises to be maintained, you know. I worry Outer Worlds has become one of those classics that everyone who’s played it is going to have played it and other people are just sick of being told to play it and they’re like, oh, fuck it, you know. It’s a bit like Citizen Kane. You know, everyone’s like, oh, Citizen Kane’s amazing. You should watch it. And you’re like, oh, when am I ever in the mood for it? And then you do watch it and you’re like, oh, yeah, fair play. That’s brilliant. It is good Citizen Kane. Solid film, that. Yeah, it’s great. I wonder if it’s a bit like that. Some people are just like, oh, fuck this. People just throw praise at it and quite ambiguous praise because no one wants to spoil it. So it’s quite hard to talk about and big it up in any, like, meaningful or satisfying way. It’s a lot of people going, take my word for it. You’ll love it. And that’s like, I don’t know. If someone said that to me, I probably wouldn’t listen. Yeah, so don’t take Matthew’s advice because he wouldn’t. That’s the message here. You should really, if you’ve played the base game, but you haven’t played this, just change that. Like, just play this. This is so good. Yeah, I’m excited. I will, this will go on the 2020 year two list. I’ll make sure I play this at some point. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s not very expensive, this expansion. I think it’s about a tenner, something like that. So all good. I’ve just worked out what your number one is and I’m excited, Matthew. I can’t wait to talk about it. I can’t place your two or one. I think you place one of them if you thought about it. Oh, actually, I know what one of them is, but the other. You wouldn’t have guessed this number two, I don’t think. So my number two is Age of Empires IV. So Relic Entertainment, developers of Company of Heroes and the Dawn of War Games, basically was handed the reins of Age of Empires, this old favorite PC real-time strategy game. About four years ago, I think, it was announced that they were doing this. And finally, the fruits of their labors basically came around quite quickly this year, just sort of appeared out of nowhere, really. It’s on Game Pass. You can play this. It’s also available on Steam. Basically, it revisits the formula of Age of Empires II, the most popular in the series, but kind of updates it in some key ways to make it a bit more of an aggressive and exciting strategy game. It has this campaign mode where, basically, it acts like a lot of real-time strategy games. You build up a base. You have a town center. You build up barracks and houses for your different units. There’s a unit cap of 200 in this game, like there is in Age of Empires II. Different types of units take up different amounts of the unit cap, basically. You build an army. You push on your enemy and go from there. So that’s the basics of it, but the campaign is good because it mixes in a whole bunch of different types of combat scenarios, encourages you to use units in different ways, placing archers in key positions and things like that, and really thinking about the strategy side of it. I think that’s good because if all you do is play skirmishes, that is like fighting against the AI, you might find that a bit repetitive, but because this has got a big variety of these types of real-time strategy challenges, it keeps things entertaining. But it kind of brings those to life with these scenes that can only really be described as like a time team or something like that, like these bits of actual way. I think we’re going to have to do a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of. A truly luxurious thing. And that’s nice, but I think what really did it for me with this is that the best Nintendo games, they really understand their characters, and they bring out the best in their characters, and they understand that if you get the character feeling right and feeling nice, that’s kind of most of the battle won. Like, what you build around them is just like an excuse to be that character and spend time with that character. And I think Samus in this is just a beautiful, beautiful creation. She feels fast, she feels sleek and deadly, but at the same time she’s got immense weight. It’s a really delicate balancing act. Like, when she wants to slip through a gap, she’s so limber and she slides, and the way the animations, there’s a sort of fluidity to them that she can slip and hinge through these almost impossible gaps. But then when she wants to just punch something in the face, it looks like it really hurts as hell. And it’s that combination of the kind of fast and absolute brutality of that character. It sells you on the idea that this is this fucking nightmare bounty hunter who has survived in these terrible, terrible situations, and you completely buy into that and sell that fantasy. I would say better than you ever have before in terms of just how that character handles. That for me is the pleasure of this game. It’s just kind of felt like rediscovering a character who I’ve loved, but Metroid isn’t my personal top tier Nintendo. You know, I love Metroid Prime. I love the 2D Metroid games, but they’re not like burying me with one of these five games. You know, Super Metroid probably wouldn’t be in the mix for me. But this, I thought the execution of the character was kind of perfect. Whether the game around that is delightful as a Metroidvania, I think it does lean a little bit more towards the cinematic and linear, which I’ve seen some criticisms of this game. People say that they feel like they’re never truly let off the leash. I think it lets you off the leash enough that when you get a new power-up, there’s a reason to explore the areas you have access to, to find new energy tanks, missile upgrades. I think that’s really important because it’s difficult. It’s a difficult game. The bosses are super tough. That makes the power-ups meaningful. That makes the exploration meaningful. That is the huge thing that I think most Metroidvanias get wrong, is that there’s just no point, you know, you’re just finding them for the sake of finding trinkets. Here, you’re like, oh, thank Christ, I have an extra sliver of health. That will actually count. That’s really, really important. I think I’d say the same about the Metroid Prime games as well. Like, the difficulty is what locks a lot of Metroid’s design into place. I was so blown away at how good this was. You know, I said at the outset of this episode that I don’t think it was any game, like, I truly love. But I think this is definitely, yeah, I know, obviously, it’s my number one. It’s the closest I got. But I, yeah, I was just, I was so surprised at how just awesome this feels to play. Yeah, so I’ve I’ve played a bit of this, not enough to put on my list. I echo what you say about the movement, the way she slides, the way she’s animated, like absolutely everything about the character to put in your hands, like perfect character to like understand how she works straight away, but then really hard to master. Just like exactly what you want. I was really curious before this came out of like, what is the value of having a kind of big budget 2D metroidvania these days? Just because there isn’t really much to compare this to in that respect, because this is a space that’s become dominated by Indies. And then like playing it, and like it is just some of the cinematic stuff or like the animation where you’re like, oh no, this is what money gets you. It gets you like, this is spectacular to behold, even though it’s like theoretically a 2D game. Like, yeah, just yeah, uses a whole bunch of different tricks to pull that off. Yeah, it looks and sounds fantastic. Matthew, I was curious, what do you make of the enemy enemies in this? Which are kind of like, if I could describe them, they’re sort of like instant kill enemies. It’s a bit like having an encounter with a 2D version of the alien in Alien Isolation, but like in the form of a puzzle, where you have to figure out how to basically get past it in the form of like careful movement and to avoid its path. Otherwise, it will perform an attack on you. There is an instant kill if you don’t counter it, and countering it is very hard. So it’s about kind of getting away. What do you make of that whole thing? That’s the one thing it took me a little while to click with in terms of what I was meant to make of those. The problem is some of them are kind of puzzly in that you have like a stealth shield. You can turn invisible for a limited amount of time. And some of them, it’s about like going to a certain place, turning invisible so they move past you that opens up the route. Sometimes it’s just a, you need to just run fast as shit and pull off some like quite intense platforming to get there. I felt like I got into the rhythm of those sections and I didn’t really have a problem with them. Like I saw early on like, oh, okay, this is what I’m meant to do. You know, I’d go into the map. I’m roughly heading in this direction. Here’s the kind of exit of the room. You know, I have to get between here and here. I think where some people come on stuck is that they go in blind and they’re just running around in circles and then the thing kills them. And they’re like, well, that’s bullshit. But I think if you go in with purpose and maybe that’s something that comes over time, that kind of puzzle or kind of platforming execution element emerges and they become a bit more satisfying. I think they end really well in that in each ME section, you eventually get to a room where you get this mega super duper beam. I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s not called that. And it’s basically, it’s a cannon. It can be shot once and it’ll kill an ME. But it’s got this weird sort of cinematic charge up sequence where you kind of get locked, the camera kind of swoops down almost into game. It’s like over the shoulder, you’re locked in place and you have to aim this beam at the ME’s face to like melt its face plate before you can shoot its core. And it becomes this sort of puzzle. You basically have to find a place to stand in the level where there’s enough distance between you and the ME for you to melt the face plate by the time it reaches you. It’s quite daft, but I like the kind of power stance. That’s the thing, there are just little moments in this game which sell Samus as this mega tank character. I don’t think there’s standout. Like if there’s a room for improvement, that idea of this Predator character could maybe be a bit more interestingly executed. If you’re not in an Emmy room, you’re safe. And actually, you’re not in an Emmy room for that much of the game if you know what you’re doing. Yeah, fair play. Yeah, I think I really like the beam thing too because it allows each one to have that cinematic crescendo moment, which I think is a nice touch. What do you make of the bosses in this game? Because I’ve seen that people are maybe arguing a bit online that are the bosses too annoying, too hard. Do you have any thoughts on that? They are hard, but I think they’re super fair. They’ve got attacks. I think they’re very easy to read. Not very easy read. I think they’re easy enough to read that most of the bosses took me three or four goes, but by the fourth go, I felt like I could do them untouched, which I think speaks to the quality and fairness of their design. If you know what you’re meant to be doing, you can get through it. It just comes about pulling off these kind of acrobatics. I will say, the control scheme gets quite hectic as the game goes on. There’s a weapon on every beam, there’s a weapon on every button, and all kinds of different combinations to pull off stuff. I personally think that playing it the way I did over a couple of nights, that progression doesn’t feel as aggressive as it might do if you went away and came back, which I think some people do, because they’re like, fuck this boss, and then they leave it for a week and they come back, and not only can they not do the boss, but then they’ve lost the muscle memory of this quite strange control scheme. I didn’t experience that myself. I really like the bosses. I thought they had big cinematic payoffs. Again, very like the bosses in Mirror of Fate. They end with almost like quick time events where you do some flashy execution mode. But I like the patterns of them. I thought they were all pretty fair play. The last boss is an absolute shit. But yeah, I liked it. It’s like really old school design, but with just a really modern polish and modern eye. Yeah, I love that combination. I really hope the success of this on Switch means we will get more 2D Metroids from this creative team because they are a great match. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s almost a dead set based on how successful it’s been. Like, yeah, just must have blown their expectations out of the water. Yeah. And now it’s a bit like we don’t have Metroid Prime 4, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve got this other good Metroid again. You know, it’s like this Metroid, this would be good enough if this was it from now on. I would be happy. You have influenced my thinking of like, what is it that I want from a Metroid Prime 4? And I can’t figure out what it is. And I think it’s like, basically what I realized is I probably just want to play the original Metroid Prime again, and that’s that will be fine. So, yeah. All right. Great stuff, Matthew. That’s a fantastic pick. Anything more to add there or should we move on? No, just good. This is good. Good thing. Yeah. Love it. A nice Nintendo surprise as well. Came out of nowhere. You know, announced four months later, boom, brilliant. Fantastic. I cannot believe, Matthew, that we’ve only got, we’ve only had one game in common on this list, this episode, like that’s very rare for us in these lists, like there’s usually a lot more crossover. And this is the game where we cross over. So my number one. Oh, I forgot about this. Yeah. My number one is Hitman 3. So a safe pick. Being completely honest, I really struggled to pick one, one, like above all others in this list. Right. Like, lots of games vying for the top there, lots of games, definitely was number one at one point. I never quite considered Age of Empires 4 because I thought it was a bit too close to Age of Empires 2 to like make it my number one. Hitman 3 is not the best in the trilogy. Hitman 2 is the best in the trilogy, just in terms of like the quality of the maps, which is largely what dictates the quality of a Hitman game. However, I did love that the series had a victory lap this year. I did love that this came out and this seemed to be the time where finally after the the series seemed seemingly struggling commercially all this time, despite being fucking amazing action, stealth series, finally became as popular as it deserved to be. Got the acclaim it deserved and it helps that it had like, I would say, three outstanding maps in it. So Mendoza, the map, the kind of like winery is a fantastic map. Like, you know, definitely like probably the best map of this in terms of like replay value, just massive like social simulation loads, loads kind of going on in terms of like NPCs and places to go and hidden James Bond style base. Dartmoor, of course, which is where the the kind of like murder mystery sort of plays out. You only need to do that once, but it’s a fun map to replay. It’s got some good good reasons to replay it. I imagine this is quite good with the elusive targets, but I have less experience with that. And then, of course, the Berlin nightclub as well, which was was was also quite quite had quite a novel spin on on the kind of the old Hitman mechanics, which are, you know, you get given a target or two or three and you have to find out the optimal way to kill them. But when you replay it, you find ways to like speed up the process or do it in a particularly novel way or execute these more cinematic opportunities to kill your targets. Like I say, I think Hitman 2 has like the best maps, but this is this is pretty close. And the kind of like, I think that the feat of having the maps of all three and the DLC in like one place to just replay endlessly is just like wonderful. And so I felt like putting it here is an endorsement of that in a way. It’s like, yeah, if you’ve never played the first two games and you can get all of them at once, you are in for like one of the greatest experiences you will ever have in gaming. And I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, like, no, no, it’s true in that, you know, if you like you like me have not been on holiday for a long, long time, then this is like as close as you can get in game form, I would say. It will take you to different places with it. And it will feel very vividly like you’re in those places. Matthew, I assume you agree with me that Hitman 3 is probably not the best of the trilogy. But how do you feel about me putting it number one? Yeah, I think that’s a great reason as like the full stop on what is the best ongoing projects of The Last Generation. This series, and it has to be taken as a series, because it’s the rare game that treats all its parts as a series and updates them with each sequel, the fact that they all exist together. You don’t play a trilogy. It is just that their completed Hitman project. And it is, I think, a genuine like masterpiece in terms of structure and creativity and beauty. I mean, this is some of the best level design, you know, environmental design you’re ever going to see. The thing it does slightly differently is that a lot of the levels have a kind of like almost a narrative layer to like introduce you to them. And then once you’ve done that, you can enjoy the more traditional finding infinite ways to kill infinite enemies in them. But I did I like some of the cinematic stuff more like the murder mystery in Dartmoor. I think hunting the anonymous agents in Berlin is really, really cool as well. And the Mendoza stuff is just like the James Bond audition run, really. It’s just so classy. Amazing thing. And only going to get better next year with added ray tracing. They’re bringing the VR to PC as well. Yeah, elusive target arcades. Is that right? Yeah, whatever that is. And new levels as well. Oh, that’s great. I assume they’ll be paid. I know we’ll definitely pay for it, because what a great thing. I mean, just a great… Yeah, and you’re right. It’s just so popular. It feels like it’s secured its place and it’s secured that studio’s place to a degree. Yeah. And putting it at six is a bit stingy. I did really love this game and it made the beginning months of this year a lot more tolerable. Oh, yeah. It was also a proper next-gen thing to play as well, if you were playing on console, you know. Although I played at the Epic Games Store, where I accidentally wiped my progress from from Steam when I brought the games over from the other ones. So that was unfortunate. So I had to do all those leaderboards again. But that’s not a bad reason to go. No, I mean, it’s just so much fun playing this. If you’re a fiend for collectible doodads and unlockable things and leveling systems, there’s so much in this game. It’s like the greatest checklist of all time. Oh, it’s so good. Oh, it’s so, so good. Yeah, I can’t wait for the new maps. And to see them invest in it more is very exciting. Matthew, we did it. Those two top 10 lists, a monster episode there. We have probably room for a few honorable mentions here. So anything else you wanted to tick off before we call it a day? A little shout out for The Forgotten City, which is a time loop detective game where you end up in a town where if anyone commits a sin, everyone dies and you basically have to escape and then come back and do the time loop again and you have to work out who is committing the sin that has caused this problem to arise. A great concept based on a Skyrim mod of all things. I liked it. Didn’t love it. I thought it held your hand a bit too much. It didn’t let me do enough detecting for my money. But I love time loops. I love detective stories. It’s kind of weirdly ambitious for quite a small indie game in terms of production values. So it’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s like this quite lush 3D world. It’s surprisingly dense. It’s got some really good twists and turns. I just wish the objective markers did a little too much of the work for me. Yeah, that’s what I did give a go, but I didn’t quite have the time to get my teeth into it properly. So one for me to play next year. All my honorable mentions, Matthew, honestly were either mentioned on your list or I’ve already talked about them. So Forza Horizon would be one. But I don’t really have loads else, to be honest. What about you? Any more to tick off? I really liked It Takes Two. I thought that was a genuinely lovely co-op game. I thought it was a little unlikely that it won best game of the game awards. I have not seen this atop anyone else’s lists, so I’m not entirely sure where that fight came from. But anyway, we won’t get into that. But it’s from the Brothers and A Way Out guy. A Way Out I did not like. This was a good co-op game. It gave two characters very different roles, which is just vital to an interesting co-op experience, I think. Also, like Psychonauts, just a great ad for colourful level design with mega graphics. So I liked that. I really liked Inkl’s Overboard, which was the not who done it, but how you get away with it, where you’ve you commit a murder on a boat at the start. And then it’s this very short narrative experience where you try and get out of being found out by a Poirot-esque character by framing people or whatever. A big branching narrative game as is Inkl’s Way. I just like the setting for this a lot more than some of their other recent stuff. Like, I like murder mysteries. The kind of the flip that you’re playing the bad guy is a great a great hook. I guess a little nod also for Skyward Sword HD, because I feel like my reputation is feathery and twined with that game. So I need to big it up. Even when you’re no longer as convinced by your own opinions as you used to be. Yeah. Yeah. I wish they’d released the other Zelda games. It didn’t feel like much of a celebrate birthday celebration, but, you know, it’s a cool game. It’s got cool puzzles. Yeah. There’s always next year, Matthew. Yeah. I had one other one, actually, which was just Rider’s Republic, which is, again, I played like a few hours of and it seemed really, really good, but didn’t quite get my teeth into it properly. But I appreciate that there was something in this kind of like, quite unloved extreme sports genre to play this year that was actually also super, like, super ambitious in scale. So I’ll give that some more time in the new year. I actually quite enjoyed what I played of Far Cry 6 too. And I feel like it’s because I haven’t played many of these games in a while. And it just like, it caught me in the right mood, but I only played for about, I played that for about three or four hours as well. So, yeah, same really good looking game. Yeah, playing on PS5 helped a lot. A good sort of showcase for your next gen console if you’ve got one. Yeah, exactly. So if you’ve got the appetite for it, that’s well worth a shot. Is there anything on your pile of shame for next year, Matthew, that you’re looking to tick off? I feel like I should play more Eternal because it’s just too hard and I rebounced off it. So I don’t really feel like I’ve got a valid or interesting opinion on that. I’m annoyed I didn’t get to Monster Hunter Rise because I saw Catherine playing it and it looked amazing. She’s like riding around a giant cat or something and it just had a very different like art vibe to previous Monster Hunter games. But I just didn’t have time to commit to playing a Monster Hunter game. So I might play that when it comes out on PC maybe. Yep, that’s cool. If you do, oh right, if you play on PC that’s fine. But if you do end up playing the Switch version Matthew, I also have it and could be tempted into some multiplayer. So yes, once, I don’t know, like the Omicron wave dies down, maybe it could pop over and we could play it or something. Yes, something to consider there. I’ve made like a big pile of shameless here Matthew. So Wildermyth, I wanted to play that on PC this year. A PC game went to bat for that. I think that was Robin Valentine was like, big push in that and it was cool to see that take off kind of like procedural sort of like RPG kind of style game. Yeah, I played a few hours of it in early access, really liked it and then forgot to play more. Good, yeah. So I’ll play that at some point, talk about this podcast. Chivalry 2, I played a little bit, but I want to play more of it. Really kind of like nice feeling chaotic sort of like sword multiplayer game. One, I wish I had some friends who were playing it, but like, maybe I’ll see if anyone I know fancies giving it a go, but I thought that seems promising. Chickery, A Colorful Tale, I’ve seen that high on a lot of people’s lists, Matthew. I was quite curious to play that. No More Heroes 3, I’m going to play, of course, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, The Forgotten City, Overboard, Death’s Door and Mundorn, those are all games I’m going to play at some point. Any others, Matthew? There’s a lot. There is a lot, but you know, I just want to give each of them a go, you know. Yeah, I’ve asked for Shin Megami Tensei V for Christmas. That’s going to be too hardcore, surely. Because I feel like I need a super hardcore 100-hour JRPG in my life. That’s a game that I’m… Interestingly, I read Edger’s review of it and I thought it was an excellent review because it praised the game but also explained to me why I wouldn’t like it. It was like, this is incredibly hard and like not jolly and like not persona. So, just make sure you know that because this is what the game actually is. And I did everything that I wanted a review to do. And I really appreciated that because I was like, right, this does sound cool. I like the idea of owning more JRPGs on my Switch but also this is clearly isn’t for me. So, it’s fine. Yeah, know your place. Yeah, exactly. So, my final question for the episode, Matthew, is let’s each have a punt at what next year’s best game is going to be. What do you think it’s going to be in 2022? It’s quite a boring answer, but as long as they release it, and I think they will, Breath of the Wild 2. Ah, yeah, of course. I did forget that was next year when I wrote down Elden Ring here. If it’s not Breath of the Wild 2, it’s bound to be that, right? Yeah, for sure. So, next year could be amazing. We’ll see how it pans out but I’m excited about where things are going. Could be good. But that can be saved for our 2022 predictions episode, Matthew. And we have completed this monster of a game of the year episode. So, an absolute pleasure going through these with you, as ever, Matthew. Yeah, it was fun. That was a lot more different than I thought it was going to be. Yeah, like those are two really varied lists. So, yeah. Maybe it has been a good year after all. I’ve actually got very excited about all these games doing this episode. Yeah, yeah, it was good. I went in being like, but now I’m like, actually, it’s pretty strong. I think it’s like one of those things where it’s sort of like, together, it is a good year, but individually, maybe fewer things to love than normal. But, yeah, nonetheless, it was a lot of fun. So, if you’d like to follow the podcast on Twitter, we’re BackpagePod on Twitter. Matthew, where can people find you? I’m at MrBazzill underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts, and you can email the podcast at backpagegames.gmail.com. If you’re a Spotify listener, you can now rate the podcast on Spotify. That is a feature they’ve added on the app. So all you have to do is on your phone or whatever device you use, just go to the app page and give it a star rating. A bunch of you have already. We really appreciate it. I assume that helps with visibility. They’ve said something to that effect in an email that what I got. So yes, that’s good. And this is the last podcast of the year that we’ve recorded. It’s going out on the 31st of December, I believe. So this is our final gift to you for the year. But we’ll be back next year with more episodes, more guests, more fun. And thanks for listening.