Game Awards 2025: Digging, Dropping Deuces, and Deep Frying your Friends.

Happy 2026! Never surrender. We played 76 games between us this year (good lord). We travelled the world, we travelled the secret underworld, we travelled space, we travelled beneath the ocean, heaven, hell, chicken island, and the milk factory. Here's the udder-fresh cream of the crop of games we played this year:

Best Character

Susie (Deltarune Chapters 3+4)

When you blep into the abyss, the abyss bleps back at you.

Of all the characters in Deltarune, Susie certainly gets the most development. She's a big purple lizard monster, going through a teen punk phase. She's quite insecure about her circumstances and how she's perceived, and quick to lash out to take back control of her bad rep. A lot of Deltarune's character work is centred around giving her the space to open up and feel like she can be accepted and loved, but 2025's Chapter 4 leans in harder than ever, and teases a ton of future avenues.

Susie feels heavily inspired by Bowser, and she’s introduced as the stereotypical school bully, who reluctantly joins your party. At first she wants to join the antagonists and pummel her way out of any challenge. But by chapter 2 she’s already warming up to her new comrades and by chapter 3 you’re like BFFs. Her rugged approach to problem solving plays great with the gentle conflict-avoiding Ralsei and taciturn Kris. Her appeal to me is twofold, I relate a lot to her rugged tomboyish sensibilities but she also has a lot of contradictory impulses that make her feel so well written, complex and realistic.

Runners up: Hulkenberg (Metaphor: ReFantazio), Passepartout (80 Days)

Worst Character

Jimmy (Mouthwashing)

I've already learned not to trust anyone who says "Jim'll fix it."

Iconic awful person. Arguably too popular of an antihero to be a “worst character” in a quality-of-narrative sense… but sometimes a good bad character can be a good bad character, you know? OK you look kind of pained right now. (hope it hurts ;-|) Anyway, what's special about Jimmy is you spend a lot of the game playing as him, and the game spends its duration slowly and non-chronologically revealing what went wrong with the crew, and the answer is, broadly, this fucking guy. If you’ve ever heard of the “missing stair” metaphor, it's very apt.

Jimmy Mouthwashing rubbed us the wrong way almost immediately. The type of guy who really loves to emphasise every time he does something, because he really needs people to know he's pulling his weight. It doesn't matter if he wants credit for doing someone a tiny favour or if he's just doing his actual job. You get the sense that he's trying to compensate for the fact that no one on the ship seems to like him, and this warped into this whole complex. The rest of the game is essentially about chronicling why this guy thoroughly sucks. This guy was coddled way too much for way too long, and somehow ends the game thinking he's a martyr king of responsibility Absolute gutter of a person.

Runners up: Algus (Final Fantasy Tactics), Winston (Deliver at all costs)

Best Soundtrack

Deltarune Chapters 3 & 4

2025 was a really strong year for video game music for me. Most things I played had scores that were interesting, catchy, or emotionally resonant. This was both the case for the scores of new titles, as for the ones from my substantial backlog. Unfortunately for all these cool games and talented composers, 2025 was a Toby Fox year. Deltarune's new chapters featured a packed new soundtrack, with banger after banger. I wasn't expecting each chapter release of Deltarune to come with a full new soundtrack, but I won't complain when the quality is consistently this high.

I know we COULD have stopped Deltarune from squatting on this award it already won in 2021, but we’d be lying to ourselves. 2 new chapters released this year with a pile of new music, and just when I thought Rude Buster couldn't sound any better, they came out with Ruder Buster. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack more than anything this year. AGAIN. The evolving sanctuary music in chapter 4 is a particular highlight.

Runners up: Crypt of the Necrodancer, Metaphor: ReFantazio

Best Art Direction

Unicorn Overlord

My renfaire lady

Developer Vanillaware is known for its stunning, distinctive, handcrafted and outrageously horny art. This game manages to rein it in a little bit to make a deliciously rich looking fire-emblem-like. It’s always glowing and dense with hues like a Monet painting. It’s also nice to see a beautiful bespoke UI these days as well.

It was a decade in the making, and was a huge financial burden on the studio, but the results speak for themselves. The game is as gorgeous as it is ambitious. The game boasts a colossal roster of characters and enemies, and a sprawling, well-realised world. My personal highlight though is how good they make the food look. This company is no stranger to tacky uses of jiggle physics, but I can't deny it really motivates you to liberate a town with a tavern.

Runners up: Sea of Thieves, The Plucky Squire

Ugliest Art Direction

Candice DeBébé's Incredibly Trick Lifestyle

Street like Candi

Look, you have eyes. Even at my most generous, there's no way it wouldn't win. It is a comedy game, so in a way its art direction is perfectly in sync with what it is trying to accomplish. Unfortunately "intentionally bad" is still bad at the end of the day. Colours and textures will assault you at any given time, making it quite difficult to look at. One of the worst parts though is that its artistic incompetence also directly hinders the gameplay as well. There's no real indicator where maps begin or end, so you can be warped around without warning. Everything has a lumpy quality in an attempt to make things less flat and boring, but the game's projectiles are not really designed around the elevation changes.

There’s an art to making something this “cracked out”. I assume. I think one of the most upsetting things is the way the characters' eyes are just weird bumps with textures painted loosely on them. Despite this game seemingly making fun of the style choices and mannerisms of rural british ladies in the 2000s, there is a kind of loving energy to the game, everything's brimming with self confidence and self-describing as sexy, witchy and powerful. In classic RPG fashion it's a game about making new friends and solving problems. SASSY STYLE.

Runners up: King’s Quest VII, Dungeon Keeper

Best Story

Mouthwashing

Trust me, you don't wanna take a blacklight to this place.

As mentioned earlier, this fairly short horror game tells the story non-chronologically through a series of short scenes often bookmarked by exaggerated hallucinations that tell some of the story in metaphors. Often with creepy ponies and eyeballs.  A space crew have gotten stranded in a seemingly hopeless situation, and are insulated from death by nothing but a layer of emergency foam. The brilliance of this game is in its minimalism, it tells a lot of story and the emotions present through every layer of the gameplay. The characterization, the puzzles, the metaphors, the environment details, and even the interface contribute to telling you the whole story, without explicitly putting it together for you.

Yeah, Mouthwashing can be deceptively simple on its surface, but the way it layers things on top of each other makes it able to tell a whole extra story that's highly connected to the one being overtly told. The game's mostly told from the perspective of a person who both feels guilty, but is also fighting with himself to try and deny what happened in the first place. The way it's trying to be selective starts out pretty subtle, but over time you get whole corners of the ship being mosaicked and censored, because he just refuses to acknowledge what's there. Not a fun story in the slightest, but it certainly has a lot to say for its short runtime.

Runners up: SOMA, Gnosia, Metaphor: ReFantazio

Best Original Game Concept

Dungeon Clawler

Get a grip!

You know what's one of the worst forms of entertainment on the planet? Claw machines. You know the type. Those shady machines that entice you to win a piece of useless tat using a claw arm with the grip strength of an emaciated baby. You can't really prove that they're scams, but deep down you know that they are. You know what rules though? Taking those infernal machines and putting them in the Slay The Spire (deckbuilding card game) format. As you play, your machine gets filled with random weird things. Whether these things are useful or not can really change depending on your run. 

I was really caught off guard by how immediately fun and addictive this game was. Behind the simple claw machine input and array of quirky treasures is an inspired chemistry system. You can grab items which help you attack and defend, sure, but you might also change your claw into a sticky tentacle or a magnet, and fill the machine up with water. Or poison. Or hot chocolate with marshmallows. Every powerup has a material type that interacts with the claw machine modifiers, allowing you to build an absurd playing field.

Runners up: Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, Split Fiction

Funniest Dialogue

Thank Goodness You're Here

Weasel and Geezer: back of the freezer.

This game is aggressively British. It’s like a 90s Viz magazine brought to life with impressive animation and a dense amount of background scrawlings with high concept puns like “dregs benedict” and “white shitening” and “peans”. Every now and then some weird little guy will pop up and start rambling at you. Is it funny? Best not take my word for it, we should ask some mug who's not from the shires.

'Ello, muggins reporting for duty. Yeah, this game was a delight from top to bottom. The game mostly consists of silly little guys, being silly little weirdo deviants, pronouncing stuff all silly-like. In that sense, it's a very faithful documentary of life in the UK. The game leans quite hard on absurdism and how backwards the setting is. I do think the voice acting performances do a lot of the heavy lifting in the comedy, but I was smiling and snickering throughout most of the experience. 

Runners up: Candice DeBébé's Incredibly Trick Lifestyle, Deltarune Ch. 3&4, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League

Biggest Surprise

SOMA

Gone Artificin'

Right before we decided to do Soma, we were discussing what we knew about the game. It was a decade old at this point, so it was likely we picked up a bunch of things over time from cultural osmosis. I was pretty sure it was a game on a submarine or something, while Allie thought it was a game on a space ship. Neither of us were all that sure. Turns out we were both sort of right, but also sort of wrong. I'm glad we were able to go in as blind as we did, since it turned out the game had a lot to spoil. Speculating the whole way through was a big part of the appeal to me.

I had modestly high hopes for this game, since I like Amnesia. I didn’t expect it to be one of the best games I've ever played in my life though? Sure everyone who's played it says it's good, but I L O V E D it. I mean it was horrible and super scary and I couldn't wait for it to be over, but I'm surprised people don't mention it in the same breath as Bioshock and Half-life 2. Not enough shlooting I guess? You do get to stick your fingers into a lot of cyber bungholes though. YOLO!

Runners up: Bear’s Restaurant, Miiside

Biggest Disappointment

Codename ICEMAN

I only need one button: the eject button.

We expected it to be bad, yes. Police quest is one of my most hated games of all time. No shade to the legend Ken Williams, I respect him and his games but we have completely opposite ideas of what passes for fun. So that known, I was braced for the worst with another of his chauvinism era cop/spy type simulators. These games are pretty manageable with one person reading a step-by-step walkthrough and the other person executing classic Sierra adventure gameplay and saving the game constantly. Unfortunately…

The game actually starts exactly how you expect it to start. Like the aforementioned stanky Police Quest type of games, the one whose idea of fun is knowing and following stuffy procedures of institutions. If that were all it was, we could have stuck with it. Alas, at some point you report for duty on a submarine, and that's when the game turns into an insanely difficult submarine simulator. You are greeted by this massive console with buttons and knobs and levers and dials and numbers plastered all over the place. The game makes little effort to run you through it, so it's one of those "read the manual" types of dealies. Unfortunately the manual expects way too much of you. So we reached for a guide which graciously told us which bits of the interface we could fully ignore, which bits were used for what, and it would tell us the order of operations. So we started the tutorial voyage, and within seconds we died. Turns out the steps are not enough, you need to do everything at the exact correct time, because this is a hardcore submarine simulator. The game was removed from my hard drive not long after.

Runners up: Stray Children, Dark Cloud, Mario & Luigi: Super Star Saga

Usual Suspects Award for Most Time Wasted

Galaxy Burger

But can he has cheeseburger?

Galaxy Burger is rad as heck. It's one of those restaurant sim games, in which customers show up, tell you what foods they want, and you basically have to assemble it. What makes Galaxy Burger so nice though is that it does away with the stressful timers that usually haunt the genre. These games always have the appearance of being relaxing and casual, and then subject you to the most gruelling non-stop pressure in the medium. Galaxy Burger lets you take your time, since space aliens are mostly chill. What they have in chillness though, they completely lack in taste however. These people request some weird meals.

I sunk a lot more hours into this than Tobi even, playing this solo as well as with friends.154 hours it says here! Respectable. It’s just a game you can keep coming back to, because it's so relaxing and suitable for all skill levels, you don't even really have to cooperate that effectively or share the workload equally, you can really just chat and make sandwiches or you can lock in and try to maximise your efficiency. I also really appreciate that your customers are a bunch of anime aliens and cats in space suits!

Runners up: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Miitopia

GAME OF THE YEAR

Split Fiction

My millennial humour senses are tingling, something horribles about to happen.

Probably my most anticipated game going into this year, and it was even better than I hoped. I already love It Takes Two, an outstanding co-op platformer that's absolutely bursting at the seams with cool ideas. This game manages to keep up the pace, with some even crazier ideas and slick platform-puzzles and a twisted sense of humour. It also really helps to have a co-player who's so amazing at synchronising, communicating and getting equally invested :> . The only weakness, as with the previous game, is a certain lack of charm with the characters and storytelling.

While the novelty Hazelight's bag of tricks has cooled off a little bit already, I'm still immensely charmed by it. You still cycle constantly from one little vignette to another, often with entirely new gameplay, art, and tone. These games are just so ambitious in their attempts to serve up new ideas. Split Fiction's theme is essentially "fantasy VS scifi", and the two lead characters bicker about which is better for most of the game, while you get sample platter after sample platter of genre tropes. Neither character is especially likeable for half the game, but I don't think they're meant to be. The game thrives off the friction between the genres, and the two characters. Doing it all in a fancy multiplayer game is just the cherry on top. I'd also like to give a shout-out to their initiative, where you only buy the game once, and you get to invite your buddy in for free. It Takes Two did this as well, but I had assumed that this would have been a casualty of the constant stream of enshittification. Glad to see it was still there.

Runners up:  Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, Donkey Kong Bananza

DINOSAUR OF THE YEAR (released in or before 2015)

SOMA

Horrors? at the bottom of MY ocean?

This one's been a long time coming. We'd been eyeing it up as our Halloween games for a few years now, and so 2025 was the year we finally did it. Soma is a game about digitising your consciousness, where one person who volunteered to take part in the trial of the new technology one day wakes up in the distant future. Sounds pretty cool right? Well, maybe not so much when the future you wake up in is one where you're at the bottom of the ocean, in a slowly decaying research facility. One that's slowly being taken over by alien looking tendrils and sphincters.

This game was released exactly 10 years ago, which is a relief because it was threatening to be my game of the year. I hate to use that hack slogan of “it doesn’t hold your hand” but I guess this sort of applies, as the main gameplay is exploring and figuring things out, intuitively plugging in computers and digging through the interfaces for data. This makes the game feel quite unfiltered and personal. For a relatively low budget indie game, I was blown away by the dramatic atmosphere and scope of the game because they used everything so carefully. The world seems vast and just out of reach, there's very little action but stakes feel so high and the choices are agonising. I’ve played so many aesthetically scary or sci-fi games that have nothing new to say. This is horror sci-fi done so right. I urge you to try it out, if you think you’re “bad” at scary games but you still like scary stories and films, this game has a no-death mode that I insist won’t ruin the experience. You might get stuck if you are bad at computer logic though, sorry.

Runners up: Shadow Hearts: Covenant, 80 Days, The Colonel’s Bequest

Craziest Amateur Game

Stray Children

Taylor Swift's new album sure went places.

I was a bit disappointed in this game, after being surprised by how much i enjoyed Moon Remix RPG and hearing this was somewhat inspired by Undertale, that sounded amazing. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really updated its accessibility since the ps1 era, it changed the gameplay from exploration adventure to bullet hell and QTE with the most cryptic logic puzzles on top. Still, if it did deliver on one thing, its pure unfiltered madness. Your dog-faced-boy protagonist gets imprisoned in a child labour camp run by snowmen, sticks his hand in a piranha tank, narrowly escapes becoming a frogwife, travels the mushroom kingdom by magic coelacanth, fights an incel clown firefighter, joins the roses of the rose garden, talks to batteries, and fights god… well ok, for an rpg that last one is normal I guess.

I'll maintain that one of my favourite things in a game is not knowing what my next 15 minutes will look like, and by Jove, Stray Children delivers on that front. From trying to get PJs from the sleepy mushroom people, making a duck-themed aerial screw, becoming an angel's udder-fresh milk-friending friend, discussing the industrial revolution's influence on art at a tea party, to having adults cosplaying as children as their 9-5 job, nothing was off the table. You unfortunately have to work for it, since the game's quite archaic on purpose. 

Runners up: Formless Star, Spookware

Shadiest Co-op Shenanigans

The Whooping Women of “Skull Issue” Galleon (Sea of Thieves)

This pic is actually from the end of a story mission where a glitch made the ship permanently on fire.

Sea of Thieves is basically Shenanigans: The Game. You assemble a crew of four friends, and take your vessel onto the high seas. You do quests for treasure, and take that treasure back at a port town where you can sell it for usable currency. You are not alone however. The sea is littered with other, rivalling pirate crews who can come claim your booty for their own. Expectedly though, the people we had to watch out for most were the ones from our own ship.

Our ship's swordswoman won’t stop playing the first 4 notes of happy birthday over and over on the accordion. The navigator is addicted to eating grubs and throwing up in a bucket and tipping the bucket of puke on everyone. The captain loves to end each session by setting the galleon on fire before we log off.

One time we were finishing up for the day, and we realised we had one unsold crate of supplies hanging around our ship and we thought eh, waste not, there's another player nearby, what if we sailed up to them and gave them the crate before we logged off? So we barrelled toward a single player in a sloop at full speed, and naturally they must have shat themselves and started fleeing, we caught them up boarded and made friendly gestures and they sceptically received our pretty low value box of junk. Then we all threw firebombs on our own deck, got into cannons and launched ourselves in the water, and logged off. I like to think we made an impression.

Runners up: Co-op’d keyboard DDR over parsec to prove that together we are human. (neal.fun/not-a-robot), Chair parkour (Split Fiction), Underground slides, the ultimate fast travel (Astroneer)

Citizen’s A-Vest Award for Egregious Design Transgressions

Dark Hunter Type 5 (Etrian Odyssey)

I'm never buying a one-size-fits-all corset again.

So it's a bit mean of me to pick on a bonus guest artist design. The original game had the first 4, consistent and somewhat reasonable designs to choose from for this class, and then when I scrolled to the last option added for the rerelease im pretty sure I yelled “what the fuck?” out loud, alone in my living room. In fairness though, what the fuck is that? Why did they do her like this? Why are her titties and bellybutton trying to escape? What is that emotion? Nahhhh

Every year I have to remind myself that it's important to separate bad art styles from bad designs. Luckily this year that wasn't needed, as this is rough from top to bottom. Half her outfit looks like glossy spandex stretched to its absolute limit. Trust me, sis, you don't need that belt. Those hotpants can only be surgically removed. The whole fit is so tragic, but I especially hate that they gave her that uncomfortable expression as well. One might mistakenly assume that this face is a winking acknowledgement at how silly the outfit is, but I'm fairly certain it's just another layer of this humiliation lasagne that the creator was into.

Runners up: Comet (Gnosia), Macho Collection (Miitopia)

Maximum Swaggage Award for Best Dressed Bae

Spy Movie Jeanne (Bayonetta 3)

The Spy who Swagged Me.

Bayonetta’s rival, ally, and fellow Umbra Witch got a pretty thorough make-over for Bayonetta 3. In this game, she takes the role of a spy, and they updated her ensemble to match. She's rocking a 60s look here, with some chinoiserie flair. I'm not entirely sure if it's a good outfit to use for infiltrations, but if she's getting caught, she's going to look good doing so.

The alternate universe themes of Bayonetta 3 meant the outfits were an indulgent exploration of Bayonetta and Jeanne’s rebellious and glamorous styles mashed up with different eras and civilisations around the world. One of my faves was Jeanne’s spy outfit, clearly inspired by 60s/70s mod and James Bond movies of that period, but it’s especially giving Felicity Shagwell from Austin Powers 2.

Runners up: Hat Girl (A Hat in Time), Rotten King K. Rool (Donkey Kong Bananza)

Peepee the Cat Award for Ultimate Creacher

Dancing mouse (Bear’s Restaurant)

The best glade dance of mice & men.

It was an incredible year for super cute adorable critters let me tell you. But the little tiny pixellated mouse doing a tiny jig is peak. It’s also a super cute game full of things to make you cry from sadness, joy, and the elusive emotion discovered in 2025 known as “wiwi mode”

This was once again the list with the most nominations. Competition's so stiff, but once you see this lil guy do his jig, your mind's made up. Pretty much every scene they appear in, they do their little dance, but it keeps being a treat.

Runners up: Heismay (Metaphor: ReFantazio), Otome & Chipie (Gnosia)

Gamer Grub award for Tastiest Looking Food

Mario Party Jamboree

You just know Yoshi brought the egg salad to the potluck.

This is sort of becoming a pattern for Mario Party games. In spite of how stylised these games look, they somehow keep boasting really high resolution, realistic looking food. This time around though, they had a bar that sold Wiggler Milk. If you don't know, Wigglers are those dopey looking caterpillaresque creatures from the Mario games with a flower on their head. They very much aren't mammalian, to the best of my knowledge. Yet somehow they have milk, and it's good enough to support an entire prominent dedicated saloon? I need to try this.

Jamboree also introduces a whole new gameplay mode called MUSICAL KITCHEN that features a whole assortment of colourful, oversized and juicy looking food. That’s my kind of party!

Runners up: Unicorn Overlord, Tears of the Kingdom

John Halo award for Most Remarkable Toilet

Toss-o-potty (Split Fiction)

Hi I'm Zoe and welcome to Jackass.

Huge props to Tobi for coming up with this new idea for a category. We weren’t sure we would really experience enough remarkable toilets in games to make a short list, but wanna guess how many made the nominees list? FOURTEEN.

It was just a silly suggestion, but throughout the year I kept doing that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme whenever we stumbled on another. A surprising number of contenders, all with their unique flair. Many of them even served bespoke gameplay mechanics, or story purposes. Split Fiction's made me laugh the most though, as it was one of the first instances we noticed in the year. I hid in the port-o-potty, and excitedly wanted to get Allie's attention. After a good chuckle, she told me to get back inside, which I did. And before I knew what she was planning, I was launched across the map. Turns out it was a toilet-related puzzle.

Runners up: Infinitoilet (Miside), Construction yard's Smellevator (Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo)

Headache of the Year

The Wiegraf chronicles (Final Fantasy Tactics)

Evil is when you get 2 turns per round.

This guy… I swear. Final Fantasy Tactics is a game whose game design and balancing can be really questionable, to the point where one might even consider the game broken and unplayable. Nowhere is that more evident than when fighting the notorious Wiegraf. The short of it is that the game innocuously asks you to save at some point, as it has done many times in the past. However saving here is a trap, as loading the same immediately pushes you into the hardest, least balanced fight in the game. You'll be shocked at how unfair and stupid it is. This one guy wiped my entire party before most could even act. However due to the save locking you into this battle, your options to change up your plans are extremely narrow. Back when I played the game for the first time in the 2000s, this was the encounter that forced me to quit the game, as my one and only save was in an unwinnable state. So when Allie played, I gave her as many warnings as possible so we wouldn't get stuck here, and hopefully see the rest of the game.

This was rough going let me tell you. We tried everything. We went back to an older save and grinded a bit, we tried combination after combination of our best units. I also consider myself pretty good at strategy games, I love a Fire Emblem and I even beat the original 90s Xcom games (granted those were also insanely hard imo). This game just really expects you to have been optimising your strategies and playing by the handbook from the very beginning. We ended up looking up a strategy that sort of exploits the boss’s behaviour just a little bit, enough to give us the edge. Oh, also it's like 3 boss battles in a row with different strategies in each, naturally.

Runners up: Cryptic logic puzzles translated from japanese (Stray Children), Submarine (Codename ICEMAN)

Words & Deeds Award for Most Awkward Moment

Killing the final boss on his birthday (Final Fantasy Tactics)

Still better than the birthday party in Mouthwashing

So this game, if you aren’t familiar, has this zodiac system where every character in the game has a birth date and days pass as you travel across the overworld map in this adventure. The dates all have some complicated system that affects their stats based on some astrology stuff that I never bothered to learn. Also the game is brutally hard in some areas, so beating the boss was a hell of an ordeal. We cheered with relief when we finally beat the game's final boss, that’s when Tobi noticed the current in-game calendar date…

We didn't plan it. It just kind of happened. We didn't know what the in-game date was, and we certainly didn't pay attention to the zodiac mechanic. We just stumbled on it as I was looking at a wiki, trying to figure out what the boss' gender was. When the birthday popped up as trivia, I felt so bad.

Runners up: "Go do the laundry… NO DONT LOOK AT THE DETERGENT, DONT TOUCH MY STUFF, THATS WHERE I KEEP MY CYBERCRACK" (Detroit: Become Human), I molested the Jydge on the title screen and his arm exploded and fell off?? (Jydge)

Ratch City Award for Moments of Severe Cursedness and Deviancy

The king transed his son and made him his 7th frogwife. (Stray Children)

For the frog the wedding bell tolls.

Sometimes you witness something that makes you question if you made the whole thing up in your head. Stray Children has a worrying amount of those moments. When you enter the frog kingdom's castle, you are greeted by a big frog on a throne, surrounded by femme looking frogs, and a lone knight frog. The king quickly explains that all these ladies are his wives, and the knight his son. After having a mild disagreement, the king gets annoyed and uses his magic to turn the knight into another femme looking frog. Really weird. What's even weirder is that this transformed frog becomes really affectionate all of a sudden, and the king accepts them as his newest bride. The scene sounds so simple, but each new message box of dialogue had us confused and frowning.

Luckily I was there to witness this bizarre game as Tobi was playing it, and I could confirm, yes, I did just see him trans his son's gender and make her a bride. When Alex “deserved to get sued” Jones warned us they were turning the freaking frogs gay, he wasn’t thinking big enough.

Runners up: Mommy time (The Typing of the Dead: Overkill), A song about that time I had sex with a mermaid (Candice DeBébé's Incredibly Trick Lifestyle)

Dumbest Premise

We must stop a volcano… let's use a spider web! (King's Quest 7)

Can spiders feel shame?

This game was delightfully unhinged through and through, with its “we have dragon’s lair at home” goofy looking presentation and odyssey of feverish fairytale references. As was the style at the time for 90s adventure games I guess, sometimes it felt like they were just mad-libbing in some bullshit. Poodle birthday party, why not. Loyal pet Dragon-toad lets go. Mysterious device that turns you into a baby. There are no bad ideas!

No, there absolutely are bad ideas. One being using spider webs to block lava. Not only would it burn the webbing with ease, there are also huge gaping holes through which the lava can easily escape. This was clearly an idea that they came up with on paper, and didn't bother thinking too hard about. When the time came to build the game and depict it visually, they were already written into a corner. 

Runners up: This is Ratha the Rathalos, child of Ratha the Rathalos, please don't mistake them. (Monster Hunter Stories 2), The killer was… the person everyone most suspected? (The Colonels Bequest)

Most Tears Shed

Gina and Otome don’t like being bad guy (Gnosia)

Keep your gnose clean.

Gnosia is a Werewolf type of game, where you have a group in an enclosed setting, and among the group are a bunch of traitors, and you have to use deductions to sniff them out. Since the traitors (Gnosia) are randomised each time you play, you get to see how each character performs in the various roles. The game involves a lot of lying, manipulating, and accusing others, which some characters are great at. Unfortunately there are also characters that are really bad at it, or simply hate it. Poor Gina doesn't want to lie or deceive people, which makes her a terrible Gnosia who gives up pretty easily. Really sad… except when you are her fellow traitor. Lock in, sis!

Werewolf-likes aren’t usually single player but this one uses it to its advantage with a great overarching meta-game story and crazy characters who you slowly learn more about as you play, they all have some subtle habits adding an extra layer to your strategies and an array of alternate endings. 2 endings that made me quite sad though, were some of Gina and Otome’s endings where you’d get into a bit of a situation, and they’d tap out unexpectedly. In a game that's all about mistrust and being coldly calculating, seeing a character reveal that they’re actually so pure of heart knocked me sideways.

Runners up: Anytime a character cries (Bear’s Restaurant), Heismay relates (Metaphor: ReFantazio)

Most Terrifying Moment

Scavenging for parts in base Omicron (SOMA)

Women want me, fish want me, fear wants me. I will never know peace.

Frictional’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent is to me the scariest game I've played to date. I was braced for something similar, but it eased me into a sense of security with its eerie aquatic ambiance and emphasis on psychological horror storytelling. Maybe I've gotten tough, or maybe this game's just not so scary, I thought, y'know… foolishly. Then we got to base Theta, never mind! Despite the punishment for death in these games not being particularly steep, the shambling humanoids (and more!) are perfectly designed with their unique creepy sound effects and unpredictable behaviours. I thought the worst part would be over after escaping the medical station at Theta, but then we had to get to Omicron and we had to scavenge for parts going back and forth between 3 torturous floors of terror. Horrible!

I don't like it. You can smell the set-up from a mile away. It's essentially the same "find three fuse boxes to open the door and don't get caught by the scary monsters" ploy that's in all these games …multiple times. You'd think you'd get desensitised to it. But no, not really. It still gets ya.

Runners up: YUOR TAKING TOO LONG (Deltarune), Sewer son (Metaphor: ReFantazio), Horse in da cargo room  (Mouthwashing)

Bognor Award for Exemplary Fucking-Shit-Up-itude

Rader bends over and splits his fiction (Split Fiction)

Get your mind out of the gutter dimension.

Split Fiction is a game where an evil CEO has a machine that can steal artists' creative ideas, so they can churn out slop content forever. What a crazy scifi concept. Rader (who looks a suspicious amount like Andrew Wilson IRL CEO of EA, publisher of this game) has his plans foiled though by two ladies deviantly poke at the limits and glitches of the machine, corrupting the data he was gathering. This CEO gets really frustrated by their actions, and decides to jump in himself as some sort of deity.

The spectacular split screen mayhem was definitely one of my highlights of the year. Rader real-time manipulates your gameplay area as you cooperate to fight him, sending barrages of anything he can pull from other worlds and pulling the splitscreen border around with his hands. And I swear I remember spotting one time where he bends over and splits the screen right out from between his cheeks. I didn’t make that up right, we saw that right? 

Runners up: Winston (Deliver at all costs), Elephant Bananza (Donkey Kong Bananza)

***BOUTIQUE GAME AWARDS***

We had a cool idea to experiment with this year. See, It’s been fun spotting patterns and recurring themes in the games we played annually, so what if we turned those into unique categories that we come up with towards the end of the year, and they change each time? Well let’s find out.

ACAB award for most useless law enforcement

Deliver at All Costs

Excessive Parcelforce

On trying this game I first clocked it as a modernised top-down-era GTA-like (the games before Grand Theft Auto 3). But I was shocked the first time I ploughed through someone's entire house, tumbling it into dust, and everyone just carried on. I didn’t fail the mission, no police badges appeared in the corner of the screen, nothing. OK sometimes the police come after you if you run over SEVERAL civilians, but generally everything's extremely lackadaisical in this sleepy faux-50s retro futurist town. Oh also one time I trapped a lady in a portable concrete sphere and keelhauled her around town off the back of my truck and nobody pressed charges. That was a story mission!

The cops in this game are so openly corrupt. If they do show up, it's always to run interference for rich people. Once they're activated, they go all in too. They'll try ramming you and your cargo like healthcare's free in America. Doesn't matter if you're visibly transporting a bomb, they're going to bump into you until there's nothing left of either party's vehicle.

Runners up: Jydge, Redacted

Diggy Hole Award for Dirty Fingernails

Donkey Kong: Bananza

He wears pants for one chapter and suddenly he looks naked without them.

I was shocked to see how many games we played this year that involved digging, making holes, or being subjected to them. I figured we'd only have a few, but somehow we ended up with around 15 of them. The king of digging though, ended up coming from a surprising place. Gorillas aren't really known for their ability to make holes, but somehow Bananza went all in on the destruction tech. The game found countless ways to make new small puzzles and challenges that essentially revolved around digging or filling holes. While I didn't quite see this direction coming though, I can't deny that I loved my entire time with it.

Yeah this one had to take the medal for how all-inclusively it revolves around smashing stuff and digging your way through everything. And the amazing breadth of ways it uses the digging mechanics too. You dig your way out of things, dig your way into things, dig under hazards, dig out air vents, dig to let light in, dig to extract gold, dig to redirect flow, dig to demolish buildings, dig dirt, mud, sand, concrete, fruits, rainbows, glass, hamburgers, lava, salt, snow, thorns, slime… there’s nary a problem you can’t solve with your giant mitts.

Runners up: Steamworld Dig 2, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Astroneer

Yellow devil award for eating a lot of bananas

Donkey Kong Bananza

Molten gold bananas btw (not piss)

I think we ate an unprecedented amount of bananas this year. In both Sea of Thieves and Miitopia, bananas are your #1 go-to healing item and you’ll see everyone chowing down mid-battle. Donkey Kong, though, is obviously the king of getting bananas. Unlike previous games where he just sort of hordes them, he smashes these bananas made of crystal into chunks and scoffs them in bullet-time (the manosphere no-homo way to eat bananas). By the time I was done with the game I’d collected 884 giant bananas, and thousands more banana chips.

I think DK has a serious problem. It's one thing to eat and enjoy bananas. It's among the most commonly eaten fruits in the world for a reason. However DK doesn't just eat bananas. He even eats anything banana-shaped. Half the game he is chowing down onto gems. I'm amazed his teeth look so immaculate after crunching on so many crystals.

Runners up: Sea of Thieves, Miitopia

And that's it! We're a little overwhelmed, but we're full of sugar and swagger and we've hit the ground running ready to bust some more backlog in 2026.

Game Awards 2024: Breakouts, Brainlords, and Boner jokes

Happy 2025! 2024 hasn't been so bad here, feels like we're a little out of the covid era. My moods a little better personally. And between us we played 65 games! Seems like it was a great year for new co-op experiences, action RPGs, political satire, and... like, a whole lot of talking about dicks and bums it seems. We did some crimes, we did our times, we even bust some rhymes.

Best Character

Kim Kitsuragi (Disco Elysium)

I say the magic words: Abear-cadaver!

Kim has the patience of a saint. Imagine being called up for your job to go to some terrible neighbourhood where you will be subjected to a number of bigotries, where you essentially have to babysit the human car crash. Your partner has none of his stuff, has done a number of crimes, and struggles with being coherent, and you have to stay professional. I'm not sure if I could do it, but Kim could. While he starts out stern and seemingly joyless, nothing made me happier than seeing his facade crack and be excited about things. Pretty sure trying to make Kim like you is the most common achievement in the game.

I already have a soft spot for a good support character, as well as a character that's kinda quietly judging you and reacts to your choices in the game. For an NPC Kim does an awful lot, he gets involved in just about every conversation in the game and tells you everything you need to know about your role. He’s so well fleshed out as a character, being believably stoic yet sometimes petty, aloof yet geeky, principled yet forgiving, and sarcastic yet deeply kind. The game also has well-performed voice acting which helps.

Runners up:  Futaba (Persona 5 Royal), TOMCAT (2064:Read Only Memories)

Worst Character

Bonaire (Alundra)

They HAD to have known.

So like, I dunno, worst? Best? Nah worst… Alundra is one of those games from an era where publishers just didn’t really respect Japanese games very much, and thought it would be best to quirk everything up a notch for the anglo market. So they took this high fantasy tragedy about elves fighting evil gods and injected some surfer dude characterization in there. His name sounds like boner though, very funny.

When I first saw Bonaire, I knew I'd either adore or hate him. There would be no middle ground. He's got this tiny little smile, and he talks like a Ninja Turtle. Most of his dialogue is about thinking about babelicious betties, even though everyone is dying. You'd think a creepy horndog character would be rizzing up the local ladies, who somehow think he's amazing, all the time. Unfortunately he prefers his women ethereal, so he's only "checking out the tasty morsels of babitude" in his dreams.

Runners up:  Desuhiko Thunderbolt (Raincode), Sigma Jet (Ripened Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love)

Best Soundtrack

Disco Elysium

With a name like that, we're in for some Disco music surely, right? Regrettably …no. You'll have to settle for mostly Alt Rock and shoegaze, with the occasional quirky "hardcore to the mega" outlier. It all fits super well though, contributing heavily to the game's moody atmosphere. It also thematically fits quite well that the dour music doesn't match the fun vibes that are being announced, as that's pretty much what the main character's like too.

At first I was like, “wow this rave music is annoying”. Then it was in my head nonstop for like 2 weeks. Then I looked up the soundtrack and got kinda hooked on it. I’m a sucker for moody music, and this game’s soundtrack is so unique and adds a lot to the game. It’s mostly ambient yet kind of melodramatic, mystical and evocative. It’s just been a total mood for the year.

Runners up: Persona 5 Royal, Live-A-Live, Bastion

Best Art Direction

Sushi Ben

She can sear my scallops with just a look

We love a crisp, sunny game with blue skies and bad bitches. The minimalist art style looks like a cross between Mega Man Legends, Untitled Goose Game and Katamari Damacy.

Yeah, I really like this type of artistic direction. It works really well for VR too, where the simplified style also conserves resources, which you can spend elsewhere. Sushi Ben is a game about being in a quiet coastal village, doing chores for the community and a sushi restaurant. Such a cosy game needs a pleasant aesthetic, and it absolutely delivers on that. Also helps that it knows how to be extra when it calls for it.

Runners up: Baldur’s Gate 3, Darkest Dungeon, Shovel Knight Dig

Ugliest Art Direction

Super Paper Mario

Straight Outta Context

You know what's one of my favourite video game aesthetics? Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64. A really creative and cohesive visual direction that influenced the gameplay in turn. The whole game feels like a bunch of lovingly made papercraft dioramas. You know another game aesthetic I loved? Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, the sequel to Paper Mario. It took what's good about the original, and really pushed the paper angle to the next level. Then came Super Paper Mario, a game whose art direction probably just thought "well paper is flat, so what if the whole game was flat?" This game became this weird mix of nice assets from Thousand Year Door, mixed with new original assets that feel like temp placeholders made by their least artistically inclined programmers, slapped together in uninteresting ways. 

Nintendo had this weird low point for graphics around the late GC/early Wii era, that zelda 4 swords adventure game had the exact same problem. Mismatched assets at inconsistent resolutions, and a bunch of quick and flat abstract visuals with no lighting. MSpaintcore ass colour palette. They had a bunch of new original enemies, just so that they could be like “this ones a floating square”. Ball it up and throw it in the paper bin.

Runners up: Psychonauts, Lethal Company

Best Story

Baldur’s Gate 3

Yeah that's right... I play for the narrative.

What I love the most about BG3 isn’t its big overarching plot idea, it’s the fact that it's such an incredible triumph of game-specific writing. The challenge to create a prewritten D&D style tabletop scenario with multiple solutions, interchangeable characters, told through largely optional conversations, with tons of branching paths affected by player choice, multiple outcomes through dice rolls, side-quests, enveloping a perfect balance of combat and exploration, and functioning around multiplayer co-op. All that and it somehow managed to be engaging, thrilling, funny, raunchy, digestible and unpredictable. Just… how??

Yeah, the scope of it all is impressive for sure. While I agree that the main story is not the strongest element for me either, it does do a great job at informing the state of the world and its inhabitants. It also weaves in nicely with the gameplay, and some mechanical twists. The open-ended nature of it also meant I wasn't sure how things were going to play out. We had a number of moments where we just tried something, and it ended up being accepted and viable. The developers thought of it too, because it was acknowledged through pre-recorded voiced dialogue.

Runners up: Persona 5 Royal, Disco Elysium, Yakuza 6

Best Original Game Concept

KeyWe

Pretty fly for a flightless guy.

When I saw this, I knew we were going to play this. Close your eyes and imagine for a moment that you're a little Kiwi bird, drafted in the postal service of some Oceanian country. You're just a bunch of lil guys and you can't even fly, so you have to parkour across the desks and floors, to do all the sorting and stamping and labelling. It's a delightful co-op experience.

A tactical action variety party game, I guess you could call it. Like, Overcooked meets Untitled Goose Game. As a kiwi you can jump, butt-stomp, peck, tweet, and pick things up with your beak. Use these to great effect in all sorts of elaborate and oddly specific minigames, including sorting coins, pasting stamps, patching leaks, using a typewriter, and yelling at cassowaries! It’s just so out there, it’s wacky and cute and if you can handle that very specific kind of action co-op where you have to constantly be in sync with your partner you might love it too.

Runners up: Escape Academy, Disco Elysium

Funniest Dialogue

Disco Elysium

As if you wouldn't steal chips from a child, Harry.

Difficult to describe the distinct dialogue style of this game. It sure is… something. Fans say it's radically leftist, but it's really more like it satirises all political extremes with a ton of ironic bigotry and exaggerated liberalism and just… big words and esoteric subject matter circlejerk. And much of the most cringeworthy opinions come from the mouth of the player’s character, the one you’re supposed to have the most agency over! I guess that's its appeal though. It's an RPG where you have to make choices, and designing your character's strengths means sacrificing something meaningful, such as imagination, wit, physical ability or integrity. You the player have to overcome the horrible challenge of being the one at the wheel when ur only options are "hnnnngh" and "papa horny" and I guess that's pretty ascended.

Ironic bigotry, satirical depictions of political beliefs, and verbal diarrhoea makes up three quarters of the game here. If you're not into ironic edginess, there might not be a whole lot here for you. If you don't mind, or actively enjoy it, you'll appreciate how unabashedly far it's willing to go, and how colourful it's willing to describe things.Since the game sets you up as a pretty awful guy right off the bat, and people find you annoying, it provides a nice avenue to indulge in roleplaying as a pathetic shitty guy who's willing to pick fights with children. The remaining quarter is people talking about how drunk they are/were, and that is pretty consistently tedious and unfunny. 

Runners up: West of Loathing, Going Under, Ripened Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love

Biggest Surprise

Going Under

Put 'em up! No, not the prices!

Going Under is a roguelite about being in a techbro startup, through the aesthetic of those weird corporate slides that say "synergy" a lot. Since you're the intern at a company that is trying to revolutionise "drinks", you're tasked with a bunch of menial tasks that are not part of your job description, and you have to put up with the remains of previously failed startups, since your colleagues don't really want to deal with them. The game's got sass for days, but there's a surprisingly solid game underneath it all. 

I really expected to like the concept more than the execution, as it seemed like a gamejam type idea with a few low-hanging jokes to be made. It’s a bouncy action dungeon crawler with slightly frustrating weapons and enemies that I thought would suffer from the indie games curse of getting way too hard to finish. And anyone who ever mentioned it before its release had gone pretty quiet about it afterwards. But after persevering a bit and checking the accessibility/difficulty options, I was starting to get the hang of it. The overarching story had some good twists and turns, the characters were cute, there was tons of weapon variety. The theming went hard and never ran out of jokes, each dungeon felt a bit different because they had really well-used sub-themes (job outsourcing, dating apps and crypto mining). So yeah I totally finished it and had a great time.

Runners up: KeyWe, Bastion, Gregory Horror Show

Biggest Disappointment

Super Paper Mario

Well at least there's one aspect of the game that's too easy...

This game had the reputation of getting a lot of backlash at the time, but later becoming something of a cult game? Here and there it definitely has some funny and bizarre ideas you wouldn’t expect to see in a modern Nintendo game, but… I think Mario games still fundamentally have to be a few key things: whimsical, forgiving and ACTUALLY FUN TO PLAY.

I had tried this game before back during the Wii era. I was already disappointed at how different it was from the previous Paper Mario games, and "took a break" after a few chapters. This break would last 15 years. I figured I owed it another shot after we'd keep seeing mentions of how underappreciated and great it was, if only people were willing to give it a try without the preconceived notions of what a Paper Mario game should be. Fair enough. After clearing out biases and playing the whole thing now, we can report it's still a stinker. It's pretty ugly, the dialogue is long-winded and not super interesting, the scenarios are novel but with weak execution, its platforming mechanics are very weak, its flipping and cursor mechanics are undercooked and overstay their welcome pretty quickly, and the game is full of "haha, wouldn't this by annoying?" type of game design. You might be able to appreciate what a troll game it is, but other than the music, I personally got very little out of it.

Runners up: Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Halo: Combat Evolved, Cubivore

Usual Suspects Award for Most Time Wasted

Baldur’s Gate 3

Still here, but they've got no skin in the game.

I'm not too surprised by this. I think we both knew this was happening the moment we picked it. An easy 100+ hours of our lives. Having played the Divinity games from this developer made me pretty confident we wouldn't regret the time investment though. The only thing that made me a bit hesitant was that I don't really like Baldur's Gate 1 or 2. Knowing that the developer changed eased my mind a lot though, and deservedly so.

Yes indeed. The upgrade from “action combat with pause” to “actual turn-based” makes such a huge difference, and I will never understand people who think they don't like turn-based combat in an RPG. Divinity + familiar DnD5e rules were a match made in heaven. Much like a real DnD session though, everything takes ages. Battles are tactical and require communication and planning, there are hundreds of conversations to be had, crimes to investigate, dice rolls for every interaction, flowers to stop and smell, etc etc. Plus the game is massive. Time well spent. And I want to play it again!!!

Runners up: Adventure Bar Story, Persona 5 Royal, Darkest Dungeon

GAME OF THE YEAR OF THE DECADE (released after 2014)

Baldur’s Gate 3

Having a Bhaal.

An all round solid game that just scores well on all kinds of fronts. Ambitious, well-made, entertaining, spicy, great use of DnD mechanics, fun combat, good visuals and designs, good performances, good writing… We’d already become big fans of Divinity:OS, particularly appreciating the well-balanced turn based rpg mechanics and co-op gameplay. BG3 was all that and a bag of dicks.

I still think I prefer the Divinity games at the end of the day, but I was very impressed with Baldur's Gate 3. It's my favourite translation of DnD mechanics to a video game, with the design, writing, and excessive indulgences of a Larian game. The game has a billion hours of content, and the moment we were finished, we were already discussing what we'd do differently if we were ever going to do another playthrough.

Runners up: Persona 5 Royal, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

DINOSAUR OF THE YEAR (released before 2014)

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Giving it the ol' Grant Gustin

I had played this before, so it was nice to see it again with a pair of fresh eyes. It's still a well realised 3D Metroidvania game. I was a little surprised to see how janky and old it became, but I suppose that's not uncommon with playing retro titles. It's a sign of the industry advancing. What's there though still has a lot of atmosphere, complexity and creativity. Except for the boss fights. Those were pretty bad even back in the day.

Yeah I have loads of shit to talk about this game, there's a lot I had beef with just on principle. It’s a dumb game for wrestleheads who think that solving mysteries is just following footprint trails to a perpetrators house and then you beat them in a fistfight. And I’m just a bad match with stealth and assassination games somehow. But… well, it was quite good wasn’t it? It had a load of new mechanics and they all worked well. The level designs were bold and memorable. Rich with cool art setpieces and secrets to find. It had a bunch of cool bespoke moments that I wish there were more of. Controversially, I think my favourite bit was actually the killer croc level where you have to go around a maze of rafts while he would pop up and chase you down, clock tower style.

Runners up: Bastion, Psychonauts, Final Fantasy Tactics

Craziest Amateur Game

Gregory Horror Show

Things I say when I definitely didn't wee myself.

We already extensively covered this game in a Halloween post but let me see if I can sum it up again real quick. It looks like an evil animal crossing in a papercraft furry style. You check into a spooky hotel and you have to stalk the residents (who are animals or furniture) who carry a soul in a jar with them and you have to find their unique weakness to exploit to run off with their stuff. Once you do that you have to avoid eye-contact from then on and if they catch you they’ll terrorize you with a kid-friendly Mortal Kombat fatality. And you give their souls to the grim reaper in your dreams so that you can escape someday.

Yeah, we already covered this one not that long ago, so we don't need to spend much time on this. It's a cute social stealth horror game in a hotel, with silly little guys. Everything about it feels off, but that just contributes to its atmosphere. I've played nothing like it before, and I doubt I'll ever play something like it again. That's exactly what I wanted out of it though.

Runners up: West of Loathing, Sushi Ben

Shadiest Co-op Shenanigans

The mystery of the midnight chub (Stardew Valley)

That's one hoe down

Playing co-op games stirs the cheeky gnome DNA within me, and when we were playing Stardew Valley in co-op, it was only a matter of time before I'd find ways to get up to no good. What I settled on was the following; instead of emptying out my cluttered inventory in the appropriate chests at the end of the day, what if I just throw my junk on the floor? Even better was when I noticed that tossing stuff on someone's bed will make the item become invisible, as it would disappear underneath the covers. Then people would go to bed, pick up the rubbish, and may not even notice as the screen would turn black. The perfect crime. If anyone asks, I didn't see or do nothing'!

One morning I woke up and there was a chub in my bed (the fish, but it is also slang for boner) so I obviously assumed Tobi had done it as a raunchy joke. I was like ohhh you! And he was like what? He sounded unusually convincing, had he gotten better at lying? But who else would have done that other than my gremlin witch wife? Still, he seemed… weirdly surprised… Then one day, I was working in the kitchen and our cat Pumpking walked in and dropped a sardine at my feet. It was him all along!!!

Runners up: Murbulyn (Tobi) keeps trying experimental eye surgery to get an eyepatch (Baldur's Gate 3), Tobi feels karma hard when he steals the milkshake and it was poisoned (Escape Academy)

Citizen’s A-Vest Award for Egregious Design Transgressions

Harry Du Bois (Disco Elysium)

The thin blue pantyline

I don’t know what they were like, going for in this game… but I hate every single item of clothing I found. I hate the aviators, the default outfit, the wife beaters, rave wear, windbreakers, utility pants, body armour, flares… It’s like a greatest hits show of all the 20th century’s worst politically-coded menswear.

This had way more clothing items than I expected, honestly. Unfortunately it's very difficult to not look like you tumbled into a charity shop's bin. Most of the clothes you find are either filthy or tattered, or they make you look like you're playing dress-up. And yeah, a lot of it feels politically-coded. It also doesn't help that Harry himself is a clown-shoes kinda cop, even if he doesn't own any actual clown attire. 

Runners up: Felix (Ys 9), My Son (Gregory Horror Show)

Maximum Swaggage Award for Best Dressed Bae

Tokiko (AI: The Somnium Files: Nirvana Initiative)

Cuts like a NAIX

Tokiko's got a look that says "I just woke up" and "I pilot EVA mechs for a living". Her fit settled on three colours, an understated grey and black, and some purple for accents. Perfectly coordinated with her hair. I did suspect her of being a robot for the longest time though, in large part of her design.

AI:TSF-NI’s take on near-future fashion is a whole lot of sweater-dresses and gradient leggings with that sleek kinda techwear/2010s cyberpunk look. I like it. Tokiko’s design has that perfectly styled “messy” hair to match her intense yet calculating and detached personality. She’s quite a unique and interesting character too. Villainous, intimidating, relaxed and tragic. Nice to see an anime lady over 40 steal the spotlight as well.

Runners up: Sovereign Spaw (Baldur’s Gate 3), Lexi Rivers (2064: Read Only Memories)

Peepee the Cat Award for Ultimate Creacher

Cube (Live A Live)

Servers up!

In my favourite chapter, you play as this little 2-ft tall orb with chicken wings, roller skates, a baseball cap and glasses. Perfection, right? And they’re just the embodiment of creacherly innocence. Granted a new experimental artificial intelligence to learn how to love and support, you bring your shipmates coffee as everything falls apart around you. In the digital world though, you’re quite powerful.

You immediately know Cube's a premium lil guy because he's got angel wings and an ironic name. Lil bro's basically a sphere, and they named them Cube. I think if I were in some kind of nightmare scenario, I would love to be comforted by them too. I don't think he really understands what goes on around him, but he knows that hot drinks and R2D2 noises can heal anything.

Runners up:  Judgement Boy (Gregory Horror Show), Kiwi (KeyWe), Zombi Neko (Gregory Horror Show)

Gamer Grub Award for Tastiest Looking Food

Butt-stamped cookies (KeyWe)

Ass-sorted biscuits.

Apparently it's an annual tradition that this postal service makes cookies, and it does this on the same station and conveyor belts as their mail sorting. They come in two base flavours, plain and chocolate, and a choice of two toppings. All of this, lovingly made by little kiwi birds.

It’s hard to turn down a colourfully iced festive cookie, made with fresh fruits and chocolate. Even if they’ve probably got a bunch of kiwi butt feathers pressed into them.

Runners up: Sunfish Pocket Omurice (AI The Somnium Files: NirvanA Initiative), Burgers (Galaxy Burger)

Headache of the Year

Diagonal Jumps should be illegal (Alundra)

I just wish she didn't tell the evil gods to "hang ten"

Tobi did me the favour of playing Alundra this year so I could watch and help him solve some of the puzzles. One thing I couldn’t much help with though, was that diabolical landstalker-type platforming. There is NO WAY an old game with camera angles and grid-snapped controls like this should have diagonal jumps. There’s also just a ton of jumping puzzles that use strict timers, slippery ice, teleporting monsters and demanding absolute precision. Ugh, no thanks!

The platforming in this game is pure evil. It's bad enough that the game has no sense of depth, making it sometimes impossible to judge where platforms are. You're not even graced with any room for error distance-wise. The game just expects you to try and fail a lot until you get it right. Absolutely heinous "how was I supposed to know that?" school of design-ass game. Worst were the rooms where you are surrounded by platforms, but you can't tell which ones are above or below you, or are in the fore or background, as they all share the exact same graphics. To see it introduce timers was just too much, man. This is the type of game why Save States were invented.

Runners up: The worst cover shooter level ever (Bloodborne), Sammer Guys Trial (Super Paper Mario)

Worst Trend of the Year

The “Sweet Baby Inc” thing

A solution basically presents itself.

Unfortunately, it's now time for the annual 'dumb shit that makes you sigh' award. Let's start from the beginning. What is Sweet Baby Inc? It's a small Canadian consultancy company for video games. They'll look over game narratives and such, give feedback on how it might be perceived within certain communities, and help them smooth things over or contribute to narrative design where needed. Fairly standard within the field of entertainment. Unfortunately because the usual suspects can't ever be normal, this company is being perceived as a giant shadowy organisation that controls video games on a global scale, with the goal of pushing straight white men out of the medium. Think the gamer version of George Soros conspiracy nuts.

I’m sorry that the last 4 years of this award have gone to essentially the same thing… a new buzzword for gamer-identifying-incels prostesturbating about women, blacks and queers being increasingly humanized by the media. This keeps happening though, and having some kind of tangible impact on the games industry, so… here we are. It is getting stupider and more embarrassing each time though, and I think a lot of big companies are waking up to the fact that they can’t be reassured or appeased, they have to be put on mute.

Runners up: Mass lay-offs across the tech industry including videos games, Aggressively dogpiling on games that bombed

Dumbest Premise

Evil Joker tricks an evil doctor into doing the evil job that she was already doing for the evil asylum owner anyway, to produce a t-virus that makes roided-up inmates hulk out even more so? (Batman: Arkham Asylum)

Harvey Dent's old suits are half-off!

Maybe I was just a bit too stupid to follow this game, I mean I was in kind of a silly mode… but like… I find this whole genre so unserious man I dunno. Like this is what happened, right? This scientist was studying injections that make dudes really ripped and dangerous and she did that right in the middle of a prison complex…? And then Joker manipulated her into continuing the research so she did and then Joker nicks the injections and uses them to make loads of huge dudes to fight Batman and then they fight a whole lot and then Batman wins anyway. I don’t know, I just… like whenever people talked about this game they were like “oh it's actually a really cerebral detective game and has manipulative enemies who really mess with you.” Absolutely not what I expected. Grappling was fun though.

That's how I interpreted the story too, so I assume that's correct. What I didn't really understand though is that I suspect the game wanted us to feel bad for the doctor who was doing human experimentation on prisoners? There's a bunch of audio logs dedicated to how she wants to stop or back out because she learned she was working for the Joker, but alas, she was trapped now. She just wanted to do a bit of Unit 731 science for the good guys. How tragic. I don't know why you even need super steroids in this world, since virtually everyone is unbelievably jacked already.

Runners up: The woman I won through a contest doesn't really love me, I guess it's time to turn to evil. (Live-A-Live), The house is burning, hide in this closet, honey (Devil May Cry 5)

Words & Deeds Award for Most Awkward Moment

They was fuckin’ (Baldur’s Gate 3)

Wyll they or won't they?

Ugh. I've got so much egg on my face from this one. So we were exploring when suddenly we passed a shed. The game pointed out some strange noises that could be heard on the inside. We quickly made a joke that something salacious was going on in there. To my surprise though, the game started hinting at it too alongside us. I became suspicious. If the game was giggling with us, we're being set up for some kind of misunderstanding or misdirection goof. No shot that anything actually sordid is going on in there. I say we barge in and do whatever real quest is inside!

Face to face with a sweaty orc getting railed by a bugbear. At least it was only egg on our face, and not… well.. Anyway. Unfortunately they were super pissed and insisted on tackling us with their tackle out. I’d have rather just left them to it.

Runners up: Vice President of getting civil servicemen to beat up a bunch of girl scouts ALSO YOU CAN RUN OVER CHILDREN IN A CAR (Citizens of Earth), Kamihara's half hour car trip (Emio - The Smiling Man)

Most Tears Shed

The relentless tragedies of Inoa Village (Alundra)

Should have dropped in on these grommets earlier. Wipeout!

To my surprise, this “Zelda-like” game only features one village, and a modest overworld that’s kind of annoying to traverse. But they use it to their advantage, with a melancholic and eerie plot centering around a small village where individuals are succumbing to a supernatural illness. Over time villagers will begin to have nightmares about another villager dying, they’ll get trapped in sleep and their dream will come true some way or another. Each time you go out to a dungeon, you’ll dread the return as you just know some sort of disaster will have occurred while you were gone.

The village had been cursed because the king sank a place of worship into a lake. He learned that their god's power was proportional to the amount of worshippers, and tried to undo its influence this way. I don't know if it worked, but the village had been struck by tragedy ever since, and the villagers became extra devout as a result. A lot of these tragedies could seem like coincidences to be fair. Mining accidents happen to miners, some wild animals attack after invading their territory, old people are passing away in their sleep. No need for superstitions about nightmare gods here, friends. Oh what's that? There's a lady who will conjure explosions when she falls asleep? Well ok never mind then.

Runners up: Futaba and Sojiro use words (Persona 5 Royal), Kiryu's letter (Yakuza 6: Song of Life), Karlach is doomed (Baldur’s Gate 3)

Most Terrifying Moment

Gloom Hands (Zelda: TotK)

Hands across Akkala

Zelda has had a thing with creepy hand enemies since even the very first one from the 1980s. They're creepy and gross, and they can catch you off guard, but they're not too bad if you know to expect them. They tend to be slow, and a number of their iterations don't even move at all. Gloom Hands on the other hand (heh) are fast as fuck, boyyyyy.

I first encountered them so early in the game, in some random cave. I didn’t know what was happening, they came at me fast and relentlessly, and I threw everything I could find at them to no avail. I don’t know why they thought the series needed more panicked button-mashing but they got what they wanted. Many hours of game later, I stumbled upon them whilst much more prepared, and discovered they also harbour a dark little secret. Also shout out to the gibdo in the desert, they did NOT need to be that creepy!!!

Runners up: Pretty much any random sounds (Lethal Company), VR headcrabs are no joke (Half-Life: Alyx), The terrible truth (Darkest Dungeon)

Bognor Award for Exemplary Fucking-Shit-Up-itude

Recall Ability (The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom)

Octorok around the clock.

Compared to Breath of the Wild, the sequel Tears of the Kingdom flushes out the old superpowers and brings in a whole array of new ones to navigate the world in a completely different way. One of the most easily overlooked powers, one with seemingly limited use is the reversal ability. Use it to make moving platforms or water wheels move the other way…  wow. But consider… did an enemy just throw a giant boulder at you? A bomb? A cannonball? Return to sender! Did something just fall from the sky? Catch a ride! You can even build a bridge with nowhere good to support it, hold it up in the air for a minute, drop it, climb onto it, and un-drop it! Gravity schmavity.

Even on a technical level this Recall is kinda bonkers.Every physics object is kept track of, and you can undo the past few seconds of almost anything. You built a flying machine and bumped into a wall? No you didn't. Recalled. You're in that same flying machine and you're out of energy? Just recall, and the batteries start recharging. It synergises so well with all the other new abilities too. Attach a bunch of weapons to a rock and make the rock spin for a while, then recall the motion, and bring the spinning rock into a camp full of enemies. You wanna swim through a ceiling (it's a whole thing), but it's just out of reach? Well hold up a platform so it is in reach, put it back down near you, stand on it, and recall it. You'll be lifted up to where you can reach that ceiling now. There's so much utility here. Coolest thing I've seen too was recalling things glued to arrows to transport them up mountains. Real brainlord mechanic.

Runners up: Disruptive in the Tech Scene (2064: Read Only Memories), Shogo the postman punches a seagull (Sushi-Ben)

And that's enough hindsight for now! Time to face the future, and moon the past. Let's play some more games.