The best games of the decade (so far)

A list article is not how I imagined setting Jank up as a unique place to read about PC games. Everybody does lists. But the more we thought about it the more it made sense - we wanted a definitive rundown of our favourite games from recent years. We needed to offer you a taster menu.

This is not simply a list of cool games we reckon you ought to play, it's a way of telling you exactly who we are at Jank - what kind of sickos we are, and how to distinguish us from the other sickos. It's also a chance to stare one another down across a spreadsheet, sweating like three spaghetti western outlaws, chewing words in a tense standoff to see whether or not Balatro will make the cut. It does. [spits]

Our process was simple: we made a big raw list of all the games we liked even a little which were released between 2020 and now, and included many games that made an impact, even if we weren't that hot on them. This "shortlist" came to 172 games. From there, we cast votes. Any game with at least one vote from any of us was worthy. In this way we murdered the hopes and dreams of over a hundred PC games. I will spare you some heartache: Elden Ring is not on this list (eyes twitching). Clair Obscur is not on this list (face crimsoning). Baldur's Gate 3 is not on this list (perfectly cut scream).

Take a breath. Then have a read. Please also drop into the comments and write your own entry for the missing game you love. Pump some beauty into your thoughts, and persuade others why it belongs. You're allowed one game.

We're allowed 68. Here they are, in absolutely no order.

Crusader Kings 3

Brendy: I often boast I have united Ireland in two hours. In truth, it took many days. But this is still much faster than reality allows. The realisation of a long-held geopolitical ideal isn't the only appeal of historical sim Crusader Kings 3. Stabbing your cousin in the neck while he's not looking is another good reason to play.

Every time I have a go I come away with a funny little historical fiction tale festering in my skull. I kidnapped the child king of Burgundy one time. I performed circus acts for Iraqi warlords while on a 15-year-long road trip to China. I have had many nervous breakdowns. One of the latest expansions lets you become a roving band of scumbags for hire, instead of a landed lord, and it basically turns the game into Mount and Blade without the third-person battles. It is the best of all Paradox grand strategy games and you can bet your bottom ducat on that. 

Half-Life Alyx

Graham: The best moment in Half-Life Alyx involves one of the hoariest horror game clichés,  as Alyx is trapped in a space with an unkillable enemy who can hear but not see. Specifically, she's trapped in a factory in which nearly every surface is covered in breakable wine bottles. Make a wrong movement with your actual arm and you'll send glass smashing across the floor, and the big beast - named "Jeff" by another character in-game - will come rip Alyx to bits. The addition of motion controls to an old formula might have been rejuvenating enough, but it also feels like the designers are gleefully fucking with you throughout. Here's just one example: Jeff has spores on his back that make Alyx cough when she's too close, so naturally you need to squeeze into a lift with Jeff and cover your mouth to stop Alyx from making a sound. I've never felt such a 1:1 connection with a game character before, nor felt so simultaneously ridiculous, terrified and awed, as I stood stock still in my living room and pressed a VR controller against my lips.

Brendy: Pity you have to strap a TV to your face to play it.

Citizen Sleeper

Brendy: A sequel has since been released for this dice-rolling sci-fi RPG, but I'm far fonder of the first instalment. You play a "sleeper"  - a biomechanical person who has cut and run from their corporate slavemasters to seek a new life aboard Erlin's Eye, a spinning space station stinking of fried food and welded metal. It is a refugee tale, as much an intricate work of interactive fiction as a capital-R roleplaying game. Or maybe just a really well-crafted visual novel. The exact genre definition matters less than the heart and character underneath it all. You'll meet malicious bounty hunters who want to blackmail you, and you'll end up feeling sorry for them. You'll babysit for a shipyard worker trying his damnedest to make a better life for his little girl. You'll make a habit of eating noodles at this one streetfood vendor, because he just enjoys listening to your life story. Citizen Sleeper is a lot like its runaway protagonist. It is a little machine, powered by dicey numbers and branching logic - but it remains deeply human too.

Teardown

Graham: Destruction tech is nothing new - Red Faction was a long time ago - but it's employed rarely enough that I still feel a giddy thrill when a game lets me blast holes in the level geometry. Even rarer is a game that is able to make that destruction more than a toy. Teardown finds the perfect means to make your sledgehammering strategic: you need to steal something and then flee before police arrive, and so every collapsed roof, dynamited floor and bulldozed wall forms a part of your escape route. I find my interest wanes in the later levels when the difficulty ramps up with the arrival of security robots, but until that point it's a total delight.

Death Stranding

Brendy: After three hours of Death Stranding I was concerned I'd wasted my hard-earned money on a sad dream about a baby. Only many hours later, when I realised this sci-fi delivery sim was leaning hard into its own sense of boredom, did I come around. It is basically Getting Over It With Hideo Kojima, except the central thesis is a confused mish-mash of feelings about solitude, community, infrastructure, and extinction. It also lets you piss anywhere you like.

I like that you have to hold the shoulder buttons to keep yourself balanced as you walk across bumpy bits of not-Iceland. I like that you end up building your own zipline network; every mountain usefully conquered. I don't like the boss fights (I wasn't alone - the sequel lets you skip them) but that wasn't enough to stop me sauntering from nonsense cutscene to nonsense cutscene. Kojima is the Nicolas Cage of videogame storytelling, no two people will agree whether he is brilliant or moronic. I don't care for the cult of personality around him, but I do appreciate it when his team make a game as stupid as it is compelling. 

Graham: The early hours of Death Stranding are an onslaught of cutscenes, but at least they're packed with unfamiliar ideas. Rain that makes you age? Babies that detect ghosts? Corpses that explode like nuclear bombs? It's a treat to get a sci-fi (or fantasy) world that doesn't feel like an existing franchise with the serial numbers filed off, even if I ultimately enjoy it less for its story than because it lets me piss anywhere I like.

Desperados 3

Graham: Mimimi revived and mastered the stealth tactics genre across three games and then promptly closed down. If you're new to their work, Desperados 3 is where I'd begin. You steer a gradually expanding band of cowboys through a series of diorama dilemmas, using your crew's special abilities to sneak into compounds, hogtie guards, plant dynamite and skedaddle before all hell breaks loose. You may be used to playing stealth games in third- or first-person, but the bird's-eye view here only makes the challenge meatier as you pick through patrol routes and literally cover your own tracks. Best of all, once you're done, you can move onwards to Mimimi's followup, the pirate-themed Shadow Gambit, or back to their ninja-flavoured Shadow Tactics. All three are superb.

Inscryption

Brendy: Best played unspoiled. But if you still haven't enjoyed it four years after release, I'm not going to respect the twist embargo. I'm endlessly recommending this to my friends and family who love trading card games. Not just because it sees you playing little cardy cockroaches and turtles against a freaky kidnapper on the opposite side of a table, but because it is about those games and about the kinds of lovable weirdoes who play them. Inscryption is not simply a deckbuilder, but a funny and unsettling escape room about being trapped in a recursive nightmare with malevolent trading card nerds. A card game within a card game within a card game - and none of them a safe place to be. As Jean-Paul Sartre might have said if he were really into Magic: The Gathering: "Hell is other players."

Hitman: World Of Assassination

Brendy: Hang on. Only the third and final Hitman game of the recent trilogy came out in the last five years. The other two are ancient. Literally many years old. Why is this bundle of all three games in our list? And why is it also at the very top?

Graham: Sure, only Hitman 3 came out this decade, but Hitman 3 was also the moment when the trilogy morphed into the World Of Assassination, a single package that contained all the murderboxes from all three games. It was also the point at which all three games were fully polished into near-perfect stealth playgrounds, and the last best expressions of the immersive sim sandbox. If you like bald men who do crimes, there's literally no reason left not to play these games.

Brendy: I believe there's about 20 levels and (aside from one or two linear duds) they're cracking playgrounds of lethality. I have previous faves like sunny Sapienza and the deadly racetrack of Miami, but I think the most recent game adds some of the best levels. Dartmoor is a darkly funny murder mystery mansion playing out in real time. Berlin is a tense cat and mouse game in a nightclub as you suddenly become the target, hunted by a handful of unknown agents (find them before they find you). And Chongqing is an urban warren that was compelling enough to make me watch an entire documentary about the city.

I will say I don't like how Hitman is packaged. You need a guide just to know what edition to buy on Steam. But once you're out in those hotels, jungles, markets, banks, and suburbs, that ugliness goes straight into the nearest dumpster, alongside the unconscious body of the nearest mall cop. 

Jon: I don’t love the interface, the plot is superfluous and the dud missions, like Colorado, are interminable. But the genius of World of Assassination is that it turns an excellent immersive sim into a service game, a platform for a limitless series of gleefully cinematic settings packed with murderous opportunity. Tinkering is invariably rewarded, mistakes are routinely entertaining, and the many stupid moments are always played completely straight in such a way that I’ve never quite been certain if IO realise what they’re making. Perhaps the only series where even the training missions are worth replaying, again and again and again.

Baby Steps

Graham: I like hard games, but I don't typically go in for mean games. Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy was a rare exception. I found that I could make steady progress up its junkyard mountain if I played in shortbursts, and my constant falls back to its bottom were buffered by Foddy's narration. He speaks to the player with the comforting tone of someone who knows what you're going through, coupled with aggravating reminders that he's the motherfucker who built what you're going through. 

Why all this talk about Getting Over it when this is meant to be about Baby Steps? Because Baby Steps feels in many ways like a direct sequel, in spite of its third-person perspective and more traditional narrative. It's still about climbing a mountain (and falling down it), and Foddy still appears at regular intervals to commend and cajole. I can't decide which I like more yet, but if you loved (or loved to hate) one of them, you should definitely play the other.

Spelunky 2

Graham: Spelunky is my favourite game of all time, and Spelunky 2, which is not, is even better. The core hook remains the same: it's a 2D platformer with the precision of Mario in which the levels are procedurally generated and death sends you right back to the beginning every time. What makes me persevere where other games send me packing is that, among the randomised enemies and sudden death, are similarly unpredictable powerups, from shotguns to pickaxes, capes to jetpacks, and there's nothing better than slowly learning how everything works until you're able to bend its systems to your will and navigate those dungeons flawlessly. Except maybe revisiting the dungeons in the chaotic co-op mode with some pals and finding whole new hilarious ways to die.

Jon: This is one of two games that I have had to force myself to stop playing, because otherwise I would play nothing else. It was the Daily Challenge that did it, offering a new seed and a leaderboard every day, something which I eventually realised had become as compulsive as smoking and meant I was spending an hour a day on a game I knew inside out. Every time it’s different, every time it’s satisfying. I’ll return to it in my retirement home. 

Vampire Survivors

Jon: One of those game mechanics that felt like the ruthless scientific experimentation of free-to-play mobile breaking containment, this places you in an open space that steadily fills with infinite mobs, the slaughter of which gives you currency to spend on upgrading your auto-firing weaponry. This steadily escalates from soothing whittling to chaotic weaving through increasingly choked spaces, snatching pickups and deploying upgrades to keep you ahead of the mob. It feels like a messy, organic evolution of the kaleidoscopic precision of arcade shmups, and more willing to support haphazard experimentation rather than falling into a robotic flow state. 

Babbdi

Brendy:  A free first-person muckabout in a brutalist city where the only honest goal is to get the first train outta there. There is something both ugly and honest about Babbdi's dour concrete world. It's a place where potato-headed people lurk in high-rise apartments, where garish raves manifest in sewer tunnels. You move with the bunny-hopping speed of a multiplayer Quake combatant in 1999, and this movement is complemented by various tools you can pick up. A pickaxe will let you clamber up walls, a baseball bat will propel you upwards if you batter the floor, a motorbike will see you skidding around at even faster speeds. There's more daft tools to find within the hour or so it takes to stick your nose into every urban cranny. But it's where those tools lead you that matters. 

Graham: My favourite Babbdi tool doesn't lead you anywhere, as far as I know. It's a trumpet. You can only carry one item at a time and every other object is a tool for reaching areas that feel out of bounds, which means there's no greater choice in the game than to throw away the pickaxe, the motorbike, the flashlight or whatever else was in your hands for a trumpet that does nothing but toot.

Hollow Knight Silksong

Graham: Confession: I've only played two hours of Silksong so far. That's because the buzz around its launch is what made me finally go back to Hollow Knight, which I'd only played for a few hours previously. That game got its hooks into me and 60 hours later, I didn't feel like immediately moving on to its more demanding successor. This makes me unqualified to sing Silksong's praises, but come on, are you really going to claim it's not one of the defining games of the decade? Even before its release, it was a behemoth, and I've played enough (and watched dozens of hours of streams enough) to know that it's a great game to have in my back pocket for some rainy month down the road. Maybe when its own successor comes out.

Brendy: I'm turned all the way off by Hollow Knight's spookycute art style. I think the hero of the first game is what would happen if Tim Burton made a Funko Pop. I can't stand the look of him. Yes, I'm very shallow.

Car Mechanic Simulator 2021

Brendy: I learned to drive a year and a half ago, and only then did I stop to wonder what actually happens inside these bizarre metal boxes. I started watching videos about how to service your own vehicle, how to replace your brake pads, the tools you'd need to do basic self-repairs. "I should probably know everything it is possible to know about cars," I thought. "I should probably retrain as a mechanic." And then: "No, I'll just play a videogame." Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 is not much different to any other job simulator, but I do feel like I know the names of certain bits of metal a little more after taking apart a virtual engine piece by piece. 

Videogames, at their core, are about being given a task and then completing that task. We are all, in some way or another, confusedly trying to find that one rusty bushing underneath a legally distinct Honda. Car repair is just what I was interested in that month, and it's reassuring that there are today countless games that capitalise on such whims. So I'm including Car Mechanic Sim 2021 as an exemplar of its ilk. For all the job sims that satisfy a passing obsession: this entry is for you.

Jon: As somebody who formerly worked (briefly and incompetently) as a car mechanic, and continues (at length and fractionally more competently) to repair and rebuild my own cars, I find this game maddeningly simplistic. It does indeed teach you what a coil spring is and where you might find it on the vehicle, but captures neither the bottomless frustration of replacing it nor the nihilistic-through-euphoric spectrum of satisfaction of driving the vehicle afterwards. This is probably what game developers feel like playing Game Dev Simulator. Anyway, the act of car repair is far more accurately captured by My Summer Car, or installing an Elden Ring mod that replaces the bosses with seized cylinder head bolts; this paltry simulacrum cannot compare.

Brendy: Oh no I've activated Mecha-Jonty.

Disc Room

Brendy: Disc Room will always be set in the future. When I first played it five years ago, the prologue said the story takes place in 2089. Today, if you boot it up, that same prologue will announce the year is 2094. It's always - that's right - 69 years ahead of you. The devs have literally made their game futureproof. Nice.

The clue is in the name. It is a twitchy action game where you continuously fail to survive horrible rooms filled with deadly buzzsaws. I don't like many games that can be classed as "bullet hell" but this is a stylish, clever, quickfire take on the genre. It made me nod with a fancy winetaster's approval even as my body was sliced into quarters by razors in the dark. Death sometimes sees you absorbing the power of a disc, giving you new abilities to dash or clone yourself, adding precious seconds to your best times. 

The devs mercifully resisted the temptation to roguelikeify things, as many today fail to do, and stuck to making a smooth score-chaser that can be completed in one firebrained and focused five-hour sitting. Chasing an extra 0.25 seconds of survival might have you playing for another 69 years. But you'll never catch up.

Graham: I used to be a magazine Disc Editor. It was extremely dangerous.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

Graham: I normally catch a glimpse of grind in a game and immediately lose interest. Not so in Fantasy Life i, which dares to ask the question: what if Animal Crossing was a videogame? The result is a colourful, relentless onslaught of dopamine, in which every activity levels up you, or your tools, or your job, or your town, or your companions, or--. It doesn't matter whether you're cutting down trees, farming or fighting birds in a forest, every system is simultaneously simple yet bottomless, and all of it tightly tied together in a way that provides you with a neverending todo list of just-one-more unlock. It helps that it also has good, casual co-op multiplayer for both open world exploration and dungeon delving, which provides a social justification for all that time I spent terraforming my NPC village so a magic fountain would give me a five star rating.

Tetris Effect: Connected

Brendy: Tetris is the videogame. I invoke Tetris any time I am asked to justify my questionable career to those who know little about games, because it is an unassailable classic even they will know and appreciate. I hope to play Tetris even as I lie in hospital on my last lungs. I hope to hear its music when I die, ushering me to the next world in a block-dropping zen state. If only one videogame were allowed to exist, I would choose Tetris. And until a better version of it comes along, Tetris Effect: Connected is the edition that survives the hypothetical ludo-rapture. I wasn't initially a fan of its many blooming light effects and splashy flashy application of Rez' lightshow philosophy. But then I learned you can adjust the intensity of lots of effects in the settings. Now, if I am in a really bad way, I play Tetris Effect and find it calming and helpful. I routinely listen to the stand-out song of its soundtrack (Connected by Hydelic - have a listen). Tetris is the videogame, and Tetris is forever.

The Finals

Graham: All I ever wanted was a first-person shooter that let me live out the intro from Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, and in The Finals I finally got it. This is a 3v3v3 team shooter in which entire levels are destructible, letting you smash your way through floors, ceilings and walls with explosives, sledgehammers or, with the right class, a big run up. Paired with ziplines, jump pads, flexible character builds and level modifiers like meteor showers, The Finals ends up feeling like an unholy amalgam of Battlefield and Unreal Tournament. That mixture of tactical depth and knockabout silliness kept me coming back for months - and far longer than any other multiplayer shooter in the past five years.

Mouthwashing

Brendy: Oh, another retro PS1 horror game. Big dea-- 

[Three hours later]

I need to sit down. Oh, I'm already sitting. Okay, I need to stand up. I need to pace around my room and have a think. I need a cup of tea and a lie down. No! Get up! I need to write 2000 words about this. 

Mouthwashing is Tacoma for pessimists. Instead of a crew of competent scientists, you get five deeply flawed and tragic space statistics. It begins with you intentionally crashing the spaceship into a rock in the middle of space nowhere. You do not know why. Everyone is stranded with little food, save for the minty fresh (and alcoholic) contents of the ship's cargo hold. The story cuts back and forth in time to show how everything got so bad. There are hideous layers to the crew's internal struggle that you will need to peel back, and a darkly nihilistic comedy to many of its scenes. It is an uncomfortable piece of psychological horror that demands attention, even if it throws in the obligatory jumpscare or monster chase sequence. Like Tacoma, it reminds me of good theatre. But unlike Tacoma, it also reminds me of how much twisted denial a human being can endure. (A lot).

Jusant

Graham: Climbing an enormous cliff face is one of those fundamental fantasies to me and in recent years video games have finally started to deliver on it. Jusant is the best of the bunch so far (Cairn is a week from release as I write this; perhaps two days from release as you read it). It has a fantastical setting, in that you are climbing an absurdly tall mesa embedded with the abandoned remains of a society and restoring it to life via a magic lil' guy, but the climbing itself is pleasantly focused on the physical realities of hanging from a wall hundreds of feet from the ground. Any game where I need to rest my character's arms is a winner in my book.

Stray

Brendy: I enjoy sci-fi and am tragically in love with all felines. So Stray is pure catnip to my toxoplasmic brain - a cyberpunk explorer about a cat trying to make its way home through the rugged streets of a futuristic supercity. It first caught people's attention when the devs posted some flashy GIFs of the cat walking down a single neon alleyway inspired by Kowloon Walled City. I'm grateful for how much of the flavour promised in those early designs was eventually delivered.

It was a largely linear adventure, more cinematic than the open world collectathon it may have otherwise warped into. But I appreciated the straightforward rigour of its rooftop-hopping journey. It's also got excellent animation. There's one optional scene where you can settle on the steel belly of a robot trying to sleep on a street bench. The way he reacts - startled at first, then resigned, and eventually comforted - is ten times more human than his robotic chassis suggests. I was a little disappointed by the ending, but a video analysing the geography of this sub-dirt city has reassured me (spoilers ahoy).  

Minishoot' Adventures

Graham: Me, whenever I'm lost in a metroidvania: "I hate this stupid genre and dumb, backtrack-y, smack-every-wall approach to exploration." Me, whenever I complete a metroidvania: "I am bereft, for I have made my home among the peoples of this mysterious land, and now I am cast out." So it was in Minishoot' Adventures - except for the "peoples" part, because there are no people here. This is a world made entirely of sentient spaceships, who cheep and chirrup as you help them by shmupping and bullet-helling through its vast overworld and many dungeons. What made me keep going in every moment when I was stuck is the wonderful feel (and sound!) of moving and shooting. If you want a palate cleansing dose of the genre between Hollow Knights, give Minishoot' a go.

Chivalry 2

Brendy: There is a dedicated button for hollering brief but murderous medieval rants as you charge into battle In Chivalry 2, which could be more accurately titled Bastardry 2. It is a multiplayer bloodbath of first-person sword wielding (and mace flailing and spear poking and arrow firing and...) Although it is full of shiny armour and period accurate weaponry, it takes inspiration not from dusty historical archives or embroidered chronicles, but from ludicrous medieval battle scenes in inaccurate Hollywood blockbusters. Arms and heads will roll across the mud. Big siege towers will crank their way towards walls filled with roaring idiots. You can - and should - throw entire roast dinners at your opponents' face. 64 people will die and die and die again, some perishing with the gleeful wisdom that this is multiplayer gaming as it should be, others with all the expected salt of our gut-spattered pastime. They don't get that being stabbed is fun, actually.

The Roottrees Are Dead

Jon: It’s not constructed with the same precision engineering as The Return of the Obra Dinn, but it’s recognisably using the same deduction format with an interface that hits me painfully in the demographics. You’re uncovering the backstory of the titular family at the tail end of the 1990s using a passable approximation of the dial-up web, picking through a collection of crude homepages, serif-fonted news sites and prototypical search engines. The clumsy tech and sparse sites are a smart way to limit the information and the interface, and gradually piecing together the family tree across multiple generations, scandals and dead ends feels extremely satisfying. The “Rootreemania” second act is shorter and not nearly as well done, which is a shame, because it feels like a format that’s got legs.

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle

Graham: Give me a dense city block to explore, and I'm happy. If that city happens to be the Vatican, with a Pope to dodge, Nazis to punch, ancient scripts to puzzle, and a truly absurd number of biscotti to munch, then all the better. I think The Great Circle's accuracy in replicating the Indiana Jones movies was somewhat overstated, but it's better than mere mimicry, anyway. It's a first-person shooter that delivers on the fundamentals of exploration and tumbledown fisticuffs better than almost any other game this decade.

Brendy: You call it a first-person shooter, but there is remarkably little shootsing to be shot. I appreciated this a lot. Giving Indiana a loaded revolver is the boring way to solve his problems. It's much more interesting to have him dress up like the enemy and donk a backturned guard on the head with a priceless vase, or use his whip to tie them up just long enough to bumrush 'em, or scuttle around in the dirt for a loose rock or an oily wrench to swing in a state of panic. When shooting happens it feels like a last resort, or a pacey moment of bullet-hosing filler between the real moments of adventure. Indiana Jones is a seat-of-the-pants fella, and while the game still goes to lengths to make its player feel like the best puncher in the room, it also remembers that Indie is still mostly making it up as he fumbles along. 

Jon: Just a perfect combination of brand and developer. Machinegames nailed meaty Nazi-punching in the Wolfenstein remakes, so just slapping a fedora and a John Williams score on it would have sufficed, but these intricate levels are far more satisfying to navigate. The CGI is less embarrassing than the last movie, too. 

(the) Gnorp Apologue

Graham: I've recently become enamoured with incremental games, which take the power curve of a normal 50-hour action-RPG and typically condense it down into something you can experience in a couple of evenings. Part of how they do that is by removing any skill requirement - you will make progress whether you do much of anything - but they're not idle games, either. So it is in (the) Gnorp Apologue, in which you hire little guys (Gnorps) and set them to work either hitting a big rock to make an ambiguous but valuable resource spill out, or carting that resource from one part of the screen to another. Within half an hour your screen will be overrun with Gnorps, explosive particle effects, mounds of treasure, and several supplementary buildings - and this is just the beginning. Is there a point to it all? Not really, but it's supremely satisfying, and a concentrated dose of videogames for the modern professional in a hurry.

Deathloop

Brendy: It's only been four years since the release of Arkane's timeloop boot 'n' shoot, but I get the feeling Deathloop has been too quickly forgotten. I loved its sense of humour, and its extremely powerful kick. It's my favourite immersive sim made by the studio(s), and there may be a few of you who foam at the mouth over that definition. The Dishonoreds boast great art and level design, but they take themselves so seriously. Prey has a strong opening and intriguing setting, but its blobby enemies are a twitchy bore to fight. 

Deathloop offers something else: an actually funny sci-fi shooter with guns that feel good, a roguelike aftertaste, and a novel multiplayer side that sees other players invading your timeline to assassinate you and screw things up. It's an adventurous and jazzy lark on an island full of compelling asshats, the goal being to somehow kill them all in a single run. I cannot help but want to learn more about these terrible people, before I line them all up for a perfect lethal domino flick. 

Despelote

Graham: I am all the way done with games that depict children as if they're the protagonists of an American young adult novel. It simply feels like a desperate waste when, for example, French developers at Dontnod are telling stories that are likely more reflective of Dawson's Creek than their own lives. This is part of why I found Despelote so refreshing. Set in Ecuador, it's an autobiographical telling of the creator's childhood during the country's World Cup qualification campaign in 2002. Through a series of first-person vignettes you flit from your home, to your mother's video store, to kickabouts with friends at the park, and the football fever gripping the nation is glimpsed at the periphery, as world events are when you're a child with little control over your own life. Despelote experiments with player agency and its narrative framing in ways I've never seen games do before, but its real trick is it tells a deeply personal story and is all the more relatable for it.

Assassin's Creed Mirage

Brendy: To be honest I just like looking at old Islamic architecture. There's no other reason this is on the list.

Dwarf Fortress 

Graham: It might seem odd to say that Dwarf Fortress is "of the decade", but if 2006 was when these ambitious developers first struck the earth, it was its Steam release in 2022 when they finally found gold. That was when the infamously obtuse colony simulator was updated with sprite art, mouse controls, a graphical interface, and tutorials, among other welcome concessions to approachability. It was a justifiably tremendous success, allowing the Adams brothers to continue development for years to come. That's good! As every Dwarf Fortress player knows, the game doesn't end when you find gold, it ends when you release demonspawn into your fortress and they rend your entire population of dwarves limb from limb. Keep going, Adams brothers!

Arc Raiders 

Jon: Helldivers 2 got me back into extraction shooters, but Arc Raiders is the one that kept me there, with an experience that’s almost entirely counter to the former’s chest-thumping artillery barrages. Arc Raiders is about creeping through a blasted but still beautiful setting and tiptoeing around the risks rather than rushing into them, with every encounter a cause for caution. It’s faintly embarrassing how refreshing it feels to play in a fallen Europe rather than a generic middle-America, with the combination of fallen cities, abandoned machines and soft sunlight reminiscent of Simon Stalenhag, and the scrambling, twitching, hooting robotic enemies are perfectly pitched. Even the puniest are fatal if not handled carefully, but in time you learn that even the hulking, rocket-firing behemoths can be taken down straightforwardly enough. Emphasis on “can”, mind. 

I usually prefer to dodge such encounters in favour of scrabbling through the ruins to fill my pockets with salvage and get back to the hatch before it closes, something that throws up a series of high-tension close encounters on almost every round. The only downside is the other players, and the abundance of griefing dickheads within - although I was delighted to discover that playing solo rapidly sorts you into matches populated with people of the same playstyle, which in my case means a series of charming Europeans who cheerily greet me and hand over rare weapons for free. Solo games thus becomes a soothing, if cautious, series of harvesting trips while all the camping griefers are trapped in robot-infested wastelands with each other, which is the sort of judgement I can get behind.

Outer Wilds: Echoes Of The Eye

Brendy: I didn't think Outer Wilds could get any better after completing it the first time round. A sci-fi game of discovery and exploration, it became the poster child of a whole school of game design philosophy (ie. "knowledge-based design" - boring name but clever stuff). In chunky expansion Echoes of the Eye, the solar system is still being eaten by its supernova-ing star every 22 minutes, and you're still caught in a time loop trying to find out how to stop it. But go chasing one odd new clue in your homeworld's museum and you will soon find your way to an entirely new environment - and one that is arguably more playful and exciting than any of the planets that have come before. Fellow journo friend Matthew Castle of the Backpage Pod once called it a "masterpiece inside a masterpiece" and at the risk of making him smile with smug satisfaction if and when he reads this: he's very correct.

Cyberpunk 2077

Graham: You know the story: Cyberpunk 2077 launched in a terrible, buggy state and was later redeemed by patches, systems overhauls and DLC. In truth, I loved it from the start in spite of its frankly terrible character upgrades and perks and lackluster shooting. That's because its writing and quest design were always strong. I love my V and her desperate attempts to save herself from the mind virus slowly killing her, and I love the mind virus, personified as obnoxious bastard Johnny Silverhand. Most of all I love that it's a story that pitches kindness and community as the best forms of resistance against a world of ultro-capitalist neo-feudalism (even as you slice a lot of people in half with roboslick arm-swords). What several years of updates did was turn a janky game I nevertheless loved into one of the few blockbuster games I'd recommend to anyone.

Brendy: There's a vending machine called Brendan, and he's very nice, as many Brendans are. Just thought I'd mention it.

Season: A Letter To The Future

Brendy: There are not many games about cycling your way across a post-war countryside in an effort to bank your memories in a scrapbook before the season changes and everyone is struck by collective amnesia. Quite the setup. Much of this low-key third-person adventure is spent in a valley about to be flooded by the state to make way for a dam, as you get to know the few remaining inhabitants who have yet to clear out. Along the way you take photos and make sketches and collect notes that will be a record of your travels and the people you've met. A record that'll be handy for the mysterious changing of the season, another upcoming event that looms over everything. 

I find it hard to explain in such few words how poignant the storytelling is in this small, bright-looking thing. It is a quiet and bittersweet contemplation of memory, identity, and meaning. From one perspective, it is about loss. From another, it is simply about change. Games are so rarely this emotionally literate, that to come across one while looking for a simple game about riding a bicycle across pleasant vistas is kind of astonishing. It saddens me that Season's impact might have been lost in the flood of games that has been filling our own valley in the games industry these past few years. But I live in hope that it'll see a revival, when some popular YouTube nitpicker plays it on a whim and sees just how thoughtful it is. 

Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown

Graham: What if the industry's primary purveyors of mainstream, big budget megabloat turned their resources towards the humble metroidvania? The result is a lot of polish you probably don't need in the genre (3D art, fully voiced cutscenes, etc.), but married to fundamentals that are nearly best-in-class. That includes expansive movement and combat, a huge and beautiful world to explore, and a surprising willingness to lean into difficulty, with boss fights and (optional, at least) platforming challenges that will absolutely break your thumbs. (And unlike many of its indie mates, if the boss fights prove too difficult, you can fiddle with the settings and make them easier). Much of the criticism of The Lost Crown at launch focused on its premium price, and fair enough, but it's now regularly discounted to a fraction of that price. Only Hollow Knight and its successor Silksong are more essential genre entries.

Shadows Of Doubt

Brendy: A procedurally generated detective game as ambitious as Shadows Of Doubt was always going to have problems. Repetitive dialogue boxes, cases that lead nowhere, clues that mean nothing, bugs that mess up your progress. But none of it ruins the private eye fantasy, and some of the sillier bugs even make me enjoy it more. I love that anyone you pass in the street might be the killer you're looking for. I like that you sometimes run into the same people and explore the same apartment blocks over multiple cases, drawing lines of relationships between murder victims that are sometimes completely incidental. 

I once spent an entire evening scanning post boxes for fingerprints - absolutely thankless cop grunt work - just to see if a faceless suspect was living somewhere in the building. Later, I crawled through freezing vents to break into a killer's home, only to find them sleeping in bed with their partner, at which point it felt weird to arrest them. Shadows Of Doubt is a game that I feel ought to have been made years ago, because it is such a good idea that even when it is done imperfectly, it still slaps harder than the male lead in a 1950s noir. 

Graham: If your favourite bits of Deus Ex games are reading emails and hiding in vents - and those are my favourites - then boy have I got the game for you. 

Straftat

Brendy: The gall of this game. Straftat. The absolute gall. It's one thing to release a blisteringly quick 1v1 online shooter that perfectly channels the deathmatches of a bygone era, it's quite another to offer said shooter FOR ZERO POUNDS. Every time I play a quick match of Straftat, I am quickly shot in the face with a shotgun and find myself a) laughing and b) shaking my head. How is this free? Straftat. You can pay an extra six quid to add more maps and weapons to your rotation, yeah, but it's not like the 150 free maps will run out any time soon. It breaks my little mind that the developers (the same pair of French brothers who made brutalist explore 'em up Babbdi) also keep building and adding more maps and guns to the mix - both free and premium. Straftat. This shooter already offered the best buck-to-oh-fuck-I've-died ratio in today's oversaturated market of live service hypertrash. And then it added a 2v2 mode. These people should be locked away. This is untenable. Straftat. This is diabolical. STRAFTAT. This is STRAFTAT STRAFTAT STRAFTAT.

Graham: What if you combined the movement of Titanfall, the weapons of Counter-Strike, the knockabout level geometry of a user made map like fy_iceworld, the rapidfire brevity of a Mario Party minigame, and the UI aesthetic of a Winamp skin, and put it in a free first-person shooter? STRAFTAT STRAFTAT STRAFTAT.

Balatro

Jon: It’s fucked-up poker with modifiers that immediately start breaking the rules, and stack in increasingly elaborate and occasionally game-breaking ways. I’m bad at real poker - my only ability is a failure to remember what’s going on, which can sometimes confuse the competent players to my benefit - but I can grasp the basics, and this rapidly spirals in intriguing and compulsive ways. I’m still not very good at it, but it’s always entertaining and the next round is immediately available, notably different and not very long, which is something I increasingly cherish.

Graham: With an open mind and open heart, you can find the value in any work of art. Unfortunately my mind and heart are closed to mind-numbing skinner boxes precision engineered to waste your time*

*Except the skinner boxes I like. 

Tactical Breach Wizards

Jon: It took me a long time to realise I liked turn-based combat - thanks, Jake Solomon - but it’s become one of my favourite genres and this is a perfectly-pitched midpoint between the sprawl of XCOM and Invisible Inc and the tiny precision of Into the Breach. Being able to rewind every step and try again feels like it should be save-scumming, but it liberates you to muck around and try different approaches, and experiment with the violent defenestration that has become Suspicious Developments’ calling card. Each level is big enough to be a satisfying challenge and small enough to encourage experimentation, and the instantly-graspable fiction is played perfectly: there’s more plot than the game needs, really, but it’s played perfectly and with real laughs.

Graham: Never heard of it.

Disclosure: Graham works for Suspicious Developments, the developers of Tactical Breach Wizards.

Keep Driving

Brendy: As the proud owner of a car from 2007, the thought of being behind the wheel for a real-life road trip stresses me out. Anything could go wrong. But in a pixel arty sideways management RPG like Keep Driving, things going wrong is exactly what gives the misadventure flavour (yes, the same is true of life, but it's much more time consuming to change a tire there). You're trying to get to the other side of a fictional US-style country in time for the big music festival. A lot is going to happen between here and there.

You might pick up hitchhiking punks, sell your prized guitar, take a job delivering pizza. There's a chance you'll end up settling in the big city instead of going to the festival at all. Or you might sack it off to go visit a relative in trouble. It's all accompanied by turn-based battles against potholes, cyclists, lorries, and bad weather. Your jalopy deteriorating with every dint and scrape. The game's inventory management and route-choosing put me in mind of NEO Scavenger, except where that is a land of brutal survival, this is one of wistful decisionmaking. There's no wrong turn though, just do as the game's title says.

Halo Infinite

Brendy: Look, I just enjoy sniping lads across the map, okay? People were quite cool on this latest Halo, in which humanity gets into yet another Master Beef with a xenogorilla. But I got a pleasant kick out of its rocky Pacific Northwest open world, dredging up memories of my first encounter with flightless Iron Man in the grassy second level of Halo: Combat Evolved. Now you get a grappling hook, and you can throw barrels of exploding electricity at aliens. That's swell. The multiplayer did not chase trends either. It just modernised Halo, and it's the best the series has had to offer since Halo 3. What I want from this dumb bro-shoot is simple: sporty and goofy competitions of murder in an old-school arena where I can feel the level designer's eyes on me as I use that ledge or this rock to gain a tiny but important advantage. And in the deathpits of Infinite, that's what I got.

Anthology Of The Killer

Brendy: I sometimes wonder what the games industry would look like if the writer of this game - Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy - worked on blockbusters made by a giant studio, instead of his own zinelike cult murder mysteries. I imagine a distant parallel realm in which the next Call Of Duty is penned not by an advertising executive but by the man who, in our world, brought us Murder Dog IV: Trial Of The Murder Dog. A timeline in which Naughty Dog's narrative director is not Neil Druckmann, but the Irish renegade who penned, in our dimension, Drill Killer and Goblet Grotto and the always bloodful Space Funeral. 

I cannot tell if these alternate realities are desirable, because I do not know if Anthology Of The Killer exists within them. In many ways, this is a collection of thecatamites' fanciest schmanciest works, made in conjunction with fellow artists and music folk of similar slime. Or they might just be the middle-point of an upcomingly large oeuvre, a representative sample of the dangerously good and funny writing he has unleashed upon humanity since his debut in... [checks Wikipedia]... Biggles On Mars. See? Even saying the name of something made by thecatamites is funny. Anthology Of The Killer is nine of his games bundled into one. That is at least nine laughs out loud. Make no mistake. Across all universes, all timelines, this represents exceptional value.

Dune Imperium

Graham: I've not read a Dune book or seen a Dune movie, yet Steam tells me I've spent over 160 hours in this digital boardgame. I reckon I'll play hundreds more. Each player takes control of a leader from the Dune universe and, each turn, sends their agents to different board spaces to harvest resources (water, spice, currency, troops) or curry favour with one of four factions. What makes it compelling for the long haul is that it's also a deckbuilding game, and over an hour-long match you construct an engine for turning those resources into combat wins and victory points. I've not yet exhausted the potential for clever synchronicity between its cards, and it has only got better as it's received new systems via expansion packs. Whether you're playing against the AI, progressing through the challenge mode, or have a weekly appointment to lose to a friend like I do, it's truly superb.

Dragon's Dogma 2

Brendy: Thank god, a fantasy RPG that doesn't let you fast travel whenever you like. Years of open worlders by Ubisoft and Bethesda have set an expectation that players should be able to warp anywhere they've previously been at a moment's notice. No wonder all that space between "points of interest" is empty and lifeless - the level designer never thought you'd go there, so why waste time filling it with something? Critics of open world design have been complaining about this for years, but most big developers don't wanna hear it. Their games are about ticking off lists, collecting things, getting from A to B as fast as possible. Dragon's Dogma 2 is a little different. It's about getting from A to B as meaningfully as possible. Fast travel can be done via special crystals, but they're sparse, expensive to use, and most only land you in specific hub zones. So you rarely do it. Most of the time, you're hoofing it.

You need to ensure your backpack has space for new things you'll find on any trip, you have to avoid overloading it along the way, and you probably even abandon good stuff. Interesting decisions are happening not just when you battle dragons or fight off bandits, but also as you simply root around in your rucksack. I was pleased to read how bolshy the game's director, Hideaki Itsuno, was about this design choice.

“Travel is boring?" he said in an interview with IGN. "That's not true. It's only an issue because your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun.” 

This decision comes second to only one other feature: being able to pick up any person and throw them half a dozen meters.

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator

Graham: This is a silly, knockabout physics 'em up, in which you send cobbled-together armies of cowboys, ninjas, knights and mages to beat each level's enemy forces. If that's all it was, it would be a cute but insubstantial autobattler, but TABS has the good sense to let you bring your own toys to its sandbox. My son and I have therefore spent countless hours making our own units, producing 300-foot-tall cavemen, electric angels of death, and swarms of tiny, punching lunatics just to see who would win in a fight. If you have a kid, and if they ever liked smashing action figures together, sit them down in front of TABS and enjoy their delight.

Abiotic Factor

Brendy: Half-Life was a comedy. Just try to play through the opening disaster of the facility without laughing at the scientists. If they're not laying the foreshadowing on thicker than phlegm in a sample beaker, they're getting yoinked into vents or snogged by little alien beanbags. Many developers inspired by Half-Life seem to have missed the memo that laughs matter, despite the fact it is plastered all over the offices of Black Mesa in blood-spattered post-it notes. 

The makers of Abiotic Factor did not miss it. They tore it off every cubicle they could find, pulped it all down to a comical mush, and reconstituted it 25 years later as a multiplayer survival game. You play a scientist in a government facility, where the entire staff has been messing with interdimensional physics far beyond their ken. The place is a monster-infected mess, and every fully voiced character you meet has some funny line or stupid role to play. It is a survival game, so you will need to eat (fry alien steak), sleep (do a platforming minigame) and satisfy other needs (relieve the poo meter). But unlike a lot of survival games that just dump you in an open wasteland with a few points of interest, Abiotic Factor is a warren of labs and staff lounges and experimental facilities, all of which feel handcrafted with the comedy of disaster in mind.  

Noita

Graham: Noita is a sidescrolling platformer and roguelike where every pixel is physically simulated. That alone would make for a fun novelty, but my real obsession with Noita begins with the wands the player uses to manipulate the environment. You can find them at random as you delve deeper below the surface - perhaps grabbing a wand that sprays fire and using it to burn away a lake of oil that blocks your path. You can also fully customise the wands yourself, however, and the complexity of the spells - and their alchemical reactions with the increasingly fantastical solids, gases, and liquids you encounter - only becomes more thrilling. I've never completed Noita, but I've had a wonderful time blowing myself up over and over and over again.

OlliOlli World

Brendy: There are three OlliOllis, and while the second is probably dearest to my heart (I cracked the top 20 leaderboards) I will concede that OlliOlli World is the twitchy skateboarding game at its apex. Colourful and playful enough to invite you along for a cruise, yet difficult enough to have you replaying level after level in an attempt to wreck your old high scores. This is a harmonious flow state of thumb flicking and kickflipping. The game's critical success is accompanied by some bittersweetness though. Publishers Take-Two Interactive took a fire axe to studio Roll7 in May 2024, laying off everyone there and shuttering the studio while inexplicably denying they were doing so (why do those in the games industry above a certain salary find it impossible to talk straight?). This means that we're unlikely to get another OlliOlli game, and if we do, it'll be made by entirely different people. Regardless, if OlliOlli World does turn out to be the last of its kind, it is a rad finale. 

Graham: I'm bad at it therefore the game is bad.

Helldivers 2

Graham: I don't have time for a live service game that requires me to play it like it's my second job, and so Helldivers 2 was perfect. I've seen Starship Troopers, so I immediately understand what is required (killing lots of bugs, occasionally friendly firing friends), and the starting bundle of machineguns, laser rifles and artillery strikes were as useful and as pleasing to wield as anything I unlocked back on my spaceship. Is that flattened progression track part of why I moved on after fifteen hours and haven't looked back? Maybe, but in my world being done with a game after having had a thoroughly good time isn't a bad thing, it's ideal.

Jon: This is the game that finally forced me to upgrade my PC, and it was worth it: the scale and the bombast add an extra, oh, 20% entertainment value to the already solid comedy offered by Battlefield and its ilk. Orbital cannons and ludicrous jingoism played completely straight is the sort of escalation I need, and I was delighted by a meta that emphasised futility yet became a matter of desperate seriousness for the community anyway. 

Dread Delusion

Brendy: The recent remake of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is not on this list. Because if you are driven by nostalgia to seek an open and unexplored world of fantasy critters and demonic overlords, I have something much better. Dread Delusion is a PS1-style first-person RPG in which you are released from prison on the condition that you hunt down the terrible pirate Vela Callose. A machine prison warden tells you your chances of surviving an encounter with her are "one in three-hundred-and-sixty-four". I'll take those odds. 

Out you go into a small open world full of steam-powered spiderbots, grinning skeletonfolk, and small towns full of jittering textures and hidden sewers. Make a deal with an ancient invisible god. Map the world for the cartographer's guild. Take a quest from the Clockwork King, and then never complete that quest. I don't want to play Oblivion again, waltzing through a Tamriel I've seen and saved before. I want to potter around a truly fresh landscape. And that's what Dread Delusion has to offer. It feels like an ancient PC game you forgot about in your parent's attic, but it's a crimson-skied world that's all new.

Marvel Snap

Brendy: I'm not a superhero person. I watch Marvel movies at the cinema because I want to hang out with my brother or my friends, and I care less about the movie than eating popcorn with pals. So over the years I have absorbed enough about these baffling eejits to understand their unique powers, and how such powers might translate to silly gimmicks in an online card game. Nightcrawler can poof from one card lane to another. Spiderman can trap other cards in a sticky web, preventing them from moving. Daredevil lets you see your opponents move before you play your own.

As a fan of Gwent, I like that Marvel Snap boiled down its principles to make a quickfire game that chases the same tricksy, bluffy feelings, as you slide every card one space to the left on the last turn to steal victory. I haven't played it for a while though, so I don't know if it has since followed Gwent into the same hole of overcomplication. (The perpetual curse of free-to-play trading card games is that they just keep adding more cards, watering down elegance as they chase the whales deeper and deeper at the expense of casual sharks.) But I was happy to play for as long as I did. 

Webfishing

Brendy: Sometimes you just want to log onto a friendly server and do some fishing. For many, that means hanging out in your favourite MMO. But what if a game existed where you could just do the fishing part? Well smoke my sardines and call me kittycat, Webfishing did just that. It's a lo-fi hangout space with the graphics of a PS1 platformer, as much a chill chat room as an actual videogame. Some guy on the internet once complained it only catered to queer folks, because the game's cosmetic user handles (sold for fictional currency) included things like "trans" and "bi" but not an equivalent title that read "straight". So the developer added one. Then set the in-game price to $9999. A perfect response. 

Tales From Off-Peak City Vol 1

Brendy: Pizza delivery for... [checks receipt]... weird photographer! I finally played Off-Peak this year, a full five years after it came out. I'm glad I did. This surreal city block explorer is set up like a heist story. You are new to town, hired by a mysterious woman in a boat to steal the saxophone of a famous musician. Said musician has retired though, and spends his days making oddly addictive pizza for the citizens of these streets. You get a job at his pizzeria, earning his trust, until something happens that throws your whole plan out of whack. Now you are delivering pizzas all around town - a good excuse to explore and listen to all the lunatics who live here.

My favourite moment comes half-way through, when you emerge from a secret basement to find yourself on the banks of the city's canal. Your clandestine handler floats past in a row boat. She says one thing: "The saxophone." A dark, gliding reminder of your true purpose here. Can you betray the man who granted you this simple pizza life? I mean, probably. It's how you complete the game. But that doesn't mean you won't feel kinda bad doing it.

Sifu

Graham: Oh how I wish I was better at this game. Sifu is a third-person kung fu brawler in which you fight through dojos, nightclubs and long Oldboy corridors. If you're doing well, it's as cinematic as gaming gets, as you choreograph intricate parries and counters in real-time. In the hands of someone like me, it's a sloppy mess, as I stumble through fights, get my ass kicked, and occasionally get lucky. Repetition and retries are a part of the journey, as your character grows old and grey each time you fail in your quest for revenge, but still I feel as if I am letting the game down every time I play it. And yet I keep playing it.

Barotrauma

Jon: Not for me the cheery wipe-clean co-op of PlateUp! or the childish diligence of the Lego games: my kind of co-op is desperately struggling to pilot a defective submarine through an extraterrestrial ocean trench beset with nightmarish horrors. Between the clumsy systems, the array of murderous lifeforms and the myriad challenges of trying to keep water out of the sub and oxygen into your flailing QWOP-style crew, it’s a heady mix of comedy and survival horror. I don’t have the stones for single-player but co-op was a delight: attempts at manning one’s station and diligent maintenance quickly deteriorated into scrambling, giggling panic and ragdolling death as the sub gradually sank into the depths.

Rematch

Brendy: "It's Rocket League without the cars," goes the popular joke. And, I mean, yes. But it's more than that. Rematch is a combat sport. It's not the game I expected from the makers of kung-fu fighter Sifu and multiplayer biff 'em up Absolver. But I should have trusted them. If there was ever a studio that could make football feel as fluid as a fighting game, it's Sloclap. Rematch sets itself up as distinct from plainer football sims like Fifa or eFootball. You control a single player, and there are no throw-ins, offsides, or fouls - the only thing that stops play is a goal (with enough time to see the celebration animation you've unlocked with in-game currency). It's played from that fundamentally personal perspective that makes the sport inviting to kids all over the world. You can get the ball and be the hero who scores. This means it suffers from the exact same problem as a playground kickabout - ball hogs. I don't mind this so much. That the game mirrors the social dynamics of real world footy just proves how accurately it channels the spirit of the sport. Don't get me wrong. I still think watching real football is boring as fuck. But Rematch at least helps me understand why people enjoy their weekly five-a-side. 

Skin Deep

Brendy: Hot off the hacker time trials of Quadrilateral Cowboy (ie. nine years later) this stealth game was released to the pleased noises of Blendo fans from across the decades. The sense of humour that has accompanied this studio's boxy games remains intact. You are Nina Pasadena, a security officer frozen on long hauls only to be thawed out in the event of a pirate boarding. Pirates will board every time. It is part Die Hard in space, part Prey for cat lovers, and part Metal Gear Solid without Hideo Kojima's terrible practice of naming characters after a single defining attribute. You might throw a bar of soap to make guards slip up, leap out of the vent you're hiding in before your sneeze meter brings you dangerously close to revealing your position, then decide - fuck it - let's smash a nearby window and send everything and everyone in the room floating off into space like a diminishing thought. There are a few weird bugs and your strategy for ridding the ships of bad guys starts to become routine once you understand all the tricks on offer. But the comedic timing and dense gags of the story make up for it.

Proverbs

Graham: Proverbs is Minesweeper crossed with Picross, in that you use numbers on a grid to tell you which squares to fill in, and which are negative space, and doing so ultimately reveals a picture. This places it in the same field as several other grid-based puzzle games, but Proverbs worked for me particularly well because it offers just one, huge grid to solve rather than a set of distinct levels. That meant it was all the easier to slip into a flow state, or perhaps a fugue state, as I sunk nearly 30 hours into it over a long winter break. I'm not sure if there's any nutritional value to the experience - perhaps some art history, as you reveal its pixellated version of Buegel the Elder's 1559 painting "Netherlandish Proverbs" - but it's certainly numbing, and sometimes that's what I want while I chew through episodes of House MD and wait for sleep.

Hell Let Loose

Brendy: I often wonder what would happen if every Battlefield player suddenly learned about the existence and virtues of WW2 shooter Hell Let Loose. It is, in my grizzled eyes, a more interesting land of warfare. One of the things Battlefield 6 gets praised for is the chaotic atmosphere. Bullets whizz past, tanks roll by, every player exists as a theoretical nobody in a grander conflict, but your small acts of heroism will sometimes stack with those of another player, and another and another, until the war swings in your favour and all control points are painted your colour. But play just a couple of hours of Hell Lets Loose and you'll find it does all of this with a force of commitment that Battlefield's developers would be deeply afraid to ape. 

That means it is unforgiving. Step into an open field of France and you will likely die in seconds to a rifle round from some distant hedgerow - you'll never know who fired. Run toward the objective without following your squad leader's advice and you'll end up decorating some snowy hillside with a dramatic shade of red. This is about teamwork, not intuitively but hierarchically. You must follow orders (or give them). Your squad leader will talk to his commander about what's happening in the next kilometre of countryside, and that commander will talk to the big boss at HQ about whether it's worth pushing on, or setting up MG nests for a tricky defense. Maybe he'll even call in an airstrike on your assaulters, if he's feeling generous. Battlefield 6? Buddy, that's just boot camp.

5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel

Brendy: Rook to 1999. Checkmate. I sometimes try to explain this game beyond the elegant description provided by its own name, but every time I fail to describe just how fucking funny it is. Is your king caught in a checkmate? Just escape to a parallel timeline. Are you lacking material? Just send your remaining bishop back in time, say, five moves ago. That should help. I have three queens because I do not honour the laws of physics, and to beat me you will have to lower yourself to the same level of quantum disrespect. Or you can just send your knights willy-nilly all over the time-space continuum. You will often win a game of 5D chess without understanding how. It is the funniest way to play chess I have ever witnessed. 

Infinite Craft

Graham: Infinite Craft is a toy rather than a game. There's no challenge to it, no problem to solve, no score or goal. Instead it presents you with a blank canvas and a palette of words you can drag and combine, just to see what happens. Combine "King" with "Ocean" to produce "Neptune", a logical connection. Combine "Vampire" with "Pirate" and you get "Vampirate", a daft pun. The delight is in burrowing ever downwards, discovering new words and concepts, and experimenting with how they interact. There's no end to it, but you do start to feel out the structure of its connections, and learn how to six-degrees-of-seperation your way from the creation of the universe to the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. If you wished the Scribblenauts games had fewer restrictions, this is for you.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Brendy: Job simulators are nice. Job simulators set in a futuristic orbital skipbreaking yard are nicer. Hardspace begins with you signing an elaborate contract that puts you into a phenomenally deep trench of personal debt. You spend the rest of the game chopping up bits of spaceship in dangerous zero gravity conditions and throwing the chunks into big recyclers and furnaces, all to shave off a little bit more of that big red number. The game has a lot to say about the value of labour and unassailable corporate greed. Yet the work itself is strangely gratifying, even if you do often explode while lasering too close to the fuel tanks. Removing a reactor has all the stress of defusing a bomb. Unionise? I couldn't possibly. One small thing I love is that you'll sometimes find posters on board the ship you're dismantling, and you can use these to decorate your sleeping quarters - this became an ongoing quest of mine to add even a tiny bit of personality to my cookie cutter corporate hab. 

Graham: You wield a laser that cuts spaceships precisely where you position the laser. That's magic, that is, no matter how many times I do it.

Hades 

Jon: Like Graham with Silksong, it took the rapturous reception to the sequel to make me finally play the original and you know what, it’s great. Meaty, satisfying combat in beautifully detailed environments, with that roguelike reshuffling keeping you on your toes, and the characters are drawn, scripted and voiced to a level of thirstiness normally found in a visual novel. Truly a game to launch a thousand ships, in the AO3 sense of the term. Maybe I’ll finish it before Hades 3 comes along.

Brendan: I think this is cheating because Hades was out in early access for two years before it got a full 1.0 version in 2020. Then again we already included two disqualified Hitman games in the list, so I guess we just make up the rules as we go along. THAT'S JANK BABY.

Holedown

Graham: If you want to play Breakout but with a progression grind and farming minigame, then Ball x Pit awaits you. If you want to play a Breakout riff which does a better job of maintaining the arcade simplicity of the original, but still marries it to a satisfying roguelike challenge, I'd suggest Holedown. It's about drilling a hole, down, towards the core of a planet, and doing so by firing balls at blocks. The blocks have numbers on them which signal the number of times that block must be hit before it cracks. As you stack multipliers and unlock upgrades, the fundamental thrill remains the same: perfectly firing your balls in behind a bunch of blocks so they bounce around and commit incredible damage. Holedown is a delightful timewaster that doesn't waste your time.

Fall Guys

Graham: There are cracks in multiple keys on my keyboard and it's all Fall Guys' fault. That's because its bubbly bean exterior is merely a facade for a nightmarish physics-based platformer where being even slightly bumped by another player can send you tumbling, ragdolling, out of control, and a racing game where there's no reset button and a third of all tracks choose their victor based on luck. The trouble is, my kid was obsessed with it for several years and is freakishly good at it. We have played it for hundreds of hours now; me, tumbling into the abyss, cursing aloud, smashing my computer to bits; him, speedrunning to the finish line with impossible grace, employing a series of "skips" he learned on YouTube, so relaxed in his chair that he's horizontal. Fall Guys angers me like no other game I've ever played - and I love it. It is our equivalent of tossing a ball around in the front yard.

Brendy: God I love it when these wee men eat dirt. Fall Guys appeals to anyone who has ever watched some poor HR manager from Durham get punched in the jewels on Total Wipeout and thought: "That could be me." It is the best battle royale game in years, perhaps ever. Why would I parachute into another wartorn pseudo-Russia when I can leap straight into a solid wall, thinking it is maybe also a door? If the beanfolk of Fall Guys were given guns and instructed "only one of you can leave", they would probably try to wear the firearms as hats. This makes them better people, and the players who inhabit them better by proxy.

Ballionaire

Jon: It’s a pachinko game with knobs on but in my defence, they’re extremely dazzling knobs. You start with a bare pachinko board of varying degrees of plausibility and gradually build it up using the triggers you add after each ball, striving to place them such that status effects and modifiers cascade into each other to build multipliers and points.

This is all presented with bright colours, cartoony graphics and an endlessly looping electronic music beat of the sort that would shred the soul if experienced in any other environment, but here just blends into the relentless overstimulation. By the end of each level the board is a sprawling, overwhelming dazzle pattern of triggers firing off each other and blasting balls in all directions and you feel like a five-year-old who’s just downed too much cola and played three arcade games at once. Not a sensation I want to routinely experience, admittedly, but a solid, sugary distraction. 

Fridge Poetry

Brendy: For months now I have frequented the Fridge Poetry website (which you can visit and play around with for free). At one point, I would open it every morning before work, and click 'n' drag words to form a little poem. Sometimes only two lines of silliness, sometimes whole stanzas of sweet nothing. It became a soothing ritual. I'd check in on the efforts of other anonymous magnet shufflers, maybe delete a meme word added by some schoolkid tourist, and maybe arrange a few words for use later - even when I knew someone would probably nab those words before tomorrow came. I still open it up every week, and fiddle with words. It's more proof to me that simple homebrew web games can become more meaningful than whatever's clogging up the Steam backlog. 

Psycho Patrol R

Brendy: Do I "like" Psycho Patrol R? I truly do not know. I think I do. There's so much happening in this mech-piloting, stock-brokering, organ-harvesting, contract-killing, vomit-coloured shooter that I have trouble knowing how I feel about it. I know I find it deeply funny, that the character dialogue from psychologically corrupt Eurocrats, espresso-swilling mercenaries, and corporate serfmasters makes me smile with the intense glee of anyone who has suffered sufficient long-term brain damage from the internet. I know that the eyeball-churning visual style makes me look twice at nearly everything. Colour and texture and shape no longer trustworthy properties in a first-person shooter that - for some reason - is as tough as Rainbow Six circa 1998. I respect this deeply. But do I "like" it? I mean, "yes" I suppose "I do". 

There. We're done. I told you Elden Ring wouldn't be here but you didn't listen, you kept on reading against all sense, hoping for a fruitless reprieve.

But we are a merciful Jank. Like I said up top, please wade into the comments, crack your knuckles, and write a short couple of sentences about the best game we forgot. Don't everyone pick Lord Of The Rings: Gollum, now! I know that's everyone's favourite, but come on, spread out the love.