The only one that really sticks out is Starfield. Most other games I played I knew what I was getting into. For some reason Starfield surprised me, probably because it was on Gamepass (so effectively free) and because I trusted Bethesda. Oh well.

Considering the number of great games this year, that's not too bad.

I had a really solid year, all things considered:

• ⭐ Hi-Fi Rush -- Love it, hands down. This game's like if Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and DMC got into a fist fight and then that fist fight had a baby with Jack Black
• ⭐ Pentiment -- I'm still playing through this one but I can already tell it's a new favorite. Major Return of the Obra Dinn vibes
• ⭕ Against the Storm -- This game innovates on the citybuilder genre so hard and I can't get enough of it. If you love a challenge and hate the late-game, this is THE ONE
• ⭕ Psychonauts 2 -- Fun and bursting with creativity... but I had to set it down after a certain point because I stopped enjoying the gameplay loop. Can't put my finger on why...
• ⭕ Peglin -- Yes, Peglin. The Peggle Roguelite. I like it and you would too if you gave it a chance. It's not a forever roguelite, but I guarantee you'll have a blast with it for 5-10 hours
• ❌ Deep Rock Galactic -- I bounced off of this one. The game has so much charm... but I just couldn't click with it. I think co-op games just may not be for me

Honorable Mention: TF2 -- Definitely not a "new" game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so... this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation -- I thought I'd grown to hate FPS games -- as it turns out, what I'd actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee... abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse

I gave into peer pressure earlier this year and tried League.

God that shit was boring.

One: Starfield.

Not much I can say about it that hasn't already been said, it was just so bland.

I have PlayStation Plus. Most of what I play are stinkers.

• Intraveneous. Game got a lot of love and as a huge stealth fan I was really into the idea. Got it and hated every second of it. It's tedious and punishing even by stealth game standards and the story wasn't great either. Mechanics were poorly explained and it felt like the keymapping was made by a person who had never played a keyboard game before. ugh. I was really disappointed too because it was marketed as a stealth game that didn't punish you for failing stealth which is true but the issue is that it's so damn easy to fail stealth that you might as well just go in guns blazing anyway. It wasn't like MGSV where both options make sense depending on the circumstance. It was more like "stealth is nigh impossible so we made guns-blazing a fail safe for people who aren't nuts at this game"

• Atomic Heart. Yes I bought this game and I am ashamed of it. No it wasn't for the robot porn. I thought it looked like an interesting Bioshock / Wolfenstein mashup and both of those are my favorites. Game was just... slow. Combat, stealth, everything felt like you were moving through syrup. The character's english voice acting is also horrifically cringe. Like, just awful in every sense. Made me hate the MC more than the villains.

• Dying Light 2. I loved the first so I was seriously disappointed by this. Main issue was really with the movement. Gave me motion sickness dozens of times with how the camera is set up, and I was expecting something like Mirror's Edge (Catalyst) but it felt just awfully floaty. The game also did... fuck all... in terms of explaining what you... do? so I just was super confused. Uninstalled after like 10 hours in frustration.

• Ghostrunner. Played this in December of 2022 but I wanted to add it in as a hot take. Overall great but the boss fights are pretty terribly designed after the first one and pretty much ruined the game for me. Plus there's useless parkour sections that added nothing. Surprisingly little time spent being a ninja badass for a cyberpunk ninja badass game.

If you're talking video (not board) games, I think most the games I played were kind of a mix of good and bad. I mean they usually start out pretty well but then end up being repetitive and boring. If I ever have to play another farm sim where I'm required to craft things in some convoluted way that makes no sense, I'll chuck my game system out the nearest window. Why does "Stardew Valley" get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all? OK yes I play mostly casual games, but the real "gems" are few and far between. Still waiting for another good sim that isn't more work than it is fun.

I can't actually think of anything off the top of my head. After I stopped buying AAA titles from the obvious scummy companies, pretty much everything has been at least as good as expected.

Not "bad" but disappointing: No Man's Sky. There's a lot to be liked here but as someone who has played Elite Dangerous everything is just so incredibly dumbed down.

Fighting is trivially easy, just hold S, shoot and grab a snack while doing it.

There's absolutely no consequences for anything. It doesn't matter how much fuel I have because I can just find new fuel anywhere or teleport somewhere completely different. Doesn't matter where I log out because the game will just throw me to the same system as my coop partner anyway.

Doesn't matter if the authorities want me, just fly into a station and all is forgotten. Got contraband? Just tell them to get lost and fly away casually. No bounty on my head, no nothing.

Don't get me wrong, Elite is definitely way too hardcore for casual play but at the same time the only thing No Man's Sky has done is make me want to play Elite again.

Starfield was pretty much it for me.

I wanted to like it, but there is just nothing to like about it aside from the gun design and the spaceship builder.

I played a lot of great games this year, but also many that didn't click with me.

There's a huge spikes of games that I played this year, because I decided to start tackling my backlog by streaming them, these include games I've bought on sale, and those that are on PS+ Extre.

I don't think I played any truly bad games, but I do have a list of games that I bounced off of for one reason or another. Maybe I ran out of steam to play them, maybe life got in the way and I couldn't come back to it, or I just didn't want to "git gud" with the limited time I have. I basically deemed them not worth my time when I did manage to sink a ton of hours into Spider-Man, Cyberpunk, and Talos Principle.

So that abandoned graveyard consists of...

• Tunic - I hit a wall at one of the bosses and just couldn't progress. Ran out of juice unfortunately.
• Mr. Sun's Hatbox - Such a weird quirky game. Didn't get close to beating it but I got enough out of it and called it quits.
• Hunt: Showdown - This one was a bummer. It's been on my "need to try" list. I tried it, solo, and died right away. I could tell it was one of those games that needed a time investment to make it work and I just don't have it in me.
• Cult of the Lamb - Something about the roguelike aspect of it didn't mesh with me, which is weird because I feel like that's really become a genre I like.
• Overwatch 2 - I played poorly as Lifeweaver, was griefed in chat, and quit :)

Zero. The only new games I purchased this year were BG3 and Lethal Company, both of which are goated for completely different reasons.

Beyond that I've just been sticking to games I've been playing for years. No stinkers there, probably.

We finally got around to playing Gotham Knights this year since it was a few bucks on sale for a coop adventure. Certified stinker for sure.

For me it'd be Starfield and Diablo 4. I do have faith that Blizzard will turn the ship around and reel me back in to D4 later down the line. I have zero hope for Starfield ever being good, though. It is a fundamentally broken game I have no hope Bethesda will be able to fix, ever.

I personally really disliked the latest Far cry. Graphics where nice, story was ok-ish but the outlandish aspects of the gameplay (supremo's.. pets..) made it a snoozefest without any challenge. Setting the enemies to bulletsponge made it even more unbearable. I'll be waiting for the bargain bin for the next installment.

Starfield, Diablo 4, and Tears of the Kingdom for me.

Starfield was a hard pass at 30FPS on my Series X. But also, the gameplay and story just didn’t interest me at all.

Diablo 4 was monotonous. Grinding for hours to get a percentage of a percentage increase on gear was not fun. I’ve played every other Diablo game along with numerous other action RPGs of that style, but D4 is a snorefest. It’s frustrating being chain stunned by all the crowd control, it’s frustrating that a lot of enemies have a lot of health for no reason, and it’s bland when you face the same few bosses over and over again. It wasn’t so bad in the other Diablo games because you could just nuke the bosses, but in D4 each one is a straight up chore to kill.

Tears of the Kingdom… it’s a fun action adventure game, but if it has The Legend of Zelda on it, it needs to be held to The Legend of Zelda standards. And it, just like Breath of the Wild, is an awful Zelda game. If it didn’t have LoZ on it, I’d probably rate it much higher.

Not many. The obligatory 50% of all mobile games that I played for 5 minutes and went "I hate this", obviously. But PC games? Hmmm. Probably "Lost Ember", I guess. What really puzzles me about this is I played "Spirit of the North" and was utterly in love with it, to the point that it's in my top 5, and "Lost Ember" is very similar in many respects. I ought to have loved it, and I cannot put my finger on what I didn't like about it. I just didn't like it.

The only game that was kinda a bummer was Tears of the kingdom. The sky world was just copy/pastes with nothing but some robots. I wanted the hot bird people up there or something.

The underground was dead and had a few POIs but was basically just those same annoying ninjas from the first game who disguise themselves as civilians. I liked the story and characters in botw2 better. The map was largely unchanged from the first game. Some of the missions were better. Gannon actually getting a plot was cool. The enemies were better this go around. The gmod bits were cool, but caused the game to run like shit. The game also ran at like, 22 fps the entire time anyways. The shrines were as meh as the first game, which were already so dull I'd look up guides just to get more hearts/stamina.

...it should have been a $25 DLC instead of a $70 game.

It was a solid 4.5/10 for me, mostly just on the amount of rehashed stuff for a $70 game, which should have blown my balls off for waiting six years and $70 later. I hope the next Zelda game is more like Twilight Princess.

I got a lot of games with AMD hardware or other give aways, games I normally would not buy anyway. Imo Forspoken, Starfield, Redfall, Dead Island 2, Callisto protocol, AC Mirage and Harry Potter I did not like.

Glad there have been a lot of games I did enjoy recently, Dave the Diver, my time at Sandrock, Thalos Principle 2, Stray. I did like AAA Jedi Survivor although some technical glitches occurred.

Dunno if I'd call it a stinker, but my excitement for Starfield waned very quickly as I played. 20 hours in, it was still fun. 30-40 hours, I'm like, eh. Past about 60 hours I was completely disillusioned with it. The perk system is a nightmare, leveling up gets really difficult really quickly. Making money (especially after they hid all the vendor chests), getting materials, etc. is a tedious slog. The UI/UX for ship building and settlement building is painful. Settlement building in general is a pointless waste of time and takes way too long to get the perks enough to make it even remotely worthwhile.

It also doesn't help that there's not a native version for the Xbox One, and Cloud Play is miserable. Constant disconnects, jitters, long load times, long wait times.

SPOILER BITS

The main quest is completely pointless. It has no effect on anything. Outside of Constellation and the other Starborn, no one even knows anything is happening. Your choices don't have any impact on anything. Side with the Hunter? Side with the Emissary? Outside of the number of dupes you fight at the end, it literally doesn't matter. And getting to the end does absolutely nothing. Now you have to start over with a shittier ship you can't upgrade, some armor that's mostly fine, and literally nothing else. Nothing's different. Sure, after enough times through, silly things start happening at Constellation. But what else? It's not worth it.

The faction quests are fun, but then again, have basically no bearing on anything.

The companions are disappointing: ostensibly you have two lovable rogues, a religious zealot, and the most Lawful Good character who will judge you for even the slightest non-Squeaky Clean choices you make, though they all end up being basically the same.

Otherwise, you just keep running the treadmill: get all 10 upgrades to your Space Shouts, ship, and armor? And then what? Just keep going. Do it again. And again. And you still don't have enough perk points.

On second thought, maybe I would call it a stinker. So fucking disappointing. It had so much potential.

I played a few games that were just really mediocre.

• Warhammer 40k: Inquisitor was a super boring ARPG and I couldn't put in more than a few hours. The levels were super short and just corridors.
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker started out ok, but was just far too long, terribly paced, and the last third was a complete slog. This was probably the one I'd call a "stinker" the most.
• Crisis Core Remake (FF7 spin off) had a boring story and lame characters. The bulk of the "content" were 300 side missions that were usually less than five minutes long in one of like six stages. I picked it up after I enjoyed the FF7 Remake far more than I thought, but this game adds nothing to the overall story. To be fair to the game though, I did complete all 300 side stories, because from time to time I like a mindless grind.
• I'm continuing my four-year-old save of Octopath Traveler, where I got a third or so in. I dunno if it's the Steam Deck, but there's just tons of aliasing, shifting sprites and flickering, it just looks bad, and the detailed enemy sprites were the only thing I really liked about the game in the first place. Combat is also a slog at times, so I don't know if I have it in me to finish the game.

I picked up Red Steel on the Wii for £1. It has not aged well.