Twentieth GOTW finished for 2024. Excellent arena brawler with great music, varied characters, interesting "powered" forms, and beautiful graphics. Constantly running around to grab the power stones, while using the environment for attack variations and grabbing items and furniture to use/chuck at your opponent, felt chaotic and fun. Didn't really feel all that great to actually get up in an opponents face for pure fighting, but that's a small knock and not the recommended way to play. Honestly just had a blast with this one!

Nineteenth GOTW finished for 2024. So the controls/physics are very sensitive, touching a wall (that you're not supposed to drive on, yes you can drive on the walls), another racer, or honestly just blinking too hard can send you spinning out all over the place. The general speed of the races being quite fast does not help this fact. Despite that, this was still a pretty fun racing game that doesn't take up too much of your time. You can collect weapon/power ups ala Mario Kart (including what is literally this game's version of a blue shell) and the destructible environments and said drivable walls make for some very fun gameplay moments. Wish it controlled better, but overall I had fun!

Third GOTM finished for May 2024. I thought the boss designs and fights were really interesting, and the sound design was excellent. Pretty much every other aspect of this game was "meh" at best, and annoying at worst. A 3D Metroidvania-style game doesn't really translate all that well when a lot of the environments look the same and everything is drenched in murky browns and grays. This is further compounded by a teleportation system that relies entirely on symbols, so heaven help you if you forget which one goes where. Raziel's movement is also a little odd, in that there's an "acceleration" from standing still to actually running/moving that kept throwing me off, especially in a game where the developers loved to throw in small platforms. There were some neat ideas here, just don't think they were executed all that well.