I was one of the people who actually played the original Alan Wake on the 360 not long after it came out.
I had no idea what it was, it was a library rental when I was around 15, and it changed my life. Remedy’s brilliant approach to storytelling and writing, truly unique third person shooting, often unpredictable and equally terrifying. I was who this game was made for.
And they did it, they really did it. Everything: the sound design, the production design, dialogue with NPCs, the detective work, the world bending, the two egregiously detailed semi-open hub worlds, and a mixed media presentation unlike anything seen since Control (but done in an alarmingly more effective way), the acting work, the overall creative direction, the shift to true survival horror, EVERYTHING works.
The more time I’ve spent away from the game, the more I dwell on how special of a piece this game is; the result of a veteran studio who has never ever been afraid to stick to their guns and problem solve over and over and over again.
Play the first Alan Wake, then play the second. They are stories you will never forget.
Alan Wake II was the best game of 2023.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon feels like a miracle.
A dizzying barrage of missiles, lasers, and scrap metal.
Pulsing rhythms meet vibrant synthesizers, pushing you forward, drowning the fears of a one-man-army. A broken one-man-army, swallowed by debt, forced into the life of an apathetic mercenary, and genetically modified to do just one thing: pilot AC’s. I’d never played an Armored Core game before this, but now?
I’m in it for life.

Armored Core VI takes basically every lesson From Software themselves have learned through ten years away from the franchise, and brings a true to form Armored Core experience to players. It’s not a souls-like, though I’m not sure why people assumed it would be, they woulda just made another one if they wanted to. It’s Armored Core, which means bleak ultra-capitalist commentary experienced from a cold distance, sortie based mission design, world building through role-playing immersion, the works. Missions are usually less than ten minutes, with almost every arena fight taking less than one, at least in my experience, and you’re greeted with a massive variety of missions asking you to accomplish tons of different objectives, many of which involve exploding as many robots as possible. And we’ll get to the action in more detail in a second, but this structure offers players a real sense of role playing that I hadn’t expected.

Being an AC pilot can actually kind of feel like a career: online training modules, form responses from the people you work for, competitive pay to consider, a purposeful disconnect from the people you slaughter and the fact that you’re turning coat the next morning and weakening the folks you just worked for. It’s genuinely compelling stuff if you’re willing to experience it through this very purposeful distance.

I found myself very quickly taking the role, in my physical real world home, of a quiet and surviving mercenary.
Allowing the garage screen to sit open and play chilly ambient music while I sorted through shops, slowly and methodically planned builds, and took smoke breaks between missions.
I quietly made note of the times my handler and others called me a dog; they don’t say it all the time, it’s enough to know they mean it.
You’re an attack dog to them, but you already knew that.
It’s why you’re here, on Rubicon, trying to escape your debts.
The freedom fighters cajole me, “Why fight like a dog for these corporations? You are more than this!”
How would they know? They don’t, can’t.
A desperate plea, and how do I answer?
Gunfire; no choice.

It’s a tense and tantalizing push and pull of what you know you’re doing and the very individual reason for why you’re doing it, often at odds with one another. You hate the corporations too, they put you in this state to begin with, but working for them is the only chance you might get to make it out alive. This is one of Armored Core’s biggest strengths, and I think a ton of people will blow through this game not really recognizing that. I mean I get it, just like the rest of From Soft’s work it’s obtuse and doesn’t explain much and drops you right at the beginning of a potentially world-ending conflict. But if you’re already familiar with this type of storytelling, and are actually willing to see new approaches to narrative in video games, Armored Core VI does an unbelievable job at keeping this illusion intact, and I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Just to be clear, this is hardly the first Armored Core game to do this, in fact the very first one did this to great effect, which is why it’s remained a staple of this series.
It just really works for me man, everything about this world comes together in a way that even when I’m not on missions, I still feel like the low level merc trying to make a name for himself and survive another day.

And as you move farther, and get better, you’re no longer this low level merc. You’re soon taking on the other AC’s you’ve met in the field in the arena, the handlers who you’ve been taking orders from all game. Slowly climbing the internal ranks, one by one, until there’s literally no other mercenary on Rubicon who compares to you, because you’ve destroyed every last one of them. At least virtually, these arena fights are simulated in the lore, but they’re absolutely no joke.
And the game world takes them seriously, ALLMIND, your mercenary AI, begins to almost editorialize the fights as they get harder, and once you’ve climbed all the way up the ranks she thanks you for your dedication and seems almost in awe of your ability.

You and your AC become one, eventually the blur of insane speed, explosions, gunfire, and dense UI all become second nature. You don’t have to check your ammo counts as often, because you’ve internalized the order and timing of the weapons you fire, consistently filling stagger and going direct hit damage. And unlike the Souls series, at least in my experience, this takes so much less time to internalize. Your boosters feel like legs, flying feels like running, and your weaponry becomes your arms. It does that very cool thing called “flow state” where the controller disappears and you don’t have to think about what you want to execute, you just do it.

I could go on for so much longer, (and I will over on my YouTube channel one day soon) but ACVI has a game and production design purity and perfection that I don't think I've seen since beating Persona 5 Royal and Nier: Automata for the first time.

I don't know if it'll be for everyone, but holy shit was it for me.

I spent a few hundred hours with the first Overwatch. It's one of my most played games ever, one of my favorite shooters ever, even with the issues that remained in the original.
Overwatch 2 has become one of the biggest disappointments I've had as a gamer. The change from 6v6 to 5v5 is maybe the only change that really works (aside from healers having passive healing to themselves), the rest is entirely hamstrung by an aggressive free-to-play model.
It locks vital, meta-centric heroes (the stuff OW2 was literally made for) behind an expensive yet lackluster battle pass system, so bad I actually wish we just had loot boxes again (which is its own sin), completely stripped away the one mode (coop) that they'd claimed they'd poured thousands of hours of work into (as the FOCUS for OW2), and made them bite sized missions you have to BUY every time they launch (even if you bought the preorder, which I did), and are entirely lesser than the experience detailed and envisioned when Blizzard went out of their way to set high expectations for them. They outlined all this amazing stuff, and what we got was two heroes and three maps, after seven years. I feel very lied to. I know how game development works, and I know that was very likely not the dev's intention, but it certainly was Activision/Blizzard's.
So incredibly disappointing, a very good team-based shooter is still here, but it's buried underneath poor balancing and all of the other stuff I listed. A real shame.

I mean what else is there to say that hasn't been said to death? It changed how open world games were viewed and conceived, and Tears of the Kingdom has now done the same thing.
My biggest gripes were the Divine Beast Dungeons/Bosses, and that replaying doesn't feel very rewarding (sort of the nature of discovery based gameplay), but otherwise, such a bold step in the right direction of open-ended design the few flaws BOTW does have fall by the wayside in the light of this marvelous, dangerous, and exciting Hyrule adventure.

It feels a little crazy to give a mini golf game a perfect score, but for what it sets out to do and how it relates to VR's beauty as a medium, it's really hard to do better than Walkabout Mini Golf. CONSTANTLY surprising, challenging, gorgeous, and immersive. Each DLC course is $4, super easy to drop when they release a new one every few months, and EVERY RELEASE, they up themselves in terms of level design, new mechanics, and art direction.
Literally don't miss out on this, especially if you've got buddies to golf with. Maybe the greatest mini golf game ever made.

I grew up always wishing I could play these games (Nintendo kid) and watched from afar as people I grew up with gushed about them and how much they meant to them. But by the time I grew up, and never getting the chance to play them in my youth, I'd already become disillusioned with Disney and their properties and practices. I thought I might have missed the boat on this thing that people so ravenously loved it was confusing from the outside.
So I bought the remastered collections, and gave them a real go, and am I glad I did. KHII is not perfect, and there are a couple things I actively dislike about it (looking at you Pooh), but the PACING is damn near perfect. This was the one true time Disney and Square came together to blend these worlds and stories together, information in one world leading to things discovered in another, and each of our Disney friends have an actual part to play in their respective worlds and in the overarching plot.
The combat is like crack, somehow striking this delicate balance of turn-based and action combat that rewards smart play and positioning over mashing X. Mashing X might get you through standard fights, but bosses will make you learn, and the true depth of its combat comes when you learn how to make massive moves and combos all on your own. KHII will kick you sideways a few times, and more than a few times towards the end of the game, but it was never more than I could manage, and even when it felt that way, I felt compelled to continue and master this combat dance.
This is where the series truly kicks into gear, and what spurred me to play every last one. Such a genuine joy to play and beat.

The best this type of combat has ever felt (until Elden Ring), an unforgettably grim and bleak setting, standard enemies and big bosses that will send chills down your spine and gags up your throat, the BRILLIANT rally system, the list of superlatives just goes on and on for Bloodborne. Immensely satisfying to finish, substantially quicker and more aggressive in combat but soundly rooted in smart and deliberate play, I still pray they bring back trick weapons for another Bloodborne or Souls/Ring game; I could sit here listing the things I love forever.
It may be one of the most ruthless of these titles, but if you're like me and wanted to get on the FromSoftware boat but the other games just weren't clicking, this is the one, seriously. Bloodborne teaches you the way to approach the rest of these games: get in there, and get messy. Bloodborne really is one of the all-time greats.

A lovely lovely LOVELY little game with great writing, very satisfying platforming and movement, and tons of little secrets to find, all the while you're playing into the game's theming as you glide around and do things other than the task you've set out to. A very sweet time that doesn't overstay its welcome, but I kinda wish it had! I had a great time, did plenty more than what was necessary and finished within two hours. It is indeed a short hike but, personally, I'd have taken a longer one if I could have.

As good as it's been claimed to be. A fantastic send off to one of gaming's most important and innovative franchise. The first souls-like game I actually finished, and it was the one to secure this series and this dev team as one of my all-time favorites.
It's really very obnoxious when people just tell you to "get gud" and that's how you learn to enjoy the game, and it's just as obnoxious that, reductively, they're totally correct. If you're stuck, if you're frustrated, KEEP GOING. Learn to walk confidently into fights, learn to roll like your life depends on it (because it does), and keep your cool. Some of the most memorable fights and level designs of any game I've ever played. Memorable, throttling, enthralling, and wholly satisfying to finish; you really feel as though you've earned it.

I used to think this was the best Zelda and then I grew up and learned about game design. In a lot of ways Skyward Sword feels like anti-Nintendo design, like it was made by a third party.
Obviously the attention to detail is there: the environments are gorgeous (especially on the Wii), the score is truly amazing, some of the items you get are quite unique and fun to use.
But at almost every other step the developers feel the need to drag you by the hand: through story beats, through gameplay features, by showing you your bag EVERY TIME you pick something up, I don't even need to mention Fi. It's the game in this series that felt the most like a tour rather than an adventure. Absolutely no mystery, everything is overexplained, padding and filler is apparent, some of the weakest bosses and most annoying enemies in the whole series. Some of the puzzles in these dungeons, and the dungeons themselves, are genuinely great, but the rest is such a formidable slog that I just can't go back.