It’s time for the only Games of the Year awards that matter!
… Just kidding, no GotY awards matter. But I like doing them (which does, in fact, make this more relevant than the VGAs), so here we go.

I am choosing 5 winners, and then one TOP GAME OF THE YEAR winner, just to attempt at variety, and then posting all my honorable mentions which are games I liked but that weren’t GotY material. This is obviously going to be based on games I played myself (which is still over 50 games, even though I reviewed very few of those). So if there’s a game you liked and it doesn’t appear as one of my winners or honorable mentions… it’s because I didn’t play it. And I probably didn’t play it because it was obviously bad.

As far as notable games I skipped one that aren’t bad (or probably aren’t bad), there’s still a few of those. I skipped on both Like a Dragon games, Baldur’s Gate 3 (I will get it at some point), Persona 5 Tactica, Remnant 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Lies of P, Dave the Diver and probably a bunch of other games that were pretty popular and probably-good. Also didn’t play FF16 which… I’ve not been convinced it’s good, but I’m waiting for the PC version so I will review it when I do play it.

And there’s a few obviously bad games I didn’t touch, like Alan Wake 2, Starfield, Redfall and Diablo 4 (I played the beta, it was not good, so I skipped on the full game). And of course there’s some bad games I did play, like Forspoken and Sonic Superstars… or that were fairly subpar like Spongebob Cosmic Shake.

As a general rule, remakes and remasters will not make the list unless they’re substantially different from the original, but some might make it into the honorable mentions.

Anyways, time to rant quickly, then go through the winners and stuff. LET’S GO!

Okay so Sonic wasn’t good (see previous review), but Mario, unlike Sonic, has an extremely solid track record of quality up to now (as far as mainline 2D and 3D games go), and the trailers for this were pretty darn solid (I only watched the reveal trailer, but people were hyped for all the following ones too). These are 2 franchises on basically opposite ends of the quality spectrum, and it’s pretty interesting that these bitter rivals saw a release of similar styles of games in the same week.

So really this is just pure hype and, after release, very good critical reception as well, moreso than Sonic. I’ll try not to make too many comparisons in the review itself, but this whole point of reviewing both of these (especially when my review output has been low recently) is to compare them.

So let’s just go with it right now, not much else to say in the intro!

Awawa?

Awawawawawawawawa!

Anyways, yeah, October games. September had a few posts because… stuff happened. But still haven’t gotten really any reviews out. I’ve been playing stuff, but I don’t feel like I have much to say about them. Maybe I’ll make a post of micro-reviews or something, I dunno.

So here I’m highlighting: 18 multiplats, 4 Switch games and 1 PS5 game that will come out to PC later. There’s just 1 “for sure” game for me this time, a few maybes though. I actually skipped on including a bunch of stuff because it was so obviously shitty (like that awful VR Ghostbusters game).

Let’s go I guess!

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, some more niche stuff I may notice, and such. Not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. And of course, I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.