This year was a bit weird for me as far as games go. I didn’t get a ton of gaming in during the first half of the year for reasons I won’t go into here, but I did manage to get quite a few games played by the end. Let’s talk about some of them.

As always, this post won’t just touch on games that came out this year. More and more as time goes on, I move away from rushing to play games right on launch day, and I find I enjoy games far more by playing them on my schedule.

Let’s dive in!

Donkey Kong 64 Randomizer

Does this count? Of course it does. This isn’t my first randomizer, but it’s definitely my favourite. For years, the discussion around DK64 is “this game is bad” and I’d let myself fall into that a bit, despite still loving it myself. But the reality behind the game is that it’s a good N64 game with some flaws that make it a bit of a drag to get all the way through. Some simple mods like Tag Anywhere go a long way in fixing the core issues with the game.

But the randomizer goes well beyond fixes. Like many randomizers, playing this tests your knowledge of the base game by moving stuff all over the place and you basically just have to look everywhere to find what you need to progress. The DK64 randomizer is really well done because there’s a lot of variety in the extent to which you randomize your game. If you’d like a fairly vanilla experience with some slight adjustments, you can do that. If you’d like to go totally wild and randomize everything, you might find a shop swapped for another shop, a single watermelon piece where there was once a Golden Banana, and a whole entire Kong to rescue inside of a random crate in the middle of a level. It gets wild and has caught me by surprise many times. On top of that, the community has worked to provide a long list of songs from other video games adapted to the DK64 soundfont that you can have swapped in to replace the game’s soundtrack, which makes every trip through the randomizer even more varied and interesting.

I have loved my time with the DK64 randomizer. It’s reignited my love for a game that deserved better, and I look forward to playing more of it regularly.

Night in the Woods

This is one I didn’t have on my radar for a very long time for whatever reason. But I decided to play it this year, and it’s an incredible game. Everything here is in service of the story being told, and it’s done in such a unique, enthralling way. The dialogue in this game is so particularly quirky that I’ve not really seen much else like it. It’s silly in the best ways, had me chuckling throughout, and even had me emotional at several points during the story. There’s not much else like it.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

I’m really, really, really late to this one. But it’s never too late to discover a great game, and this is one of those times. I’ve played Spider-Man for PS4, though, and you can see how this game influenced that (and many others). Arkham Asylum does cool stuff with stealth where you basically need to be stealthy. Often this is frustrating in games, but being as you’re playing as Batman, you basically need to play the role and actually be Batman, not a clumsy brute smashing your way through everything. On top of that, there are some good combat mechanics and detective opportunities that really make you, ahem, feel like Batman.

It’s worth calling out that I did feel the Bane boss design got reused way too many times throughout the game, so it felt like I was doing the same battle over and over again. I get why that happens, but it was definitely repetitive. That aside, I’m glad to have finally made my way through this game. It’s excellent, and has me excited to play Arkham City at some point in the future.

Astro Bot

There’s not a lot that I can say about this one that hasn’t already been said. Astro Bot is the best game of the year, and just a stellar 3D platformer. The little details in the level design alongside all of the nostalgic PlayStation characters and references make for a joyful masterpiece of 3D platforming fun.

Balatro

Here’s another one that’s been talked about enough by everyone else on the internet. Balatro is super clever in how it takes the basis of poker hands and builds another game on top of that, totally devoid of any other connection to any card game you’ve played before. Personally, I don’t stick to roguelikes most of the time, so I didn’t expect to get hooked here. I played Balatro once on Steam, saw the appeal immediately, but didn’t go back for another run.

That is, until it dropped on Apple Arcade. I don’t play a lot of mobile games, but a game like this is perfectly suited to the platform. You can leave the game anytime and resume later as if nothing happened. And runs themselves don’t have to run particularly long either (especially if you set the gameplay to max speed like I have). It’s a really easy game to pick up, do a run, and go about your day, and that’s what’s kept me playing.

Besides the platform, the gameplay in Balatro is really enticing for a game that starts with poker hands. The variety in Jokers you can use that change up your run make for some really interesting strategies and allow for some creative builds that make each new run different from the last. Balatro is a brilliantly-designed game, and I recommend anyone give it a try.

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That’s all I’m highlighting for this year. I originally found myself with a larger list, but it was ultimately me listing almost every game I’d played throughout the year, and I don’t think there’s much point to that. You can just check my Backloggd if you want to see what I’ve played this year. As for 2025, I suspect we’ll be seeing the Nintendo Switch successor finally, so we’ll see what that brings!