Fez is my Game Of The Year. It's official. Fez was fucking wonderful. I fucking love everything about Fez. I love how it controls. I love how it looks. I love how its all about exploration both of a map and of a world. I love the little touches like wildlife or furniture. I love the way when the sun set the sky would turn pink. I loved the way basic platforming and perspective puzzles worked and were built upon. I loved the deeper mysteries of Fez and solving them collectively. I loved the communal nature of it. I loved it when I would discover an area that blew my mind which happened time and time again right up until the very end. Most of all I love how personal it all was. It is a magical and diverse world to explore filled with magical and diverse things to discover and I loved every minute of it.

Sound Shapes is amazing. It's just brilliant. I love Sound Shapes. The way that it ties level progression with musical progression, collectibles with notes, and mechanics with musical cues is astoundingly cool. It makes you feel more involved with the music as it rises and swells over the course of a level, and it makes everything feel connected in a way that's hard to describe. In the game Levels are called Songs and eventually you realize it's perfectly apt to call them that. Beyond the way the game works on the whole the game is remarkable content wise. Each of the albums feels completely different, each song within each album feels different from its counterparts, and the ability to make your own songs means there will lot of songs which often feel like nothing else in the game such as the 4 Songs I made which I love deeply. It's a very engaging and meaningful game with some of the most memorable stages of the year and I loved every minute of it.

Jesus Christ, this came out of nowhere for me fast. I don't even usually play this sort of game. This is the first graphic novel dating sim I've played and goddamn did I get a lot out of it. It's profound in many ways. Its prose is well written and evocative, its setting and set up brilliant and allows many things to come together perfectly, its characters are interestingly flawed and terribly endearing, and the directions the plot goes in are extremely well done and are very emotionally involving. A lot of it hits home hard. Real hard. This is a fantastic play/read and I'm extremely glad I downloaded it on a whim.

I did not like Borderlands 1. The plot was shit, the gameplay substandard and all the guns felt the same. In Borderlands 2 the plot is still shit but the other two points of contention have improved so much that it makes the game one of the best I've played this year. These changes make the gameplay more engaging to carry out and the guns are more fun to collect and try out as it's often immediately apparent how they differ from your other guns. Not that it works it becomes an addictive cycle of getting cooler and cooler guns to use to fight engaging gun fights with. Now that both sides of that work it's just a compelling experience top to bottom.

Syndicate is fucking awesome. You really should've played it. I's a really solid shooter with a really cool core mechanic that's integrated into the level design, enemy design, weapon design, and coop design perfectly. It's done so well it feels perfectly like a perfectly natural way to interact with everything every time I play it. It feels perfectly natural to hack cover away, hack grenades away, hack UAVs, hack heavy armor away, hack weapons, hack your partners to heal them, etcetera, etcetera. It just feels right and adds so much to what would already be a fantastic shooter. You should buy it right now.

Diablo III is a game I played for 2 weeks obsessively than stopped playing. That said where some would say that as a negative I say it as a positive as this was the first Diablo-type game I actually dug. It's just really really fun and engaging mechanically and a lot of that is due to the changes they made specifically for Diablo 3. The way unlocking abilities works is fucking brilliant and makes experimentation possible. The way loot splits up is perfect and removes the downside to coop. There are a lot of smart people working at Bioware and, if you ask me, Diablo 3 is another time where they've just hit it out of the park.

The first Telltale game in years that you actually looked forward to playing every month. That alone is a noteworthy achievement as adventure games go but for Walking Dead it's just the beginning. In replacing the conventional puzzle with emotional puzzles were there are no right answers made its world far more engaging than previously thought possible as it gave you the feeling of adjacency for the first time in an adventure game. It made you think everything you did count which made you care. And then when the inevitable death happened you were always sad either because you didn't get to know the deceased well enough or you knew them all too well. It's amazing an adventure game can make you feel sad, guilty, happy, angry, or afraid. It's a landmark game.

Oh my god, Hotline Miami. What can you say about Hotline Miami? Its combat mechanics are superb and make playing the game super tense while you execute your plan and super satisfying when you succeed. Its story, writing, atmosphere, tone, and meanings are incredibly well executed and insightful. Its music is superb, its look incredible, its replay value high. It's just fucking wonderful on every level.

There are problems with Dishonored. A lot of them come down to the characters and the writing. Ultimately they all sort of fall flat. However at the end of the day I really enjoyed it not just once, not just twice, but a total of seven times through. They really succeeded in making a really really mechanically engaging stealth/action game with extremely open levels which nail player agency. It's just a really immersible and engaging stealth action game that I got a ton out of.

You know I understand a lot of criticism with Halo 4 and agree with most of it. Yeah the story is pretty poorly contextualized. Yeah I really wish they went crazier with it. I know these things but, from my perspective as someone who never played a Halo before, it was just a ton of fun. I even played a ton of the multiplayer which surprised me as I figured it would be no fun without years of experience. I even bought map DLC. In that way it was everything I thought it would be for me and then some and I'm extremely happy I bought in.