somnambulance

@Oram77 Rebirth is arguably Game of the Generation for me so far. It was a travesty it basically got NOTHING. That said, I also loved Astro Bot. Last year was sort of weak altogether, but it had those two and Balatro

I’m going to be playing move furniture back into my living room and my daughter’s room after finishing painting and installing floors. I threw my sofa away, so when I do hook my consoles back up… I have nowhere to sit. I will be playing “search for a new sofa” after that. I’d like to say I’ll be settling down to play Yotei, but I don’t quite know if I’ll have time. All I can guarantee is that, in the absence of having my console games to play while I move stuff, Balatro on my phone will say hi.

@Fishmasterflex96 They also gave Resident Evil Village GotY over Ratchet and Clank and Returnal. It’s not really a bias. Pushsquare is unique. All of the contributors have their own voice. While I know some of them loved BG3, for instance, others didn’t click with it, and the site was pretty honest about that. I think that’s great that they don’t just give GotY to whoever is trendiest game on the block, even when they get flack about it. Expedition 33 may yet still win here, but I wouldn’t say it’s a certainty. It seems we’re about to get some really diverse staff lists soon.

If it’s priced right, I think I might buy into the Steam Machine. I say this as someone that hasn’t been a PC gamer since the Sims 2 came out. Say what you will, but I’ve always liked to support all the platforms, and Xbox’s cascade into third party publisher has been negative for PlayStation in being competitive. It’s been a couple years that Xbox has struggled, but the more might PlayStation has had, arguably the more complacent they’ve been. I’ve been on PlayStation consoles for decades now and there’s only one first party game that I’m looking forward to. It just feels off in the console space right now and there needs to be a shake-up.

@Oram77 I sort of hope literally anything else wins GotY at this point. If CO: E33 wins, which I suspect it will, it will be the most overrated game I’ve ever seen win in my 3+ decades of gaming! 😵‍💫

I think the competition will be more interesting for the Pushsquare staff since it sort of feels like there’s potentially a more diverse opinion on the game with staff. We’ve seen things like Spider Man 2 beating Baldur’s Gate 3. Anything is possible on Pushsquare!

I’ll be shocked if Clair Obscur isn’t literally everywhere on the list. Can’t wait for 2026, so the GotY discussion can go to other games. Never been so burned out over discussion on a single game in a year.

Sounds like a solid pick to me

The comments section here is going to be so positive.

It’s sort of tone deaf to say something like this. Unless the team is hoping for an “all press is good press” approach.

@Splash_Woman Needs to be longer than that. Kojima needs to top himself. I’ll never forget the day I was late for work because I beat Metal Gear Solid 4. I genuinely thought waking up 2 hours early would be enough to complete the last chunk of the game. I was wrong.

Sounds like Konami listened to the fans here. While I’ve still not gotten around to F, a lot of my friends played it, gave reviews all over the place, but literally said that most of the issues noted in this update were problems with the game

I’ll bet a lot of holiday season parents don’t know Fortnite is free, just that their kids like it.

Hopefully we see some from the Guerilla Horizon game soon enough. I wasn’t a huge fan of HFW for the story (mostly because of the twist after twist after twist approach they used towards the end) or quest structure, but the series has gameplay down and it’s such a unique world that I’d like to play more. A more open, multiplayer format might honestly be a preferable way for the series to move forward for me.

Looks interesting, but it would be a huge miss to not have this one on PS5. Much like Ratchet and Clank, I’d try it, even if it isn’t exactly the direction I’d like Sony to be taking. I think it’s becoming obvious that Sony’s with Xbox in the fight against TikTok rather than in a fight for console supremacy.

Looks better than Wolverine to me (and better than yesterday’s State of Play too)!

I’m hoping Intergalactic is solid. I know Sony’s had some solid games this generation, but things haven’t felt… on? I don’t know. There’s been something off about this generation. Hopefully that smooths out soon. Right now, there’s nothing first party that interests me at all outside Intergalactic. And not much third party either.

The show was well produced, but I can’t say I’ll be buying a single game that was featured. Pokopia got a release date today for Switch 2 and that was bigger news to me than the entire showcase combined. The Katamari dlc might have been the highlight for me? I might actually get Octopath too. Was intimidated by the reports that it’d be 100+ hours, but 2026 is looking like a year that could permit a game like that as things currently stand.

At this point, I sort of expect State of Plays to be sort of fluff nowadays. It sort of feels like Sony is playing second fiddle to Nintendo and even Geoff Keighley with what they have to announce. It baffles me as to why they did this showcase since I’m expecting this one will generate negative press.

As I play the game more, I think I like Atsu more as a character, but think Jin has a more nuanced internal conflict.

Given that it didn’t have a release date yet and we’re halfway through November, I, for one, am shocked and didn’t see a delay coming.

It’s a good game. It’s good to hear that a good game is selling well. So often we hear about disappointing sales from other good games, so honestly it’s refreshing to see this. GoY won’t be my GotY this year, but it’s one of those games where, if it influences what will be the mainstream open world games of the future, I’m totally fine with that. Personally, I like it better than Spider Man 2, Ragnarok, and Forbidden West, as far as this generation of sequels is concerned.

This is the only time Activision has been publicly honest in admitting that each new CoD game is basically next in a series of chunky DLCs

I work in a relevant industry and would gladly sign up to have staff beta test

If anything, it’s overrated.

If this and Pragmata get release dates…

Wasn’t there also supposed to be a demo for this one two years ago too though? Did Phantom Blade Executioners ever even come out?

I’m hoping for something with a January release perhaps, so I can get myself a birthday present? Can that be the Pragmata release date? Please?

I’d honestly be happy to have one surprise game that lights me up too, but I’m not expecting it. Anyone expecting FF7 Part 3 is probably going to be disappointed. Is it just me or does it feel like the release slate is weirdly blank for most of next year still?

@Medic_alert Exactly. It felt like it was designed for something to happen after the campaign, but then it didn’t. All that we’ve found out after the fact or during development of Infinite (such as the fact that Monster was allegedly making multiplayer dlc skins for multiplayer) sort of goes to show that it doesn’t seem 343 had a proper vision for Infinite. It doesn’t help that, even after the delay, forge and co-op weren’t included. I mean, those are key features of the Halo experience! I still like Infinite, but it does feel like it deserved more from either 343 and/or Microsoft to have made it a fully complete experience. I mean, it felt like a proof of concept to a concept that never came to fruition. Sorry if I’m being confusing. Infinite elicits confusion lol

@Medic_alert See, I really enjoyed it too, and felt like it was doing something unique in potentially being a live service single player game in some respects. The ending especially felt like 343 was going to add new content to the game following its release. When I found out that there was never any DLC planned for Infinite, my opinion sort of changed a little bit on the experience. It made me feel like it was actually incomplete and sort of incoherent in parts because that’s what it was, not because 343 intended on fleshing it out. The gameplay and open world was loads of fun though…

Maybe I’ll finally go back to Yotei or start with Arc Raiders? The Kirby demo is this weekend too, so I’ll try to do that. I haven’t played much of anything this week, so I’d like to play something.

Tsushima’s a better story with more nuance and probably deeper themes. I mean, Jin is his own main antagonist, depending on how you look at things. It’s a really interesting conflict, honestly, whereas Yotei’s a bit more on the nose.

Gameplay wise, though, Yotei takes the cake. It’s a lot more varied than the first game and still just as fluid.

That said though, I still think Tsushima’s also superior in world building and quest structure. Yotei is perhaps too loose with those concepts, even if the art direction’s improved… and the soundtrack in Yotei is fantastic. That said though, Yotei doesn’t have the uniqueness Tsushima had when it launched either.

All in all, I would say Tsushima’s the clear winner overall.

I’ve only played the tutorial, so I can’t really say what I’d rate it yet, but that tutorial felt really special, honestly. I have been itching to go back and play it, but I’ve not played much of anything since Halloween due to this other game called Life that I’m dealing with.

@Porco I’m a retro-head too. Probably why, even to this day, I mostly prefer 2D platformers as my genre of choice. I like other genres a lot, but I come back to those and metroidvanias probably more than anything else, and then the cinematic action adventures as the next genre. I was in high school during the PS2 era too, so that may be why I have more nostalgia for the generation immediately before and immediately after.

And yes, I played a lot of jrpgs, but my playtime with those genres peaked maybe 20 years ago, so my nostalgia for that genre is definitely more geared to SNES and PS1. To put my taste in a nutshell, I’m the guy that’s thankful Final Fantasy has gone all Devil May Cry with combat. I get where people could have a different opinion for sure.

Part of my opinion does come from a gaming session I had at my parents’ house earlier in the year as well though too. My parents have my old PS2. We hooked it up and just went and played some of the old games for fun, and I think my wife, my kids, and my siblings and I sort of felt like the games were a little uneven nowadays. We didn’t boot MGS2 or FFX, of course. Those ones hold up. PS2 era games have a charm, but they feel best in remembrance than in practice for me. But it’s the same for original Xbox, Dreamcast, and GameCube for me. That era is just an era that feels awkward to me now.

I hope we see other games from Insomniac in the future. I get that lots of people love Marvel, but I don’t. I love Ratchet and Clank instead. It’s one of those formative Sony franchises for me.

I want Insomniac to make the games they want to make, of course, but I dunno, I miss being excited for their games. The Marvel stuff just isn’t for me.

@Porco Y’see, I feel PS3 landed that experimental in the right ways vibe far better. I was a frequent renter in the PS2 era and owned 50-ish games on the console. I could definitely make a top 100 games list for PS2 and it wouldn’t include everything I’ve played. It’s not that I haven’t scratched the surface, it’s more that I’m less nostalgic on the era, I think. Most of the games aged like milk a little bit. The textures and visuals tend to be muddy and the gameplay wasn’t yet at a place where developers had figured out what makes the most sense. This is just my feelings though and I totally get how someone else may feel different. It’s not that it’s a bad console, just that it wasn’t a hit machine for me. It’s definitely the console I’d played the most bad to ok tier titles on.

Personally, I feel the PS4 era was Sony’s best, but I’m also firmly in the “I prefer Sony’s cinematic third person games” demographic.

PS4 > PS3 > PS1 = PS2 > PS5 for me. I’d say overall PS5 has had more games id call essential than PS2, but the overall output is worse.

Once Upon a Katamari for me. Clearly Yotei will win this one, and I like that one too, but I just love me some Katamari. I’ve yet to finish Yotei, but I’m like halfway through it.

I’ll also say that I’ve not played Arc Raiders enough to have an opinion of it, so who knows? That one might usurp it down the line… or not? I don’t have an opinion outside of the fact that the tutorial felt nice to play.

Fantastic game, this one. It feels like a true sequel to We Heart Katamari.

@RoomWithaMoose When I think about PS2 games that really stick with me, it’s Ico/Shadow, Katamari, Final Fantasy, and Ratchet and Clank. Probably Tony Hawk too. There’s other good games, sure, but the games were so clunky and a lot of them are borderline unplayable. And even the ones that are playable, there’s very few 10/10s on the console. For the hundreds of games on the console, it’s probably less than 10.

I am getting to the point where I’ll only buy a remaster if I really love the game now. I’d greatly prefer remakes, though I’d even more greatly prefer new games. A remake has to feel different for me to really like it, I guess. I love the FF7 games and the REmakes, for sure.

But, man, Oblivion was so boring this year because it was exactly the same game with a new coat of paint. That said, I’m also torn about MGS Delta, if I’m being honest. Love MGS 3, but it felt like I’ve done it to death already too. It was too close to the source material and safe.

In this economy, if Nintendo did a price drop before the holidays, that’d be their best bet for a final hoorah to get the Switch 1 over the wall. I think it could outsell the PS2 if they did that.

It’s always weird to me, the nostalgia for the PS2. I like the system a lot and I had sooooo many games for the system, but I feel like that system was such a quantity over quality type of system when it comes to the actual games on the console. I think it’s sorta my least favorite PS. A shame the PS3 didn’t get more love.

And I believe EA is going to use AI to cut costs and eliminate staffing redundancies. It’ll empower the creativity in which shareholder earnings are acquired!

I support the review Sammy did, even if I’m playing on Switch 2 rather than PS5, so I’m not sure if PS5 has unique issues in practice. Honestly, the MK games play like how they play on older consoles and such. I literally played an arcade tower of UMK3 a couple months ago and I was impressed by how similar the emulation feels in this collection, so I get it. If you’re reviewing this game for how it feels as a nostalgic experience rather than to nitpick technical performance, that’s where you get a 9/10. The witch-hunts are tiresome and clearly Sammy and team have built a community worth being a part of or none of us would continue to be here.

At the end of the day, unfortunately technical performance won’t be the same for everyone either. Baldur’s Gate 3 was broken on my PS5 for about a year after release, but it’s not like I’m trying to burn down the developers or protest the reviews that people had written. I may disagree with a review because my technical experience was different, but I can understand where the review comes from.

@Oram77 Yes! Oh my god yes! I could try every game then and only have my money be well spent because I’m having fun being engaged to my console, which is what Sony wants, right?

Also, is it bad if I’m really curious what Concord would’ve been had it lived? I mean, what would those periodic cutscene have been?

@Titntin @ShogunRok Is it just me or does this year feel like the year without a real GotY that feels like a GotY? While Death Stranding 2 is my favorite, I was ready to jump aboard the Silksong train if the game got traction in the discussion, but then… outside maybe Nintendo Life’s discussion… the game just seemed to pass too. It seems Clair Obscur, since release, has been the only game talked about all year long. I’m not sure what keeps the discussion going about CO and honestly like @Oram77 said, the glaze the game got soured me on a game I otherwise liked, for the most part. But honestly too, if it hadn’t’ve gotten that praise, I don’t know if I’d have finished it! I kept waiting for that big moment to change my mind on it. A couple of my friends said the same thing and that they forced themselves to finish on the hype.

My wife is perhaps the sanest one in my circle, as, maybe two hours in, she sat up, said the game was boring and walked away. When I completed the game, she asked if the game stopped being boring and I said no…The melodramatics were a bit much to me. Tintin, I was weirdly ok with that death too while I was playing. Is it bad if, after that one, I was rooting for a major death at the end of every act?

I can say this: at least when the paintress blobs a big, old 2026 on that fat, stone calendar, Clair Obscur being touted in every GotY article will finally go to Gommage. Then at least we’ll have a few months before GTA6 maximizes on saturation.

Robert, I’m eagerly awaiting your list and the rest of the staff. After following you all for years, I believe this may be the first year where I can’t even guess what your lists will look like (outside perhaps the fact that at least one gatcha game will certainly make Sammy’s list), though I’m suspecting every list will be a VERY different one.

Voting for Death Stranding 2, even though I know it has no chance of winning.

It’s so obvious Clair Obscur will basically sweep this year it’s not even funny. Months after beating the game, yeah… I still don’t get it! It’s a good game, but I’d say it’s my least favorite game out of the list of nominees, outside Peak, which I’ve never played, so I can’t comment on it. I will say I liked Clair Obscur more than KCD2 to play, but think KCD2 is an objectively better game, if that makes sense too.

Personally, this year, I’m more interested in the Pushsquare staff lists than any GotY lists. I have a feeling the staff lists will be really varied this year. I know that’s not the Golden Joysticks or whatever, but I post here and not there. Lol.

I’ll say this: they did something really cool here, but it’s a shame it’s in a Fortnite package.

Admittedly, I’ve not played Fortnite since they added the Lego expansion, but I just really have never enjoyed how Fortnite feels to play, even in the days before it was a BR experience. It has nothing to do with the game being popular. I can admit I enjoyed PUBG and Warzone and Overwatch in the past. In fact, I’d probably say I had the most fun in my gaming life playing multiplayer Halo as that memory grows more distant. Fortnite just isn’t for me. Neither is Apex or Valorant and dozens of other games. For people that do like it though and also like the Simpsons, what a treat!

I might check it out to see it and then immediately uninstall after that. Hopefully the excitement from this creates a genuine new Simpsons game instead.

@naruball I couldn’t even get my family to try Absolum with me. Lol. It feels like that game was literally a flavor of the week on the internet and then most people dropped it. For me, I beat the game, but I lowered the difficulty, so that it was more comparable to like TMNT.

As for me, Katamari and Mortal Kombat on the Switch 2 if I find time, but I’ve been constantly working either for my job or home projects the last few weeks and I keep having to invest more time and more time. I’m sort of wearing out from it, but I’ve got no choice. Sometimes house projects need to happen and you just got to keep working on it, right? The only downside is sometimes one project becomes four then becomes twelve and so on and so forth. I’d like to play Arc Raiders, but I just don’t know if I’ll have time for it.

@IntrepidWombat You prefer rhythm games I suppose?

You know, honestly, Expedition 33 on a Guitar Hero controller might actually be a really fun way to play it, now that I think about it.

To be honest, Arc Raiders feels like the multiplayer game I’ve been wanting to play for like 10 years. I’ve not played much, but what I have played is fantastic. I did not expect to like what I’ve played so much, nor for a multiplayer game to probably enter my personal year end list.

I was never happy to pay for online multiplayer to begin with.

@HRdepartment We’ve found one of them! Lol. It’s sort of fun, isn’t it?

You know, I was wearing a FF6 t-shirt at the grocery store the other day and someone with a CO t-shirt had the goofball audacity to approach me to say that CO is what Final Fantasy should be and that it’s better than the series had ever been. I said, “I bet your other favorite games are Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, aren’t they?” He got all impressed that I knew which games are trendy on the internet and then told him I prefer Pokemon and walked away.

I’d genuinely give CO 7/10, but I also clearly have bad taste!

@HRdepartment @Oram77 I definitely wouldn’t say they’re rivals either. They’re very different games. Personally, I prefer the more action oriented approach to combat Final Fantasy has.

I thought Clair Obscur was good too, but I just didn’t really resonate with it like everyone else in the world. I’ve probably had more fun being a contrarian about the game than I did actually playing it. I’ve definitely called the game a 5/10 to people in real life to get a rouse out of them. 🤡

Remake and Rebirth > Clair Obscur

Let me start the comments by stirring the pot 🥘