Like many trannies, I keep a media list on my bluesky every year. Here's a bit more details on my favourite things from this year.

The list is already in the FILMS post so I won't repeat it here. If you missed that one you can find it HERE. OK. On with the show. Today's words are about VIDEO GAMES.

VIDEO GAMES

5.Fallout: New Vegas

I've already talked at length about New Vegas and I'm not gonna yap about it again, but suffice to say it has truly only grown on me with time. It's a game full of delightful and fascinating narrative decisions, of interwoven narrative chaos.I'm quite looking forward to going back to it and siding with Caesar's Legion or the NCR and seeing more of the way that world fits together. The more you play it, the more it invites you in - I really love it, I can't lie.

Admittedly, this one is, similar to Summer Wars, not exactly an earth-shaking revelation. Did you know famously good game is good? Well, yeah, idiot. But it is, and I'm glad I finally got to see what all the fuss was about.

4. Hollow Knight: Silksong

So I played Hollow Knight through this year for the first time and was left a pretty distinct 'is that it' feeling coming out of it.

Like. It's fine? It's good, even. But the way people talk about Hollow Knight, you'd think it was absolutely revelatory, like Metroidvanias were basically shit before it.

And it's just not true, obviously. I would pitch Hollow Knight as roughly as good as Zero Mission - perfectly fun, but nothing that special.

Silksong, though? Hoooooooly fuck.

I played Silksong in literally the best way possible - avoiding online discussion, spoilers and guides, just sharing hints with a friend who was also playing it. It made it so incredibly special. Together we puzzled out how to do the rasher, what was in those mysteriously empty parts of the map, even how to get to act 3 and get the fourth heart. It was, genuinely, like no other experience I've had. Finally, I was getting what other people said was so good about Hollow Knight.

Silksong is, truly, a world to get lost in. Much akin to Super Metroid and Fusion, every single nook and cranny is hiding something for you in some fashion, and every reward feels game changing.

A single health upgrade is enormous in Silksong. A new move or crest can completely alter the way you play the game. Everything it offers up to you is delightful in some way. Sometimes, the reward (as in the Green Prince questline) is just a secret area - in itself incredible to see and experience. It's a game in relishes in giving you more, more than you asked for, more than you could ever have imagined. I am delighted to have played it blind.

There's been a lot of consternation about the difficulty of the game, and about the relative annoyance of its corpse running. My main comment on this is that it wasn't really something I experienced so can't comment on it too much, lol. I only really walled on a few optional bosses - the Last Judge et al weren't actually that difficult for me. I have however Onebro'd Dark Souls and am a high-level rhythm gamer so my calibration for difficulty is very different from the average player, I think.

I'm glad I beat all the bosses pre-nerf. I sit firmly in the 'difficulty is an intentional choice, not every game is for everyone' camp, and I do find it absurd that we have this conversation every year. War and Peace is a Difficult Book for being so long. The Odyssey is a Difficult Read because it's written all weird. But we don't argue that these books should be 'made easier' for less experienced readers. IDK. I think it speaks to games' immaturity as an art form that we continue to debate this instead of letting a game just... be.

But then, the artists themselves can't leave well enough alone. There are so many remakes now. Why has Silent Hill 2 been remade? Why Resident Evil 4? These are pillars of the form!

I digress. I loved Silksong and think it's a great game to persevere with. Let's move on to the next game in the list:

3. Deltarune: Chapters 3 and 4

OH MY GOD IT'S ANOTHER GAME WITH A CONTROVERSIAL BOSS THAT I'M GLAD I FOUGHT PRE-NERF. I CAN'T ESCAPE!

But seriously folks. Deltarune is here, with two new chapters, and it's absolutely incredible. I am in love with Deltarune. Toby Fox is a modern genius, at once an incredible writer, musician and game designer producing games that arguably define a genre for a generation. Like Undertale before it, Deltarune is truly seminal work, at once effortlessly funny, genuinely moving, and deeply creepy all at once.

Just what is going on with Noelle and the weird route? What is the purpose of the eggs? How the hell does Gaster fit into everything? I spend at least an hour a day thinking about Deltarune, and that shows no signs of stopping.

And the music. Good lord the music in this game. Imagine producing a track like It's TV Time! and it not even being the best song of the chapter. There is literally nobody out there doing it like Tricky Toby Fox. It's honestly crazy how good this soundtrack is. I can't wait for Chapter 5 for many reasons, but a new album of Toby Fox music is maybe chief amongst them.

And that's not even touching how it plays. The bullet hell dodging has only got better since Undertale, and the way in which Fox and Co deliver characterisation for minor enemies through their bullet patterns is genuinely inspired. Secret bosses remain the highlight (sitting there and spending hours breaking chapter 3's in two was a moment only equalled by the first time I ever beat Ornstein and Smough, frankly) but the creativity on display even for midbosses and chapter bosses really has to be applauded. What a game.

It remains to be seen if it can stick the landing, but whatever happens, I'm along for the ride for the long haul. Long live Deltarune.

2. Blue Prince

A manor sits at the crest of a hill. It's yours, now, so long as you can find your way to room 46. Unfortunately, the manor only has 45 rooms.

The hook of Blue Prince is simple. The reality of Blue Prince is a spiral, a mystery that grows ever deeper. A lost family member. A country in turmoil. A language you cannot read. A system of mathematics to comprehend. A throne that sits empty. A red prince, and a swimming bird.

Blue Prince took my breath away. It's a game designed entirely around that first moment of wonder from Breath of the Wild, where you leave the cave and see the world. But here, it's not seeing the world that leaves you winded - it's the solution to a puzzle you've been ruminating on for hours. It's the subtle implication in a book you read in the library. It's the ominous feeling that you're being watched. Everything in Blue Prince invites curiosity and if you will let it, it'll drag you down in its spiral, poisoning your every thought until it finally lets you free, far beyond where you ever thought it'd take you..

I don't want to spoil a minute of Blue Prince, so I'll leave this entry here. Just know that to be higher on this list than Deltarune, a game must be truly, magnificently special.

Which leads me on to...

1. UNBEATABLE

You're just a part of my life... and I can't get rid of you.

UNBEATABLE (all caps or no caps), as I said on bluesky, made me feel shrimp emotions. It's kind of a mess. Structurally, technically, whatever. It's the most raw expression of a team's emotion I've ever felt in a video game, to the extent that I think this is now a game I will recommend to everyone in the same fashion I do for Undertale.

At its core, unbeatable is a fairly simple two-key rhythm game. And it is a sublime rhythm game. I was pretty critical of the charting in White Label and the demo, often feeling like the maps barely fit to the rhythm of the song. I am delighted to say that all the issues I had with that are gone in the full release. The maps are by and large fantastic, pushing you deep into a flow state.

UNBEATABLE: ARCADE was clearly designed by people with a deep, burning love of JP rhythm games. The rating system is ripped straight from them (although thankfully without decay, my beloathed) and I'm so glad it's here, chasing rating is a unique thrill to rhythm games and seeing that little 'rating up' after you've cleared a new difficulty frontier or upscored hard in a track you struggled with is the crack cocaine form of dopamine. If it gets its claws in you, you'll be in for it for a damn while. And good job too.

And yeah, on its own, UNBEATABLE ARCADE would be in this top 5 list. Probably in the 5 spot. But the story mode. Ohhhhh man.

Again, no spoilers from me - but one of the first things you see in the game is something called 'One More Final.' And that instantly had me go 'oh, this team are on my wavelength.' This is a game in love with anime, of course - its full of environments you'd expect to see in Love Live!, bright sunny vistas. And it's interesting to contrast that to another game that heavily referenced Evangelion, my most hated game of 2024, Mouthwashing.

Mouthwashing was a game that felt like it had no real identity of its own. All its most impressive moments were stolen directly from Evangelion, transplanted into a work with nothing original or interesting to say. It sucked total ass.

UNBEATABLE also takes a lot of cues from Eva, in many forms, but instead of shamelessly stealing, it builds a world and a story and an identity all its own. 'One More Final' is ripped from EoE, sure, but it's also a statement of intent. And man. It delivers.

I will probably have a more spoiler-riffic post on unbeatable at some point because it does some truly incredible stuff in its latter hours. But that's not for now.

For now: please, if you choose to play or watch something from this list, make it UNBEATABLE. It's my favourite game of the year. It's probably my favourite game of the 2020s so far. It shoots for the moon. Maybe it doesn't quite make it - but it sure lands among the stars.

A quick snap of the fingers and with practice, that's all there is to it.