1.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
This thing is pure distilled joy in game form. The art direction, menu UIs, music...all of it packaged together feels so snug & warm. Energy that's pure & joyous w/o being saccharine. A tough needle to thread that FI pulls off with an easy confidence.
Feels quite DQB2-adjacent in feel & form. The amount of content on offer impresses and I love that there's always multiple paths/goals that can be followed. Leading to a freeform sandbox vibe that invites the player to engage at a variety of mood levels.
Man what a soothing balm.
2.
Escape From Duckov
It's amazing when media can successfully combine two disparate tones into a cohesive whole. Duckov sports both whimsy & depth.
Looks gorgeous and plays like a dream. There's a Dysmantle-like simplicity with the top-down presentation, the playfield reads clean. And still tactical depth remains with diverse loadouts, skill trees and base expansion. A refreshing combo of charm & mechanical engagement.
When I look at the inspiration with Tarkov, I see an ambitious & complex military im-sim shooter. Incredible for the target audience but for me a bit too mechanically & competitively intense. Duckov enters the chat with a single-player approximation that feels more breezy without sacrificing any of the essentials.
3.
Schedule I
Somewhere along the way Schedule I went from a pretty dang accomplished meme game to a legit awesome real game.
Great moment to moment gameplay loops & progression systems, fun world to explore, really nice gameplay feel (upgrade your skateboard asap!). This thing is WAY more thoughtful & polished than one may imagine on the surface. Really nails that "just one more day" progression loop of classics like Stardew, etc.
The WarioWare-like minigames for product packaging & distribution are a mechanical stroke of genius!
4.
Sunken Engine
SE is a shipyard sim with a creative Lovecraft twist. Sports killer artwork and the gameplay loop has surprising depth for a traditional "lite" job sim (think Gas Station Simulator).
Along with the genre staples like base expansion and skill upgrade trees there's also nice side activities like fishing and fish-market stall sales.
I love that you have to manage your sanity as well, you start seeing strange visions as it decays. This thing really nails the creep-vibe atmosphere, it feels far more authentic to the themes than you'd imagine given the genre.
All told it's a super-creative twist on an established genre with nice production values and an attractive price.
5.
Little Rocket Lab
Stardew meets Factorio-lite is about as apt as you're gonna get with this one. A great hybrid for genre fans.
Very friendly from the jump with a cozy story campaign attached to help with user direction.
The overall more relaxed vibe makes it a great palate cleanser when weighed against the math-engineering trainers like Factorio, lol.
6.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon / Sanctuary of Sarras DLC
It's AA Black Metal Skyrim and it's absolutely glorious.
Great art style, thoughtful lore from TTRPG roots, and most importantly it captures that Bethesda rpg sandbox vibe that so few releases seem able to replicate. With a bonus perk of weighty combat.
Def. got that grim-dark energy, but it's played with such earnestness that instead of being cheeseball it won me over.
7.
Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter
I do have a soft spot for the original Trails 1st. Steam says I played around 25 hrs. back in 2017, but I obviously never finished it and don't remember much beyond positive vibes.
But man this remake is just so immediately attractive on first blush. Maybe I haven't been keeping up with modern JRPG design 'cause this production is just so lush & colorful. It reads so clean, which I actually do remember in the small details found in the original, such as set dressings found in shops, etc (ie unique geometry for a random apple barrel).
Another neat touch is the character portraits in the dialogue panels. Guess I'm used to them being static pics normally, but here there's just a touch of animation to them, a slight shift in hair that's tasteful & subtle. Suggesting animation but not overdoing it.
Great realtime/turn-based hybrid combat system.
Warm-blanket RPG'ing at its finest!
8.
Heart of the Machine
Sleek, stylish & sophisticated.
Heart of the Machine is a tactics, 4X, city-builder, colony sim, and RPG.
Impressive genre mashup and the freshest entry in the Strat scene in quite some time.
Feels like a classic in the making.
9.
MIRO
Miro feels like the early days of No Man's Sky in regards to planetary exploration, the walking-sim element with discovery & chill vibes. Yet this is structured with a story & defined goals. Nice tech upgrade paths compliment the exploration element, giving purpose in resource collection.
It feels a bit like a matured Proteus in presentation but with distinct story beats & direction. Has that lo-fi PS1-era art direction if that's your thing (it def. is mine). While planets you explore are procedural, they remain static with unique resource types & structures that you can revisit for upgrade materials. So it doesn't feel random in the traditional sense.
Bonus props for QoL features like toggles to both auto-walk & auto-run. Seems like a small thing but it makes a difference at the maps are quite sprawling and thanks to an upgradable compass that populates POIs, it never feels aimless.
10.
VEIN
VEIN is a surprisingly atmospheric run at Project Zomboid. And it looks to have amazing potential.
The zombie survival-sandbox genre is a crowded market on PC so differentiation can be challenging. VEIN brings the goods in combining the complex nature of Zomboid with a fresh first-person perspective. So a bit like 7 Days with more depth.
It's coming from a 2-person dev team who appear to have a firm grasp on the appeal of titles like Zomboid. The character stats (physical/mental health), skill development & world interactivity is on the upper-end of the spectrum, making the space feel dynamic and full of possibility. After all these years it's wild to play out the survival gameplay loops unique to Zomboid in a fully realized 3D space, one that can be quite visually striking at times.
Character movement & combat feel responsive if a bit pedestrian. You can set zombie pop size in new game creation, but being 3D it feels like population sizes will never match the hoards in Zomboid. Menus navigation is smart & snappy (very important with high-volume inventory management). The map is huge with a nice variety of natural & inhabited environments.
It's firmly in Early Access so you're getting in on the ground floor. But in the here and now, it feels well worth one's time & attention.
Other notable titles I really dug this year that make me wish there were a Top 20:
Easy Delivery Co.
Quasimorph
Obenseuer
AutoForge
Card Survival: Fantasy Forest
Two Point Museum
Approaching Infinity
Disillusion ST
ENA: Dream BBQ
Cape Hideous
) gotten to them yet.
