The Gameological Awards 2025

Introduction

I always kick off these posts with a little intro that sums up the last twelve months. It was the Year of This Thing, it was the year of That Thing! Whether it's a global pandemic or a self-imposed challenge, I’m always able to distill my most recent trip around the sun into a pithy little phrase, and then laboriously try to smush my gaming habits into that phrase so everything comes full circle and I have a nice little thematically-apt blog post locked and loaded.

But try though I might, I can’t really do that this year. For starters, after last year’s “52 Weeks, 52 Games” goal, I was ready for a nice leisurely vacation from slamming game-after-game. Then, when the stars aligned and we finally got that positive pregnancy test, we took another not-so-leisurely vacation across the globe, a last Big Hurrah before the demands of parenthood take hold.

And, most importantly, I sorta tuned out gaming recommendations from the internet at large. There is a bit of FOMO that comes with being plugged into social media all the time. Everyone is playing the hot new release, and you find yourself sometimes rushing through your current game so you can play the next game. There’s nothing but discourse, and we all want to participate.

Not this year. I just played whatever was sitting on my shelf, whatever popped into my head, whatever I was feeling right that very minute. Hell, maybe this year has a theme after. Maybe 2025 was “The Year of Whatever I Want.”

The nominees: Persona 4 Golden, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Call of Duty 2, Final Fantasy III, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Super Mario Odyssey, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest, Nier Replicant ver. 1.22474487139…, Grand Theft Auto 2, Resident Evil 2, Paper Mario, Mafia: Definitive Edition, Persona 3 Reload, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, and Mario Kart World.

The "Unexpected Joy" Award

This award goes to the game that defied expectations and was more fun than anticipated.

Last summer, amidst a flurry of August announcements, 2K dropped a minute-long teaser for the fourth game of their back-pocket franchise Mafia. I’d never played a Mafia game; in fact, I had sort of forgotten the series even existed. But this new title offered something that few releases do: an Italian setting! Yes, this prequel entry, Mafia: The Old Country, takes place in the Sicilian countryside, and the tribal part of my brain, the part that lights up every time I see my heritage get a nod, was galvanized.

(I love you Mario, but you just don’t count as Italian Representation).

Alas, three games exist in this franchise prior to this new release and, if you’re reading this, you know what I had to do. I scoured the annals of eBay for a physical copy of the OG game and made my purchase. It arrived and, well, it sat on my shelf for over a year.

You see, I simply was not excited to boot this one up. The Mafia series just reeked of “Grand Theft Auto with Mobster Paint.” I would have bet my bottom dollar that this title would have offered very little by way of gameplay innovations or narrative depth. It looked like a cliché on a disc; twenty hours of dapper men in pinstripe suits blasting tommy guns into run-down diners. I would have bet my bottom dollar, and I would have won that bet.

Except, somehow, that didn’t matter.

From the opening beats of Mafia: Definitive Edition, I was hooked. I, a lowly cabbie, sat in my car and drove around the streets of Definitely Not Chicago, picking up crabby old ladies and preoccupied businessmen. Notes of sultry jazz and swingin’ trumpets accompanied my drive, and I said to my wife “this could be the whole game and I’d be happy.”

It wasn’t the whole game. In between my daily drives were perfectly competent, dare I say excellent, stealth missions and shooting segments. I was running across rooftops, slinking down fire escapes, and fighting my way through storefronts and police blockades. I’d scramble to my getaway car and floor it through town, evading cops and losing tails from rival crime families. Every single part of the journey felt so…natural.

As every chapter wound to a close, I’d drive back to my safehouse and, again, Duke Ellington would serenade my trip. Or maybe the president would air a fireside chat. Or maybe I’d just hear the baseball scores from around the league.

No, Mafia: Definitive Edition doesn’t do anything wildly outside the box. But there’s something to be said for the joy of simply existing in a world, taking in the atmosphere, and appreciating the space. I procrastinated when it came to playing this game, but now I’m itching to fire up the next one.

The "Just Didn’t Click with Me" Award

This award goes to the game that everyone loves. Everyone except me.

To say that Persona 5 Royal “won” my Game of the Year award last year would be to say that Wayne Gretzky is a “good” hockey player. P5 so utterly crushed the competition that year that it also cemented itself as “Best Game I’ve Played Since Doing These Annual Blog Posts” and rocketed up into my Top 5 Games of All Time, a list that I thought was so set in stone that nothing would ever break into that coveted category.

So fierce was my Persona addiction that I played three more Atlus titles this year, the prior two Persona entries, as well as Metaphor: ReFantazio. Every game had a little something good to offer, from standout characters to interesting twists on familiar mechanics. However, only one of the three seemed to miss the mark every step of the way: Persona 3 Reload.

Oh, how I wanted to love this game! It seemed to have everything going for it! Better characters? A darker, more contemplative story? A world dripping with melancholy and dread? Check, check, and check…..right?

No, it didn’t have any of those things.

Normally, I would pose the question “where do I begin?”, and then answer it with “how about the beginning!” But maybe I shouldn’t do that, and instead take a page out of P3’s book by not starting the analysis until 85% of the way through the write-up. When your character steps off the train in the opening minutes of the game, so much is teased: a mysterious Dark Hour where passersby lay dormant in caskets and a unique band of adventurers unlock superpowers by shooting themselves in the head. Sounds interesting? Well, too bad, because if any of these questions get answered (and not all do!), then it won’t come until you’ve grinded through fifty hours of monotonous, same-y dungeons day after day. Exploring Tartarus doesn’t feel like a dive into the underbelly of the human psyche, it feels like a tedious after school job not unlike bagging groceries or stocking shelves.

The characters you meet along the way wallow in self-pity every time you hang out with them, bemoaning their situations while taking no steps to solve the problems. Oh, your knee is hurt? It’s still hurt? It’s still still hurt? Riveting stuff. Or sometimes our friends’ problems are simply never addressed. You’re in a doomsday cult and are trying to recruit new members? Let’s dig into that for just a min– oh, it’s gone. Social links spin their wheels day after day, and then at the last minute give a big long speech about how you helped them overcome their obstacles, a thing that you, as the player, actually don’t ever do at all.

When the main story finally kicks into high gear (again, 85% of the way through the game), it feels like everything is being rushed and nothing has a chance to breathe. Characters are introduced and then killed off in rapid succession. Enemies make bold proclamations, then disappear from view entirely. Plotlines are scattered about the place like skeins of loose yarn, and making sense of the mess isn’t worth the trouble since no idea is fleshed out enough to be worth your attention regardless. Things happen, but no consideration is given to them. Characters say words, but none of them are rooted in meaning. Generic plot point after generic plot point fall down the stairs like abandoned toys until finally, mercilessly, we run out of steps.

Most insultingly, however, the game realizes how vapid it is and scrambles to have a character tie these loose threads together with one big long monologue. She damn near looks into the camera and says: “This is what the game is about. These are the themes. This is why you should care.”

This sounds harsh, I know. Truth be told, I had more fun with the game than this diatribe would likely indicate. However, the severity of my criticism hinges on the mere fact that this is a remake. I would give more grace to Persona 3 had I played the original 2006 release. The series was still figuring itself out; hell, video games themselves were still working out the kinks. But this wasn’t the original, this was a do-over; a modern-day, ground-up, bona-fide Second Chance. However Atlus appears to have had little interest in refining the narrative and polishing the themes; they just slapped some quality-of-life upgrades into the battle mechanics and called it a day.

Good music, though.

The "Best Replay" Award

This award goes to the game that I replayed and for which I’ve gained a new understanding or appreciation.

This award is typically reserved for Super Mario. Since I replay two or three Super Mario games a year, and there is no shortage of insightful revelations one could glean from Nintendo’s flagship franchise, our favorite plumber can rest easy knowing that he’ll always get a shout-out here. But not this time! Instead, I’m giving the award to a game I’d never played before: Nier Replicant ver. 1.22474487139…

“Hey, Alex,” you say. “What the hell are you talking about? How can you give the ‘Best Replay’ award to a game you’ve never played?” Well, I’ll answer that question, my reliable blog strawman.

You see, Nier does this really neat thing where you have to play the game like five goddamn times before you actually beat it. You play through the story, then you open the save file and it starts halfway through, but now all the cutscenes are different, and then the third time you collect a whole bunch of weapons, kill the final boss, then the save file deletes itself and you have to start a new file with a different name and then halfway through the story the character remembers his old life and the save file comes back you enter a phantom dimension and…and…and…

The game is bonkers, and I haven’t even mentioned the sentient book or kid whose head turns into the moon.

Every time my wife walked into the room and asked what was going on, I had to explain which playthrough I was on, why things were happening differently this time, and what it all meant. That last bit became exceedingly difficult with every passing hour. When I finally rolled credits, I was left scratching my head as to what I had just played and what I even gained from playing it so many times.

But I’d be lying if I said this thing has not stuck with me in the months since completing it. The soundtrack has snuck into my regular game-music rotation, the landscapes stick out in my memory as tangible and real, and the bizarre phrases of Grimoire Weiss have infiltrated my vernacular.

Also, this guy.

I gotta be honest, I can’t say for certain where or not I even liked this fucking game. If you came to me and asked “Should I play Nier?”, my answer would be laden with seventeen different qualifiers. But it's part of me now, like a twisted little parasite that’s wrapped around my cerebral cortex. And every time I climbed that dilapidated tower or beat down a horde of shitty little robots, the parasite held on tighter and tighter. I was frustrated with many, if not most, aspects of this game, and no part would I cite as uniquely good or fun, and yet I’m still weirdly into this game.

Do I have the Nier equivalent of toxoplasmosis? Am I losing my mind? Do I need to speak with a mental health professional? What is even going on? Is anyone enjoying reading this?

The "Oh Yeah, I Did Play That..." Award

This award goes to the game that I just plain forgot I played.

Every Final Fantasy game is, at the very least, memorable. Some of them have excellent characters! Some of them have exhilarating combat! Some of them have downright weird stories where deciphering them is half the fun. You take the good and you take the bad, and you’re always left with something that you’ll carry around in your soul for quite some time.

I played Final Fantasy III this year and honestly have no fucking idea what to even write about it. All I remember is that every character has a “job.” And the story has something to do with crystals. I think. Truth be told, that’s just a guess because every Final Fantasy game has crystals in it.

Is this all I am going to write? Maybe. I truly can’t conjure up any more words on this game because I have so little to say. I’ve enjoyed the eight-bit entries quite a bit, but this is where things started to feel stale. Thankfully, the next game on the list represents a leap in console generations, so maybe that’s the shot of corrective creativity the series needs to get on the memorable track.

The "Game That Made Me Think" Award

This award goes to the game that has educated or informed me in some way.

Did you think Mario wasn’t going to be on this list? You fool! You absolute rube! This is still an Alex Russo post, so let’s talk about Super Mario!

JRPGs are fun as heck, but there can be something inherently stupid about their combat systems. You spend the whole game leveling up, but nothing really changes. Your first enemy has 100 HP, and you cast Thunder, it does 10 damage, and you beat that guy in ten turns. Fast forward to the final boss, and now the foe has 100,000 HP, so you cast Thundaga, which does 10,000 damage, and you…beat him in ten turns. Every number gets bigger, every health bar gets longer, every attack hits harder…but everything stays the same.

That’s not the case with Paper Mario. Here, when you level up, instead of getting a broad stat boost across the board, the player chooses exactly what attributes to bolster. Newcomers tend to lean heavily on HP (Heart Points) to protect their necks, whereas experienced players filter their points into BP (Badge Points) so they can try out new skills. It’s this flexibility that gives Paper Mario its tremendous versatility and depth.

But it also gave me an idea: could I beat the game without ever leveling up my HP?

You start the game at 10 HP, so I could only take 10 points of damage in every fight from start to finish. Early bosses, yeah, no problem. But late game? Bowser regularly doles out 7-8 damage every turn. Is this even possible? Only one way to find out.

With my mission statement set, I embarked on one of the single most challenging adventures in all of video games. I had to be perfect; I had to optimize my skills, I had to know my party members inside and out, I had to one-hit KO entire bosses. Even for a seasoned Paper Mario veteran, this was a unique challenge.

Long story short: I failed. But not for the reason you may think! You see, there are caps on all of your stats, and I didn’t realize until far too late that eventually I’d become unable to level up my FP or BP, and I’d be forced to put my points into HP. I had this horrifying epiphany midway through the seventh chapter and avoided late-game combat like the plague, but eventually the game caught up to me and I had no choice, after the penultimate boss, to bump my health up from 10 to 15.

I was devastated. All those clever battle strategies, all those diabolical badge synergies, all those flashy combos…it was all for nothing! Okay, I’m being dramatic. It wasn’t for nothing, I still had a great time breaking the combat wide open, and now that I know it can mostly be done, next time I’ll pace myself a bit more and bring down Bowser with nothing but my 10 measly health points.

The "Waiting for Game-dot" Award

This award goes to the game that I didn't play this year, nor last year, nor the year before that. Maybe next year.

I try to alternate between “time-consuming heavy” games and “light, quick, breezy” experiences. I usually feel very full, like I’ve had a complete meal, after sinking over fifty hours into a game, so the quick turnover of smaller indie titles helps keep things fresh. This year, however, I devoted all of my “big game” attention to titles released by Atlus and Nintendo. Those are the games that are often ranked as “Bests” of their year, or are recommended to me by friends.

Does this sound familiar? That’s because the same thing happened last year. And the year before that.

My slavish devotion to Personas, Marios, and endless homeowner projects meant I never got around to playing a game that I’m sure I’ll love, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Nintendo has a way of reinventing genres that I’d otherwise be so-so on. They did it with Splatoon and Mario Kart. But something seems too daunting about learning a game this meaty.

However…there is an update, lest you think this entire entry is copy+pasted from last year’s list. Though I haven’t played this Fire Emblem, I have now played three Fire Emblems. Only one more prerequisite remains!

The "Best Music" Award

This award goes to the game with the best music. Kind of self-explanatory.

I'm not entirely sure how they do it, but the folks at Nintendo can crank out earworms like it's nobody's business. Lennon and McCartney must look at the Super Mario oeuvre and wonder how a bunch of games starring a goofy little Italian plumber can boast so many bangers. And it's not just the mainline games...they aren't saving the hits for the album and letting the shit slide to the B-sides. Party games, sports spin-offs, and ancillary experiences all get your toes tapping!

And no Nintendo game in recent memory has been able to wear those badges of honor quite like Mario Kart World. In this brand-new racing game for the Switch 2, we have a whole catalog of hot-off-the-presses songs that go hard, from the bombastic harmonic-heavy Title Track to upbeat Old Hollywood swing of Boo Cinema to the salsa-infused horns of Dry Bones Burnout.

But World adds a twist to the typical Mario Kart formula: an open world. Now, after the checkered flag is waved, we don’t just teleport magically to the next racetrack on the list. Instead, we drive there ourselves. One could argue that this actually hurts the game as a whole and, in fact, I would argue that very point if I were here to critique the gameplay. But that’s a conversation for another day.

As we drive on open highways and through busy intersections, we’re treated to remixes of some classic Super Mario and Mario Kart tracks. Songs dating back to the NES era are covered in a slick new fashion, tuned up and ready to serenade your cross-country trips. And, to be clear, this is not a handful of staple bangers. There’s, like, ten hours worth of completely transformed songs. Cool, Cool Mountain? Check. Yoshi Valley? You bet your ass! Gusty Garden Galaxy? It wouldn’t be a Mario game without it!

The heart-pumping pedal-to-the-metal tracks take a back seat when the player enters Free Roam mode. Here, as the player simply ambles about the world with no particular place to go or race to win, some of those classic relaxing Mario tracks make their appearance. You know the ones.

To a certain extent, it might seem like cheating to give World the Best Music award when, in reality, I’m sorta just giving it the Most Music award. But credit where it's due, these aren’t just dusty old MP3s loaded onto the cartridge to fill up some empty space. These are fully orchestrated reimaginings of forty years worth of Super Mario songs and each one, whether true to the original or completely transformed, is a joy to listen to.

The "Best Mechanic" Award

This award goes to the very best "thing" that a game allowed me to do.

After completing the "Modern Persona Trilogy" with Persona 5 Royal, director Katsura Hashino decided to form a new studio under the Atlus banner. He wanted to try something different and, hey, I don't blame him! After working in the greater Megami Tensei sandbox for roughly twenty years, it makes perfect sense that a developer would seek to build a game that goes beyond the tried-and-true symbiotic cycle of social links and turn-based combat. At long last, the world was introduced to Metaphor Re:Fantazio, a medieval JRPG full of...social links and turn-based combat.

Wait, this game is just Fantasy Persona? Basically, yes, this is Fantasy Persona. Instead of Social Links, we have "Followers!" Instead of SP, we have MP! Instead of Personas, we have Archetypes! It's the same game, just with a different coat of paint.

Except, hold the phone, maybe not!

In Persona, the protagonist has the ability to wield multiple personas, so a wide array of attacks and abilities are available to the player. However, your party members' progression is largely on rails. Your fire-casting friend will learn stronger fire-casting magic, your healer will bolster their team-healing skills, and the stat-tweaker will master the same buffs no matter what you do. There's not much by way of versatility character-by-character...it's in the assembly of your team where neat little synergies can be found.

By contrast, the Archetype System in Metaphor Re:Fantazio allows any character to master any archetype. Sure, they have a default starting place when they join the team, but with enough combat experience, you can have your healer become a brawler or your mage become a sniper.

And that's where things get wild. Because nestled in that complex chart of stats and skills lay some of the most game-breaking move combinations I've ever seen in a game. With little to no grinding, I had characters who were dodge-tanks (characters who the enemy simply could not land a punch on no matter how hard they try), and since enemies lose a move icon if an attack misses, my darling little Heismay became an absolute turn-melting disruptor for combat. Likewise, the less lovable Junah's repertoire contained two invaluable tools: Drain MP (vampiristically suck some magic points from the enemy to refill your own gauge) and Gift MP (refill the MP gauge of an ally of your choosing); as a result, my team could unleash their most power attacks without fear of running out of steam...Junah would always recharge their batteries.

When the game first introduced me to this system, my eyes glazed over. I somehow simultaneously thought to myself "this seems needlessly complex" and "this is just the Persona progression thing again, who cares." But after a few hours, things clicked and suddenly the beautiful intricacies of the Archetype system fell into place and I was salivating at the endless possibilities at my disposal.

The "Autopsy" Award

This award goes to a game that I just don't understand why it is the way it is.

For as long as I’ve been maintaining this blog, the specter of a new Metroid Prime game has loomed large on the horizon. After all, it was announced in 2017 and, despite a development restart and global pandemic, Nintendo always maintained that it was a real thing that was really coming. So for me, a person who has maintained for over twenty years that Metroid Prime is his favorite game of all time, it’s been hard not to speculate just how this new title would factor into my year-end awards.

I had to literally invent a new award just to talk about it.

For anyone not in the know, Metroid Prime does two things exceptionally well. (It does everything extremely well, for the record, but two things here are worth calling out). Firstly, it presents a type of sci-fi horror that is both beautiful and, for some reason, irreplicable. Very few pieces of art, be they game, book, or movie, have captured the majesty of broken worlds, fallen civilizations, and the terror of the great beyond AND the beauty of nature reclaiming these shattered locales. Overgrown temples and sunken cities abound, local flora and fauna have flourished in the vacuum left by the long-gone citizens of these alien worlds, and baked into every crumbling hallway and decaying body is the subtle reminder of life’s fragility.

Secondly, Metroid Prime’s design is, on a mechanical level, one of the most intricate and purpose-driven worlds I’ve ever seen. The different biomes are all tightly connected, with shortcuts and hidden paths all weaving in and out of each other like strands of spaghetti. Samus crosses the planet several times, but these retreads are never marred by a sense of been-there, done-that. With new power ups and added context, the player always finds power-ups, artifacts, tidbits of lore, or tools to make their journey all the smoother for the next leg of their journey.

When Metroid Prime 4: Beyond begins, it’s all spectacle. This tutorial segment is heavy on razzle-dazzle, but light on gameplay. That’s fine. It’s all table setting, making sure the pieces are in place for when, after ten or so minutes, Samus is flung across the galaxy and stranded on the planet Viewros.

And when she wakes up, it’s glorious. The inner-architecture of this otherworld tower is alien and eerie. The floor pulsates. The walls slither. Bridges extend and retract like spring-loaded tentacles. We leave the structure and take our first steps, and the forest is lush and vibrant. Bizarre creatures crawl out from beneath the bushes and fly to the treetops above. A jaw-dropping landscape stares back at us from across a chasm. And the music perfectly reflects the grandeur of this moment.

Samus rescues a trooper from some Galactic Federation wreckage (more on him later), takes on a malicious plant that has made itself at home in an abandoned altar, fends off some monsters, and then continues on her merry way. Shortly thereafter, we find a defunct power plant and, after a trek to the bottom of the tower, we turn the lights on, work our way up, and take on an army of drones activated by the sudden surge of electricity. It’s all pretty good!

And then things start to fall apart.

Our friend back at base camp tells us the world is our oyster and we have a whole planet to explore! This lie is exposed almost immediately, as we hit dead-end after dead-end until the obligatory trinket is found, we’re told (via intercom call) to report back to HQ, and suddenly the formula is laid bare.

The remainder of the game proceeds as follows: drive across an empty desert to the next biome, walk in a straight line to the end of the map, flip a switch, then walk back and fight a new wave of enemies, take down a boss, get a power up, drive back to headquarters, and do it all again. It's also worth noting that there are, functionally, only three enemies types in the game.

Gone are the tightly-crafted interconnected maps. Here, it’s a series of linear shooting galleries, no exploration necessary. Gone is the context-heavy backtracking. Here, it’s crisscrossing a big, empty desert on a motorcycle. Gone is the quiet loneliness of a dying world. Here, it’s escorting a squad of tropey space marines, none of whom with the ability to shut the ever-loving fuck up.

The companions are a vibe-killer for sure, and the backlash to a nerdy, quippy tech pal during the press junket wasn’t overblown by the fanbase. But to pin the failure of Metroid Prime 4 on these hapless GF Troopers would be unfair. With competent level design and strong, purpose-driven direction, these talkative soldiers would be but a minor nuisance. It’s everything else. Everything everything else.

Those who know me know I have a “there’s no such thing as bad art” mantra. That’s because I have very specific taste (we all do) and not every piece of art is made for every person, and that’s okay. Just because a person wanted a horror movie to explore the themes of X, but instead the movie ended up being a horror-comedy that played around with the morality of Y doesn’t make it bad! It’s just not for that person. We live in this weird period of brain-dead discussions where differing opinions are flat-out wrong, personal taste must be uniform, and stylistic decisions are personal attacks at the audience. The entitlement surrounding art criticism is one of the most frustrating developments of the social media era, and I do my damnedest to try to recognize that just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it is bad.

But I don’t know who would think this game is good.

There’s not enough combat to please fans of first-person shooters. There’s not enough exploration to sate the appetites of open-world completionists. There’s not enough lore to ensnare the minds of story-focused gamers. And there’s just not enough Metroid to please Metroid fans. Metroid Prime 4 could have been ANYTHING, and I would have said it was good, even if it wasn’t for me. But its middling creative indecision makes that impossible to do.

I called this the “Autopsy” award, but at the end of the day, the cause of death is inconclusive. I don’t know who to blame (The folks at Retro Studios? The suits at Nintendo? The games industry and its sickening capitalistic churn?), and I will likely never know until some ex-developer joins a podcast ten years from now and gives a tell-all interview.

Who can say what happens from here? Will there be a Metroid Prime 5? Is this the end for Samus and her 3D adventures? Probably not. I’ll bet there will be more; IP reliance is a helluva thing. We can only hope that when this franchise is trotted out yet again, it's done with greater care towards the core tenets of the series.

Because Metroid Prime deserves so much more.

The Game of the Year

The big boy.

It's hard not to feel a little dizzy at the fact that I've been doing these little posts for over half a decade. I went back and re-read my lists, and though I've changed as a person a lot in that time (we all have, I hope!), I find myself pretty firmly standing by most, if not all, of my awards. My GOTY picks, especially, still feel "right" all these years later, save for 2019 (I'd now put Bloodborne over Link's Awakening; but, at the time, I was trying to give the 2019 GOTY to a 2019 game. I had yet to adopt my "any game can win any award" stance).

Yet now I find myself staring at the list of games I'd played in 2025 and I can't help but feel a little disappointed. No matter how hard I look at my list of games, I simply cannot choose one that I think represents the gravity of the words "Game of the Year." There is no title that is that unequivocal best, the unqualified recommendation, the transformative experience that I'd hold up as a pinnacle of the art form.

There were games that stuck with me, but perhaps not for the right reasons. There were games that were fun to play, but felt like junk food at the end of the day. There were games that looked nice and sounded nice, but ultimately had little to say. There were simply no Game of the Year this year.

So the award goes to No One.

And I think that's fine. Because even though this is a blog post viewed by no one on a website that I often neglect, there is still a part of me that takes this very seriously. I want what I say to mean something, even if it's for nothing but a silly little end-of-year list about video games. I like meaning. I treasure meaning. I try to steep everything I can in meaning. "Game of the Year" means something to me, and that's why I won't say it if I don't mean it.