I played some games this year

It’s been another year of gaming and I wanted to highlight some of my favourites from this year. Games I played this year, not necessarily games published this year. These are not in any kind of order really.

I’m sharing these in the spirit of more human curation over algorithmic recommendations.

NHL 21

The list may start with a bit of a surprise. I’ve been playing hockey games ever since I learned how to hold a controller or smash a keyboard. Since the early 1990s. It all started with the Face Off!, then with EA’s NHLPA Hockey '93 and NHL ‘94 on Super Nintendo, then NHL 97 on PC that I played for years. At the same time, I played Olympic Hockey ‘98 on Nintendo 64 and my mind was blown when NHL 2003 on Xbox came out.

Around 2006, I switched to 2K series for a while until in 2010, I got the demo of NHL 2010 and the skill stick experience changed the way of playing virtual hockey forever.

People always talk about these sports games as just annual roster updates and that’s why I’ve usually been updating around 3 years as there usually is enough small incremental changes that accumulate in a few years so that the new ones feel fresh and usually better.

I’ve been sticking with NHL 21 for over 5 years already and I’m still enjoying it.

“Enjoying it” might be an understatement. Every year since its release, it’s been my most played game on Playstation by quite a distance. In 2023, I played 134 hours of it. In 2024, I played 124 hours. This year? 168 hours.

I’ve been thinking about maybe updating next year to get some of the newer teams and rosters but I’m in year 12 or something of a very nice GM run and it would be a shame to stop that now.

If I were made to choose only one game I could play from here on, I’d pick this one. I’ll never get bored of it.

Stardew Valley

ConcernedApe’s masterpiece Stardew Valley isn’t a new game either. I purchased it for my birthday in 2017, a year after its launch and have racked way over 1000 hours in Steam — and that’s only counting the hours I’ve played when online so the real number is even higher.

In the world of microtransactions, shutting down servers, DLCs and all the other crap, Stardew Valley is what I wish more games would aspire to be. It’s been almost 10 years since the launch and it still receives updates. Not just bug fixes and stuff but actual story content. The team is working on the seventh update, 1.7., that’s been rumored to maybe arrive for the 10 year anniversary.

It’s not just the official updates either. The modding community is wonderful and there are so many great, very deep content mods that brings new fresh life to the game just when you thought you’re getting bored of it.

If you’re not familiar with it, Stardew Valley is a cozy farming game with elements of relationships with villagers, mining, fishing, combat and making a shit ton of money by selling wine in a town with 20 or so adults. Who’s buying and drinking all this wine? Millions worth of it, every month.

Blue Prince

I have a love-hate relationship with puzzle games. I mean, I love them and if it was up to me, I could spend hours every day solving puzzles. But I’m also very bad at them and they mess up my sleep with horrible nightmares really easily so I need to ration my intake.

This year, I gave Blue Prince two opportunities.

Blue Prince is a mansion drafting puzzle rogue-lite. Every day, you wake up in the courtyard of a mansion and try to make your way through it to solve its mysteries. Whenever you open a door to a new room, you get to draft a new room from a selection of (usually) 3 different rooms. There are a lot of mysteries and I have barely scratched the surface so I don’t know what they are yet.

I first got it in the spring when it came out and internet was raving about it. Most likely after watching this Game Maker’s Toolkit video on the game. I played it and after a ton of attempts, I finally got through to one of the mysteries of the game — around day 70 or so. Only to find out, it was not a permanent upgrade but something that had to be solved EVERY TIME. That broke me and I abandoned the game.

In November, I got back to it and equipped with better understanding of the game, started a new fresh run and made quite a lot of progress in just a fraction of the days spent. I still haven’t gotten back to the point where I was in the spring but I have a bit more permanent upgrades and goodies unlocked so I’ve been enjoying it a bit more this time.

Cyberpunk 2077

Thanks to this summer’s Mac release, I finally got to experience Cyberpunk 2077 properly. I had borrowed it from the library for PS4 before but at the first fight scene, it turned into a slideshow and I couldn’t ever get through that forced moment.

I’ve been wanting to play this game for so long and it’s been great. I’m a big fan of cyberpunk genre and I feel the game has captured many aspects of it brilliantly. I love roaming the city, interacting with the characters and hacking away.

At the same time, I feel like it’s not gonna be a game that I’ll return over and over again in the future. It’s more of a one-off (or two, or three off) experience and that’s fine too.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

I might be a bit late to the party with this one but I finally played Marvel’s Spider-Man that’s been highly praised especially for its web-slinging movement mechanics. And yes, they are fun. But also, there’s a lot of it — too much to my taste. The first few hours it’s so much fun. After 12 hours, it gets boring because all the missions are spread out in a way that you need to cross half of New York to get to the location.

Despite that criticism, the game is great. Definitely worth all the praise it’s gotten. The story is your run of the mill Spider-Man story but it does its job well. Occasionally, you get to play as MJ and while usually these types of gimmicks are poorly done in games, I actually enjoyed these as well. While Spider-Man flies around the city and kicks and punches his way through the bad guys, MJ takes a more stealthy approach as a good journalist does.

Hoop Land

I don’t play a lot of games on mobile but there are a couple of games I’ve been enjoying on my iPad that I want to share. After years of enjoying Retro Bowl, the game became bit too repetitive and I was looking for something new. I ran into Hoop Land, a basketball game with surprising depth.

Retro Bowl’s simple controls and mechanics made it a perfect game to play on a tiny breaks but Hoop Land essentially requires a controller so it has filled a different type of void. But when you sit down to play, oh boy is it fun. It has a bit of a learning curve and in the beginning, I got smacked in the head every game but eventually started to get the ball into the basket.

For those moments when all I have with me is the iPad and a controller, it’s real good entertainment where I can put hours into.

Tatami

Tatami is a lovely puzzle game by Kaylee Calderolla. The mechanics are simple: you need to group tiles on a grid into rectangles based on the rules imposed by each level. The levels get more difficult as time goes on.

As it’s a puzzle game that I need to ration to maintain a healthy-ish sleep cycle, I’m limiting myself to maximum couple of levels a day and early in the morning. I’m currently at level 231 and the puzzles are starting to get real difficult here.

The first 200 levels are free but it’s a single purchase game that’s built with such care for the users that I recommend purchasing it right away.

Pokémon TCG

Moving (partly) away from the digital realm, my number one game this year was Pokémon TCG. I played a ton both in-person as well as digitally. One of the highlights of the year was running a Scarlet & Violet Progression Series that we started in September and finished just before Christmas.

I played in a bunch of Leagues and Prereleases, even won a tiny GLC tournament and continued growing my collection of Eeveelutions whenever I could pick up new cards I’m still missing.

I also spent a good chunk of timing building my own tools to manage my card collection (moved away from a service that provided no export and started to paywall and enshittify aggressively), built my own card API (when one I had used for years started to have issues), built a bunch of tooling to manage the progression series (a public website, a card pool viewer and I’m mid-way building a platform where one could manage a complete progression series with opening packs, building decks and recording scores. None of that will likely ever be publicly available because I don’t want their lawyers on my ass but I’m self-hosting for myself and the growing toolkit has been wonderful so far.

Magic the Gathering

I have been following Magic the Gathering for years but never really got into it to play. Mainly because my money already goes to Pokémon TCG and can’t afford two TCG hobbies simultaneously.

Then last year, they published Bloomburrow and I was sold. This year, I actually started playing. Not a ton but more and more as the year progressed. I built my own Battle Box for easy pick-and-play at the pub, I built a Dandân, Forgetful Fish deck for similar type of game play.

And when a friend asked if I’d like to join their group of casual Commander, I purchased my first Commander pre-con deck Family Matters and we started playing regularly.

Parks

I didn’t get to play as much Parks as I would have wanted this year but it has slowly climbed up the ranks of my favourite board games. It has such nice aesthetics, great gameplay and it’s the type of game that provides depth but is still kind to beginners and as such, can be a great gateway drug game to get new people into the hobby.

In Parks, you and your friends are hiking at national parks, gathering resources, taking photos and experiencing the great wild nature.

NHL 94/25 romhack

While NHL 21 has been my main way of enjoying virtual hockey, Adam Catalyst’s NHL25 romhack for NHL ‘94 has been a delight. NHL ‘94 is one of the most iconic hockey games ever and one I played a lot as a kid. So whenever there’s a way to return to that iconic experience with something new and fresh, I’m all for it.

This romhack brings modern teams and rosters, alongside with gameplay tweaks and graphics refinements. It’s a perfect nostalgia trip while still getting to enjoy all the benefits of the most recent roster updates.

It’s funny that if I want to play with Seattle Kraken or Utah Mammoth, I need to abandon my modern PS4 experience and play the game from over 30 years ago.

PokeRogue

PokéRogue, a fan-made rogue-lite Pokémon game continues to entertain me. I have an offline-version on my Steam Deck that I haven’t updated since I created it (I should check if my documented workflow still works).

PokéRogue is a game where you have 10 points to use to pick your starting party: the better the Pokémon, more expensive it is to add. Then you fight randomly generated opponents, catch wild monsters to add them to your party and as new starting Pokémon and try to get through the game.

It’s a lot of fun!

Factorio

Factorio is one of those games that I had to put on a shelf in April when I got a job. I couldn’t afford booting it up, blinking my eyes and noticing it’s 5 in the morning. I’m kind of looking forward to the Christmas holidays and dedicating a few days to just getting lost in the world of Factorio.

Every time we talk about video games with friends, Factorio comes up. It has a devious lack of cycles, if that makes any sense. There’s never a “now is a good moment to stop playing” moment. You just keep on going and going and going, solving the next optimisation puzzle. Until you notice you haven’t eaten or slept in ages.

I always play it on a safe mode, ie. turn off the aggressive creatures. The game is complicated enough to try to solve without the constant worry of someone wrecking my base.

In Factorio, you’re stranded on a strange planet and need to make the best out of the bad situation. You start by collecting some copper and iron ore and coal by hand and little by little build a massive automated factory with the aim to conquer space.

I’d love to recommend the game to everyone. If you care about your sleep though, maybe give it a pass 😅.

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