A look back at the year's best and worst, and the games worth carrying into the next one.
Eighteen years old and still one of the best arguments for what a sandbox can be. There's no real "game" here — just physics, props, and whatever the Workshop decides to throw at you — and that's exactly why it hasn't aged. Prop Hunt, Trouble in Terrorist Town, Deathrun, build servers that exist for their own sake: most of gaming's best community-made modes either started here or owe it something. The base experience is still rough around the edges by modern standards, but at this point that's part of the charm.
Built on a decade-old engine and still one of the most unsettling horror games you can get for free. The combat is clunky on purpose — every encounter feels like it shouldn't be survivable, and that's the point. The story leans hard into ambiguity, which won't land for everyone, but the atmosphere alone makes this worth the download.
Watching civilizations rise, go to war, and wipe each other out is endlessly satisfying for the first few hours — and then the lack of any real objective starts to show. Great for messing around with friends or as background noise, but there's no campaign holding it together, and updates have been slow.
The base game is a fraction of what it used to be without years of expansion packs behind it, and getting back to "Sims 3 levels of content" comes at a steep price. That said, build mode and Create-a-Sim are the best they've ever been, and once you've invested in a few packs, it's still one of the most relaxing ways to lose an afternoon.
The Flick-It controls are back, sharper than ever, and the new off-board parkour movement might be the best thing the series has ever added. Everything wrapped around that core — the always-online requirement, the cash shop, the missing career mode and Hall of Meat — is what's keeping this stuck in early access purgatory for now.
The most detailed open world ever built, and also one of the slowest-moving — every animation, every camp interaction, every ride between missions is deliberate to the point that it tests your patience early and rewards it completely by the back half. Arthur Morgan's arc is one of the best character studies in the medium, and the world reacts to him in ways that make the slowness feel like the point rather than a flaw. The online mode is a separate conversation entirely, and not a flattering one — but the single-player campaign alone justifies the hundred-plus hours.
The game that made an open-world western feel inevitable, and the one its own sequel spent a decade trying to top. John Marston's story is tighter and more focused than Arthur's, and the ending is still one of the best in Rockstar's catalog — it genuinely earns its reputation. The world hasn't aged as gracefully as the writing; traversal and combat feel noticeably stiffer now, especially if you've played the sequel first. Still absolutely worth it for the story alone.
Few games make orbital mechanics feel like a personality trait, but here we are. The learning curve is brutal — your first dozen launches will end in fireballs, and the tutorial doesn't really prepare you for any of it — but the moment a rocket you built from scratch makes it to orbit, something clicks that very few games manage to replicate. The physics are the point, and they hold up over a decade later.
Still in early access after more than a decade, and at this point that's barely worth mentioning — the updates keep landing, and each one makes the simulation a little more unforgiving in interesting new ways. The first time you lose a character you've kept alive for three in-game months to a single careless moment, you'll understand exactly why people keep coming back. Multiplayer turns it into something else entirely; solo, it's one of the best mood pieces the survival genre has.
Review text placeholder — swap this in for your actual thoughts on Samulige: what stood out, what didn't, and why it earned this score.
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Something fundamental is broken — performance, design, or both. We finish it so you don't have to.
Solid, with real trade-offs. Worth it for the right player, skippable for everyone else.
Recommended without reservation. These are the games we keep talking about months later.
Most review scores are written as a fraction — eight out of ten — and most of the time, nobody looks at the ten. We do. name/slashes started in 2019 because two friends got tired of scores that existed to be screenshotted, not read.
Every review here comes from a finished playthrough. Every score is the last thing we write. And every slash means something: it's the line between what a game promised and what it delivered.