Baldur’s Gate 3, because it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played, but also I haven’t played more than a few minutes of the other games on the list. Alan Wake 2 is only a storefront that doesn’t support my operating system; Spider-Man 2 is stuck on a console that I don’t intend to buy so I won’t play it for at least two years (and even then it seems way too similar to the last games); Resident Evil 4 is surely better than the last time I played it, but I’m not in a rush to play a revised version of that game; Super Mario Bros. Wonder I can say shocks me that people are rating it this highly; and even if I wasn’t pissed off at Nintendo these days, Tears of the Kingdom still didn’t build on Breath of the Wild the way I wanted it to.

Absolutely stacked year, I don’t think I could choose!

ToTK.

BG3 was amazing and is the best RPG of the year hands down. A really outstanding game that deserves all the praise and I’d certainly feel it deserved GotY if it won.

But ToTK was really just beyond expectations with its game design. The open ended puzzle design, the sheer number of “wait, I can actually do that?” The way it continued the BotW reinventing LoZ (NES) trend by reinventing LttP’s dark world…

It’s one of the toughest years I can recall, as BG3 was also beyond expectations and had incredibly nuanced design. But I feel like in a lot of ways it was still more structured by being guided by tabletop, whereas ToTK really just broke the mold all over again for Nintendo.

It might be my favorite Zelda title of all time.

Alan Wake 2, but TotK was so close. Spiderman 2 was disappointing.