Cass Marshall is a co-founder of Rogue.site!
Look Outside
I sang the praises of Look Outside all year, and I will not stop now that it is GOTY season. You play an unemployed hermit named Sam who awakes in their crappy apartment to find a cosmic event happening outside, and looking outside — or even spotting a reflection or artistic rendition of the Visitor — is enough to warp a person into something new and terrible. Sam must survive for fifteen days, during which he rallies surviving neighbors, creates a safe haven in his apartment, and puzzles out the mysteries behind the Visitor. The body horror on display here is magnificent and monstrous, the writing regularly inspires out-loud laughter, and the entire game is threaded through with tragedy.
As a terminally online millennial, one of my favorite gems in the rough was Barkley: Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, a post-apocalyptic old-school RPG where Charles Barkley has committed a sin known as the Chaos Dunk, and must raise his son in the aftermath. It’s a bizarre game with strangely robust systems and genuinely funny writing, and in the year of our lord 2025, the closest thing we have to a spiritual successor is Look Outside. What a lovely, unexpected surprise.
Routine
Routine is one of those games that’s going to be heavily dinged during GOTY discussion because it came out so late in the year, but it’s only a few hours long, so I’m glad I was able to fit it in. The story is dead simple — you’re investigating an abandoned lunar base full of dead scientists, and oh no, the threat is still there — but the in-game execution is very well implemented.
The stripped-down HUD, limiting your in-game info to your suit, your scanner-gun, and any terminals you might encounter, creates a strong sense of dread. The environmental and enemy design is also aces, creating a retro-futuristic station filled with robots who, for some god-forsaken reason, have teeth. There are strong flavors of Soma, Alien: Isolation, and Dead Space here, all simmered into an atmospheric and oppressive experience.
Silent Hill f
Silent Hill f is a game with a lot of built-in friction. The combat can be frustrating, and is best enjoyed on story difficulty. The full narrative requires multiple runs on new game plus, and a YouTube summary is waiting right there. For those who are patient enough to sit with Silent Hill f and really peel back each layer of the onion, there’s a real treat here. It feels positively unreal to get a new Silent Hill that’s this good, and perhaps more importantly, this subtle.
Hinako Shimizu is growing up in the Japanese town of Ebisugaoka during the 1960s. She is torn between family, friends, the expectations of societies, and the ambitions of old gods. The people of Ebisugaoka have long nurtured relationships with ancient beings, and they have cast their eyes on Hinako. That attention, combined with the pressure of a patriarchal society and the cracks in Hinako’s psyche, is enough to summon the heavy fog and nightmarish creatures we all know and love from the classic Silent Hill games.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
I love an immersive sim, and there are few as big or as complex as the one Warhorse Games built out in the Bohemian countryside. Henry, the protagonist of the first game, has barely wiped away the sweat and grime from his first adventure before being flung into yet another massive campaign, and some of the rough parts from the first game have been filed down — animations are smoother, the world is more open and feels better to explore, and stealth is less of a frustrating dice roll.
There’s a beautiful friction at the center of the game where Henry has big, sweeping goals that he must achieve through teeny, tiny steps. Wander into the woods, and you may be swarmed by a pack of wolves. One guy with a sword is enough to pose a serious, even mortal, threat. And so, I played Henry like a sneaky little coward, slurping down stolen mouthfuls of stew from ladles left unattended and stalking solo merchants so I could make big profits via murder. There’s an excellent tension there that comes from such a dense, responsive world, and the medieval era makes for an excellent immersive sim setting.
Consume Me!
Listen, I love raiding ancient tombs or exploring cities lost to time as much as the next gamer, but there’s something to be said about stepping into a much more mundane pair of shoes. Being a teenager sucks, but it’s also most people’s first taste of freedom and self-expression. I thought I’d never willingly go back to that era, but Consume Me! is such a delightful little experience, I couldn’t resist.
Consume Me! stars Jenny, a kid figuring out her relationship to food, her life goals, and navigating the crush she has on a neighbor boy. It’s all simple stuff — balance Jenny’s school, chores, and social life, and eat enough to fuel all of that. But not too much, because you don’t want to get fat, right? Every single panel and picture in this game is drawn with so much warmth and compassion, and joy that I was hooked for the ride. Consume Me! is a sweet little story that occasionally delivers a gutpunch that reminds me why teenage life is wildly overrated, and an overdue reminder to be kind to yourself that I, at least, certainly needed.