Started Diablo 4 a couple of days ago and alternate between the Deck and PC. Performance is much better than I would have thought, and even as a KB+M elitist I like the gamepad controls.
Then there are also some Vampire Survivors-like games. VS itself, with the latest DLC (Among Us collab) and Soulstone Survivors.
I also got Dave the Diver and Enter the Gungeon in the Winter Sale, but I don't think I'll get to those any time soon.
The levels / balance in Pillars can be a bit weird. If you do all the side content, or you're doing the DLC, when it's available, you're going to be overleveled. However, the game asks you once or twice, if you want to raise the enemies to your level, so they're still challenging. I didn't do that (I didn't help all those old ladies over the street, just so that some random bad guy gets some free exp), which meant a lot of the story fights were pretty easy by the end. There are still some fights designed for (near) max level though, which were really hard.
I've been playing a bunch of games this week.
First, I did go back to Tunic and got the good ending, and I'm glad I did, because now the little fox was happy. I had to look up hints or the solutions to some of the puzzles though, some of those were just too cryptic for me.
Then I tried two Vampire Survivors-likes, Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors and Soulstone Survivors, both of which I played on my Steam Deck. Also, both are in Early Access.
I only did a few runs in Pathfinder. I might just be bad, but maybe the game isn't really suited for the Deck right now. There are tons of enemies that shoot small projectiles, that are just a pain to see on the small-ish screen, so dodging everything can be a pain. It also felt like the hit boxes aren't that good right now, but again, that might just be me, I didn't play the game for too long. I'd have to try the game on my desktop PC to check out how it plays there. One thing of note though, this game has local multiplayer, which might be interesting to some people. When you're playing alone, the second character sticks to you as a companion and just deals some extra damage. I also have to mention the menuing in this game, on controller it's complete garbage. Sometimes you select some menu category with triggers, change sub-categories with bumpers, sub-sub-categories with the D-Pad and then the actual thing you want to select with the stick. I had to constantly check where I was and what I had to press, which sucked.
The other, Soulstone Survivors, was a lot more fun for me. You get up to six weapons, and also upgrades for those weapons and generally for your character. In this game, weapons can have "tags", like melee, area, electric, whatever, and upgrades can affect one specific weapon, all of them or everything of a certain type, which can be neat. There are also tons of small QoL details, like highlighting which weapons get upgraded, a summary for your stats in a run or how much damage your weapons are doing. That last point is neat, because you can keep replacing your weapons, even when you already have all six, and if you don't want to, you just get a normal upgrade. When not in a run, there's just tons of meta progression with a gazillion different materials. You can unlock characters, weapons for those characters, a skill tree, something called runes, which I have no idea what they are, and maybe more. Menus also suck, although mostly because everything is just crammed full of stuff and a bit too small on the Deck. It's not as bad as Pathfinder though.
Next, a small game I saw while going through the Steam Discovery Queue, Froggy's Battle. This is a Roguelike, where you're playing as a frog on a skateboard, that's going around in a loop. You kill enemies by bumping into them, or with weapons you might get at the end of a level. The game is really short, I beat the boss after a bit more than ten runs, about 90 minutes, although there's a hard mode, which I didn't do. The main difficulty, in my opinion, comes from the controls, since you're riding a skateboard in a loop, so you'll end up upside down, which flips some of your controls. When the loop is filled with enemies, it can get pretty chaotic. The game has a bunch of different control schemes, so you can try to find whatever works best for you, so it isn't terrible. Doing sick kickflips, while wielding a magic wand, is pretty cool.
Finally, I started Diablo 4. I'm playing a Druid, because eventually I hope to punch everything as a werebear, although right now I'm punching stuff with stones that I summon from the earth. Even though I'm almost level 40, I'm still pretty early in the story, because I just run around in the world, doing side quests, going into the dungeons and whatnot. I'm trying to focus a bit more on the main story, just so I can get the mount and get around the world faster. While I am a KB+M elitist and mainly play on my PC, I also installed the game on my Steam Deck, and it runs really well on there. I turned everything down, except like textures, so it doesn't look as bad in closeups, but I'm basically always at 60fps, with room to spare. Only in the bigger city do I go below 60 sometimes, which is also pretty much the only time when I hear the fan turning up. Playing on controller is also neat, except for the menus (again). It also does have native ultrawide support, it's nice to have a modern game, where you don't have to look for patches or fixes, to fill the whole screen.
As for my favorite game of the year (that was released in 2023), it has to be Baldurs Gate 3, not much really came close.
It's close between Baldurs Gate 3 and Nioh 2.
BG3 is just that good, but Nioh 2 is one of my all time favorites, and I finally cleared everything in the game, early 2023.
Were they? Their three releases since Saints Row 4 ten years ago weren't that well received. It's not like they were releasing smash hit after smash hit (lately). Maybe they killed themselves.
But you still need an SSD to match the cheapest OLED model, not to mention all the other small improvements (and not so small) you're missing out on.
So, unless you just want to tinker, in my opinion this doesn't make sense anymore, since the OLED was released. Unlucky timing from the company that made / sells this screen.
It's all those DLC. You don't just stop buying them, after you're already 20 DLC deep.
I'm not really into Horror games. I played the RE2 Remake and RE7 years ago and liked them, which made me also get the RE3 Remake and Village, but I've yet to play them.
Lots of F2P titles making a lot of money, and GTA still selling tons of Shark Cards as usual.
Sons of the Forest really surprised me as one of the Top Sellers. There were lots of players the week it was released in Early Access and people were talking about the game, but then I barely heard anything about the game. It seems the game also doesn't have any DLC or in-game purchases right now, so it's all game sales, which is pretty impressive.
I was recently "burned" with Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is still in rough shape, after all this time (I think there's some fuckery going on with the publisher, where Owlcat can't update the game anymore), so I'll definitely give it some time. Rogue Trader might also be in a similar boat as BG3, where the later Acts have more bugs, since those weren't in any playtests or betas, but that's just what I read.
I'm also fine with not getting everything, so that isn't an issue. All I know of 40k is basically through various memes on the internet, throughout the years, so basically nothing.
I think two or three stories briefly mention that last boss, so it wasn't too hard to figure out that something is there, but the game just makes it so unappealing and uninteresting to actually look for it, that I just can't be bothered.
I'll probably eventually get the sequel. Like you said, I've basically only heard praises of the game, but it's gonna be some time before I do.
You mean for the actual vote? Because you could nominate any game, no matter if you played it or even bought it on Steam, and the Top 5 nominations in each category made it to the final vote.