Noy's Games of 2026

Rating: 10/10

Played on: Steam Deck

This might be one of my new favorite games I’ve played. It’s absolutely insane, and I don’t want to say too much, as coming into it completely blind was the way to experience it. All I knew going in was that it was a Sokoban puzzle game that was more than it seemed. And man, was that an understatement.

There's a lot going on with this game, and I don’t even know what I want to talk about and reveal. Several times through the experience, I thought I was getting close to finishing the “main” story, but then a new mystery would appear, and I’d be playing for 10 more hours trying to follow that thread. Every single time I reached an “ending,” I was gobsmacked, from the first one I received after eating a certain fruit, to the final one where I learned the true nature of what was happening.

Impressively, this puzzle game makes replaying the same puzzles not a chore. There’s almost a Metroidvania quality to the backtracking, especially after finding certain secrets, that make it exciting and fun to revisit puzzles you’ve already finished. The fact that even restarting your game is a puzzle in and of itself was fascinating, and made the game feel super unique. I mean, I’ve NEVER played a game that uses the Steam achievements like this one does. It plays with a lot of fun meta elements despite the story not focusing on those pieces, and it’s expertly done.

I won’t say any specifics about the storyline, but it was beautiful the whole way through. Great themes of motherhood, legacy, mystery, and trauma, all told through various flashback sequences, hidden dialogue, and other secrets. The characters are all fantastic, and I genuinely can’t pick a favorite, I love them all.

Also. For being a monochrome, GameBoy style puzzle game, the art and music are beautiful. There are many great tracks throughout the puzzle rooms, from epic themes of progress to creepy, mysterious themes of confusion. And the pixel art portraits for every character are incredibly well done, giving everyone a unique personality. Also, hope you like boobs artistic nudity. There’s a lot of that. And it’s awesome.

Rating: 6/10

Played on: Switch 2

Hacker's Memory is such an interesting game to me. It is essentially Cyber Sleuth 1.5, but as a whole seperate release rather than DLC. It's just as long, if not longer, than the original, with the same systems, same selection of Digimon, and following the same story, just concurrently with different characters and plotlines. It has a lot of quality of life and gameplay improvements, more mature character arcs, and a couple new gameplay mechanics. On paper, it feels better than Cyber Sleuth, while simultaneously feeling identical. It feels like a lot to ask to play a 60 hour RPG as a preface to play another, mostly the same 60 hour RPG.

The core gameplay mechanics are all still here, but it lost the sense of discovery. I already knew most of the Digimon I could obtain, and even though I used an entirely new team, it didn't feel like a unique enough experience to justify this being an entirely separate game. There's just as much bloating and repetative quests in this game as in the original Cyber Sleuth, but they feel worse here since I already did all of that in the same system once before.

Again, I loved the story here! It was just frustrating that I had to essentially repeat the same game again to experience it. The characters were all great, Erika's story was well executed, and even though a lot of the plotlines felt disconnected and strangely unresolved, I enjoyed what they ended up doing with them. I mean, there's a pretty much canon gay love story going on here, in addition to the lesbian one from the original story, so that will always get points from me.

Rating: 8/10

Played on: Apple Arcade

I played through this game and all of its extra content while I was bored at work in about 2 hours. It's a cute and relaxing puzzle game with mind-bending puzzles about optical illusions, and 2D and 3D space interacting. The art direction is gorgeous, the music and sound effects are dynamic and emotional, and the puzzles are cute and creative. Nothing was super challenging, especially compared to some of the other puzzle games I've played this year, but it was quite refreshing. I can definitely respect the game for coming out in the early to mid 2010s on mobile without being full of ads and with a distinct beginning and ending. Most mobile games don't do that, and I'm glad that I got to experience this one, even if it was a decade later.

28. Monument Valley 2

Rating: 8/10

Played on: Apple Arcade

Rating: 10/10

Played on: Steam Deck

Toby Fox and his team continue to deliver. Hard to believe that this is the same game as Chapter 1 from all those years ago. This chapter really harkens back to what made those first few chapters so fun and exciting, being a less lore intensive, heavy experience, and focusing more on the fun, goofy adventures with your friends. I've seen a lot of people that are upset by this, but I personally think it's perfect for the direction the game is going.

I think this is the best chapter gameplay wise we've had so far. The feather segments are amazing and fun, the new battles are tough but entertaining, and all of the character designs, animations, and other fun touches are great. I won't go into too many specific details for those who haven't played yet, but I really enjoyed the secret boss and final fight, even if they were some of the most challenging battles in the game thusfar and took me a hot minute to complete.

What this chapter lacks in major lore and worldbuilding, it makes up for with its character development. Susie had her time in the spotlight in Chapter 4, but this chapter really digs into her relationship with Kris, Noelle, and herself even further. Ralsei finally gets some more development, including some genuinely great exploration of their gender, which I can't wait to see develop further in Chapter 6 and beyond. And then there's the weird route. I'm not gonna talk about it here for spoiler purposes, but... wow. Just wow.

Also special shoutout to the music this chapter. Obviously Toby's music is always peak, but this chapter felt dialed up even further, especially with the several collaboration tracks. I popped off hearing that signature Carlos saxophone.

Rating: 8/10

Played on: Steam Deck

Rating: 7/10

Played on: Steam Deck

Blue Prince is a fascinating case study about how games can use frustration as a part of their design. I’m not usually a fan of games that intentionally try to get on your nerves (cough Dark Souls cough), but most of the time it’s about your skill as a player improving. Here, the frustration stems from the randomness of the Mt. Holly Estate, not the player’s skill or even puzzle solving ability. Frequently, I had the answer to a puzzle, and was ready to execute on it, but the game refused to give me the correct room or pathway to get to where I needed to go. When I was solving puzzles and making forward progress in the house, it was one of the most satisfying games I’ve ever played, but when I was blocked from solutions arbitrarily and randomly, it was incredibly frustrating.

I obviously won’t get into any specifics, because if you are interested in this game at all, solving the puzzles on your own is the appeal. Taking physical notes, not looking up solutions to puzzles, and realizing what elements could be linked together was the best part of the experience. I’m frankly impressed that such an interconnected web of puzzles and solutions are all present and solvable, I can’t imagine the design work and testing process, especially with the ability to encounter clues in pretty much any order.

I do wish there was a bit more music. I don’t have any complaints with the rest of the aesthetics, just that walking around and solving in mostly silence was weird. A few emotional swells of music here and there during important rooms and moments were great, but a small ambient tune throughout the mansion would have been nice.

Rating: 8/10

Played on: Switch 2

Infinite dopamine simulator the video game. In a world full of Vampire Survivors-like games, I feel like it's difficult to stand out when the OG just does it best. This breakout version of the concept comes the closest I've seen so far. Characters offer a good amount of variety, there's always something new to unlock, and runs are short and sweet. The hub world base building aspect is an interesting concept, but feels a little underbaked and out of place with the rest of the gameplay loop. It's fun enough, but once you have dozens of buildings and resources to fit in there, it's mostly just trying to puzzle where everything can go as opposed to fully strategizing the optimal place for every building.

Rating: 5/10

Played on: Switch 2

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Rating IS 9/10

Played on IS itch.io

Review

IS

Baba Is You might be the most challenging puzzle game I've played. It's fascinating to me how simple the concept of pushing rules around is, but in execution, it gets surprisingly complex. Often times, the rules are only there to be broken. Your assumptions are always challenged, and you always get the "aha" moment once everything clicks into place. From the beginning of the game where you are just learning how each of the different rules work, to the secret levels after the credits, the levels always did something new. Even stages which were remixes of other levels with just one word or block missing could have vastly different solutions.

AND

Nothing made me feel smarter than solving a level after staring at it and experimenting for half an hour, but interestingly, I didn't ever feel too guilty about looking up hints or solutions to levels when I was completely stuck. The game is clever enough that even if I had to look something up, even just reading the solution step by step could give that same "aha" moment feeling. Unlike some puzzle games, there are almost never any red herrings or extreneous elements here, so its just about figuring out exactly how to manipulate what you have, and breaking every assumption you initially had about the level.

AND

I think my favorite part of the game has to be the several twists near the end of the main levelpack. I won't spoil exactly what happens, but organically finding out what you could do to access more levels after beating the "last" level was one of the most satisfying feelings I've ever had discovering something in a game.

AND

Rating: 8/10

Played on: Steam Deck

SOMA is an incredible sci-fi horror story, with intense themes surrounding identity, humanity, reality, and the sense of self we are burdened with. It has a unique and beautifully terrifying setting under the Atlantic Ocean, with a rare positive spin on the ocean for the genre - the scary monsters and horrifying elements come from inside the man-made structures, not nature. Unfortunately, this story is trapped in a modern horror video game, with most of the tropes and issues that I dislike from the genre as a whole.

I’m not typically a traditional horror fan, I’m usually more here for the psychological, mind-bending, reality altering kind of horror than spooky monsters or serial killers chasing you. I love games and stories that deal with these unsettling elements, especially when they aren’t explicitly a “horror” game. Games like OMORI, Lisa: The Painful, and even Majora’s Mask are some examples of games that have similar themes to most horror games without the tropes and frustrating parts. SOMA was very close to being a perfect experience for me, but being labeled as a “horror” game really hindered its appeal for me personally. The monster stealth/chase sequences feel more frustrating than terrifying, and the enemy behavior is… not the smartest, which really ended up taking me out of the immersive experience a lot of times. There’s some weird subplots that feel like they’re present just to pad the runtime, a bunch of characters who are hard to connect with considering they’ve been dead since long before the events of the story are playing out, and some of the scary stuff that happens is told to you through backstory logs rather than shown in gameplay. Of course, the opposite is true as well for all of these examples, with interesting characters and subplots interrupting your main journey, and quite a good amount of environmental storytelling shown to you, but the rough edges really stuck out to me.

All that being said, the story as a whole was really enjoyable. It had me hooked the whole way through, and the ending especially was incredibly well done. Catherine is a fascinating character, especially when thinking of the implications of who/what she actually is. I would have appreciated a bit more on our main character, Simon, but he did have quite a few interesting elements to explore.

Rating: 10/10

Played on: Steam Deck

Wandersong is a beautiful piece of art. It perfectly encapsulates themes of identity, tradition, imposter syndrome, and friendship through both its gameplay and story. I’m not surprised, considering this is also the team behind Chicory: A Colorful Tale, and more recently, Beastieball! It hit especially hard for me because I chose to play it during the week I was getting married! I eloped with my wonderful partner, so the idea of breaking tradition and doing what makes sense for you really resonated with me.

First, I need to talk about the characters. I love the trope of the player character not being the “protagonist” of the story. You are just a lowly bard, wanting to change the world through sheer willpower and determination. You have a boundless amount of optimism, and fuel everyone you talk to with happiness and hope. It’s great to see such a happy character thriving, and even greater to see what happens when the world challenges that optimism. For example, your main companion through the story, the grumpy witch, Miriam. She’s a character that my past self relates to a whole lot. Most of the time, she is grumpy just for the sake of being grumpy, she’s still figuring out who she is, she has a lot of imposter syndrome, and doesn’t really know how to make friends. I used to struggle with a lot of these things as a high schooler and college student, and I still do struggle with some of these things. Watching a character like Miriam experience these things while also making lasting bonds and growing was really powerful. I nearly shed some tears during a couple of her monologues near the end of the game.

Then there’s the hero, Audrey, who is a very interesting case. Obviously, she’s the hero, the rightful protagonist of this story. She kills the monsters to save the world! But no hero is perfect, and Audrey definitely has some… flaws. She’s a narcissist, insecure, and let’s the title she is gifted get to her head. I won’t spoil exactly how she fits in to the bard’s tale and the overarching plot, but I thought that it was a super unique take on a character who feels so redeemable that you don’t see very often in media.

The story itself being is a fun take on the typical hero’s journey adventure, as a character who was supposed to just be an NPC. It works well as a parody of those kinds of stories while also giving it plenty of respect and appreciation. I’ve already gone over most of the main characters but I loved all of the side characters each chapter would introduce too! Everyone has their own backstory, motivations, and opinions, and they all flesh out the world brilliantly.

The gameplay itself is also super fun, I was a big fan of the musical puzzle-platforming. While simple, the puzzles were fun to solve and the musical accompaniment from the bard’s singing made everything so dynamic and cute. All of the different unique gameplay styles were interesting and varied, from singing specific melodies in order, to spinning your joystick around to sing scales rapidly. Even some of the non-important gameplay elements like dancing or pitching each note up and down with the triggers were fun additional touches that just showed how much love and care was put into this game.

Of course, the game’s soundtrack also slaps. You can’t really be a musically focused game and not have a soundtrack that you can bop along to everything. Every song is dynamic, with the bard being able to belt out into song pretty much whenever you want. It adapts to each of the notes that you hit and different environmental factors also can join in the background and add more instrumentation.

Rating: 8/10

Played on: Switch 2

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between and outside of the gender binary... I'm a Digimon fan now. I had SO much fun playing Cyber Sleuth, and I'm glad I'm finally giving this series a shot. Disclaimer, I played the Complete Edition but haven't played Hacker's Memory yet, as I poorly depecited in the image above. I'm counting it as a separate game so there will be a different review for that when I get to it. Also, I'll probably compare to Pokémon a lot. I'm sure Digimon fans are annoyed by that by now, but it's my largest frame of reference so... sorry.

Playing this with very little prior knowledge of Digimon took me back to 2013 when I played Pokémon X for the first time and discovered Pokémon was actually pretty cool and fun. One thing that Digimon immediately does better though is the sense of discovery. My favorite part of this game, by far, was finding new Digimon, seeing silouettes of what they could evolve into, and making it my life's mission to find out what the evolution looked like - WITHOUT looking it up online first. The amount of times I would evolve my cute little rookies into some horrible monstrosity was more than made up for with the badass designs of most of the ultimate and mega level Digimon in this game. I have discovered so many favorites, and I feel more attached to most of them than I do for most Pokémon, simply due to the fact that I raised them from their little baby form. Hours of effort, grinding stat points, evolving and devolving, and hundreds of battles to build up friendship points - all of this really feels like you're bonding with your little friends. Pokémon does this too, of course, but I honestly felt that this game makes that bond feel stronger.

Honestly, the systems felt like a lovely fusion between Pokémon and Persona, in a weird way. Much like Persona, the next forms of your monsters may look and play completely differently from the previous form. Unlike Persona, and more like Pokémon, you still know it's your little guy under there, and it's just grown up and gotten stronger. I find it harder to get attached to the demons in Persona, because you're consantly fusing them to make new ones, but here, I felt like I had a core team that I kept making stronger, like Pokémon. Also, having 11 slots for party members was amazing as a new fan who kept finding cool new favorites to use.

Battling is also pretty fun here! The typing system is super interesting, with each Digimon having one of 4 main types (vaccine, data, virus, and free), and an elemental subtype. It has the traditional rock paper scissors formation for the main types, with free being the neutral option, on top of a (much simpler than Pokémon's) type chart for elemental types. As long as you have a decent variety of main types throughout the game, I found the elemental types didn't matter too much, given their smaller boost to damage done than the main type advantage. This, along with the massive team size, was great for experimenting with new Digimon and not having to worry too much about doubling up on type combinations, unlike when I play Pokémon and have to divy up my 6 party slots with 6 entirely different typed Pokémon, since it feels suboptimal to have two water types on one team.

So, overall, I loved the gameplay and basic loop of this game. There were some minor grievences I had here and there, especially when it came to certain evolution requirements, repetative side quests, and some dungeons with massive encounter rates, but overall, I found that I actually quite enjoyed the grind-y nature of the game, since there was always something I was working towards. It's definitely not for everyone, but at the point of my life I'm at right now, a game to sink dozens of hours into to get a new funny guy was just what I needed.

Unfortunately, I don't have as many good things to say about the story experience. Most of the time, it was strangely hard to follow, due to an exceptionally poor localization job. I understood the broad strokes, but in moment to moment gameplay, there were a lot of weird spelling, punctuation, and grammactic errors, obvious "word for word" translations from the original Japanese text rather than trying to make sense, and even some pronoun and name switching. None of this ruined the game - I wasn't really playing for the story anyway - but it definitely took me out of the experience a bit. I think some of the characters were fun, and plot twists were interesting, but it's certainly not the best "a bunch of kids attempt kill a god" story I've seen.

I try to rate games I play based on the experience I had with them. Sometimes, my rating is more objectively based, other times, the subjective emotions take hold. Here, I'm averaging the two - on an objective, game design level, this probably gets a 7/10, maybe even a 6/10 if I'm being pessamistic. Subjectively though, I had so much fun with this game, I'd probably put it around a 9/10. I'm averaging that out to an 8/10, along with a healthy dose of motivation to play Hacker's Memory, Time Stranger, and many other Digimon games in the future.

Rating: 9/10

Played on: Steam Deck

Goddammit, they got me again. I avoided Vampire Survivors for a long time because I knew it would suck me in, and when I finally tried it a year and a half ago, I learned my suspicions were correct, and got hopelessly addicted to it. I 100%ed the main game, played through a lot of the DLC, discovered plenty of fun secrets and broken strategies, and found all of the vampires the game had to offer. Then, just when I thought I had broken the addiction, a spinoff roguelike deckbuilder is announced, with dungeon crawling like Etrian Odyssey. And suddenly there’s a demo for Steam NextFest that I play for like 4 hours straight. And then a few months later the game comes out and I’m already pretty damn close to 100%ing it within a week.

Rating: 9/10

Played on: Steam Deck

LET’S GO GAMBLING! Aw, dangit! LET'S GO GAMBLING!

Rating: 8/10

Played on: Steam Deck

Rating: 7/10

Played on: Steam Deck

Raccoin manages to be very unique feeling while also wearing its inspirations on its sleeve. Clearly inspired by the casino roguelike craze post-Balatro, and the physics based roguelike style of Peglin, this coinpusher game has plenty of fun synergies and possibilities.

In fact, I’d argue it has… too many synergies. It took me about 4 runs to completely crack the game wide open. I got a score of 2.5e199, and only stopped because I got bored and wanted to start a new run. It’s satisfying and dopamine providing, sure, but when that happens every run, it loses its luster pretty quickly. It’s not that there’s not enough content, it’s almost the opposite - there’s too many things to help enhance your score. There’s coins, clips, consumable items, gadgets and stickers to put on your board, a wheel to customize, expansions to how many coins you can have, different characters, and probably more that I’m forgetting or haven’t even unlocked yet. There’s multiple difficulty levels too, but honestly the game didn’t hook me enough to want to pursue those.

Rating: 9/10

Played on: Steam Deck

Speaking of sequels, here’s the big one! I’ve been excited for StS2 for years, and I’m so glad it’s finally here. It’s in a very unique position, as StS was THE foundational deck-building-roguelike experience that most games in the genre took inspiration from. Now, nearly a decade later, StS2 takes elements from those inspired games, mods of the original game, and its own fun and unique ideas to make a brilliant new experience. Cards can be upgraded in more than one way, there’s a multiplayer mode that I have yet to experience, new and old characters have fun new synergies and mechanics, there are different branching acts, a slew of new enemy and boss mechanics, events, relics, and so much more. There’s even more lore and unlocks compared to the first game, which helps the extrinsic replayability factor as opposed to just focusing on the intrinsic value of getting better at the game.

So why have it rated as a 9/10, when I gave the first one a 10/10? Every aspect feels improved and fleshed out compared to StS1, right? Well, almost every element. Much like the first game, we’re starting the StS2 life cycle in early access, so balance is a bit wonky. I got into StS1 after all of the content updates and balance patches, so I had a nice, consistent, battle-tested experience the entire time I played that game. Playing StS2 in early access is a whole different beast, with balance patches regularly coming out, some enemies and cards feeling much stronger or weaker than they should, and some mechanics completely changing over only a couple days. This review is for the game a month or two in, and it’s likely the game will be in a completely different state if you come across this in a year or two. Knowing what MegaCrit is capable of with the first game, I’m 99% sure that my final rating for this game will hit that 10/10 once there is new content, final balance tweaks, new alternate acts and a finale act similar to the first game. But, as of now, there’s still a lot of tweaking to be done. I’m excited to witness the process this time though!

By the way, character rankings and opinions for those curious:

Necrobinder - Easily my new favorite, I love Osty being a tank of temporary HP and/or an absolute powerhouse, Doom is a really fun mechanic to play with, and the animations are super fun.

Silent - I’m so happy my favorite StS1 character was buffed to infinity. Poison finally feels insanely good, discard and the new Sly keyword is absolutely busted, I was initially hesitant about shivs feeling nerfed but they’re definitely just as strong, if not stronger than they were in the first game. Plus, the new design slays (pun fully intended).

Ironclad - I liked the Ironclad well enough in StS1, but runs always felt difficult to get started for me. Now it feels like there’s a lot more options and directions for his builds to go, and more cards to get into certain builds. Exhaust, strength, and barricade builds are all still satisfying, but now self damage builds and strike focused builds have more options and feel much more viable.

Defect - Despite the awesome new design, new glass orb and the hype of its reveal after we weren’t sure if it was even alive in this game, the Defect feels pretty same-y to how it played in the first game, but maybe even weaker. Focus for your orbs feels harder to get, power builds still require a lot of setup to get rolling, and builds not focusing on the orbs still feel weak. Maybe this is just a skill issue on my part, but the Defect hasn’t clicked with me yet.