The first game on the list that didn’t actually release this year, Fatum Betula is also the game most likely to be misconstrued as a drug trip. But like, a really good drug trip.

• Release Year: 2020
• Developer: Bryce Bucher
• Platform: all of them

Fatum Betula is a very experimental… adventure game, I suppose you would call it? There’s a plot in there, something about feeding a tree to determine the fate of the universe? I don’t know, it’s not important.

What is important are the puzzle and exploration aspects of the game. It’s all about roaming around the world and trying to see which objects interact with other objects. The world isn’t particularly big, but it does have a very diverse selection of little areas to explore, and a whole bunch of weird characters to meet along the way. You help some, kill others, and even be horribly disturbed by one or two.

The goal of the game is to find various different liquids, which you’ll then take back to feed your little sapling to see what happens. These liquids include things oil, blood, tomato soup, and immortality. Each one you bring back will give you a different ending, and those endings range from creepy to silly to philosophical to nihilistic. It runs quite a gamut, and while earning them all is a bit of a repetitive task, they’re definitely worth seeing, and I think that puzzling out how to find all the different liquids is definitely a reward in itself. There’s also a super-secret ending that will give you a lot of hints on how to find the others, so if you happen to discover that early, it’ll be either a huge boon or a tidal wave of spoilers, depending on your perspective.

I quite enjoyed my time with Fatum Betula. It took me just shy of three hours to discover all of the endings, and I think that was just the right amount of time to spend in this delightfully odd world. While it didn’t have a particularly cohesive narrative and several aspects were a little more obfuscated than they really needed to be, the thrill of discovery was more than enough to keep me going. It was a video game experience that felt completely fresh and unique to me, and that’s something that I’m finding harder and harder to come by as time goes on, so I really appreciate it.

Continuing down the list of the games I liked most that I played this year, we get onto probably the most unexpected choice of them all: Supermarket Simulator.

• Release Year: 2025
• Developer: Nokta Games
• Platform: PC

Yeah, this is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a game about running your own little supermarket. It’s going to be a bit of a challenge to stretch my rambling out for this one!

So, the premise is that you’re opening up a little mom-n-pop-style supermarket in the big city. You have your little space, a checkout register, and some shelves. At first, it’s up to you to buy some things to stock said shelves, put out your product, and then ring customers through. You may even have to take out a loan to get yourself up and running at first.

Over time, and as you earn enough money to expand, your little store will grow. You’ll be able to order new products, buy some storage space, increase the square footage of your store, and even hire staff. Let me tell you: once you hire a cashier and you can focus your time on other things, the game changes dramatically. No longer are you locked behind the register, watching as your products slowly deplete and have no power to replenish them. It’s an amazing feeling.

Of course, there’s a little more to it than just keeping products on shelves and customers happy. Eventually, you’ll get big enough that shoplifters will start to target you. Installing security cameras and hiring a guard help, but it’s a lot more fun to chase them down and beat them with a baseball bat to get your product back. If only that was allowed in real life… You’ll also eventually start getting delivery orders, which is the bane of my existence, since you can’t hire a courier to do them (at least not yet), and you’ll have to choose between running across town to deliver two cartons of milk, or just ignoring them.

Lastly, you get plenty of options to customize your store, from simply changing the name, to repainting the walls and floors to whatever colours you like, to adding in speakers so you can torture your customers with generic muzak. It’s not something I’ve spent too much time or money on yet, but I appreciate the options.

This is one of those games that isn’t super deep, but is incredibly hard to put down. It’s one of those absolutely deadly “just one more day” kind of games that can keep you hooked for hours if you don’t set a hard timer for yourself, and I have lost entire afternoons to it. As a modern PC game, the dev team is putting out regular updates, and though they’re mostly bugfixes, a big new update actually came out fairly recently with a bunch of new stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if the game keeps growing and getting even better over the next year or so. Possibly even longer if the player base sticks around.

I’ve recently become more than a little enamored of an independent video game called BALL x PIT. To be quite honest with you, I’m not entirely sure how one is supposed to pronounce that title, but I’ve just been saying “ball pit” in my head. What I am sure of is that I won’t be capitalizing the whole thing every time I type it out. That’s just obnoxious.

Ball x Pit is, largely, a brick-breaker game. You’ve probably played one before. Arkanoid, Kirby’s Block Ball, Wizorb, uh… others. If these don’t ring a bell, the gameplay consists of shooting a little ball up a shaft, where it will bounce around a bunch, and if it hits one of the bricks in said shaft, the brick goes away. The goal is generally to clear all the bricks without letting your ball fall off the bottom of the screen. Ball x Pit works a bit differently, as waves of brick-shaped monsters will constantly spawn and slowly move towards the bottom of the screen. If they reach the bottom, they will attack your character, and if you lose all your HP it’s game over.

However! You have not one, but a small arsenal of balls to fire at the encroaching enemy, giving you a much better chance at success. And not unlike Vampire Survivors (and the many clones that followed it), enemies will drop crystals when they perish, and collecting enough crystals will net you a level up. This gives you a (random) stat increase, as well as a choice from three upgrade items. Upgrades come in two flavours: new balls with special effects, and passive items that confer all sorts of advantages. Sometimes one of the options will be a thing you have, in which case you’ll be able to upgrade it to further boost its effectiveness.