Vampyr
Reasonably competent hack-and-slash set in early twentieth-century London. You play as a vampire doctor, who must balance his need for blood with his interest in fighting a plague that threatens to overrun the entire city. This is represented in the gameplay as having the option to murder characters for huge amounts of experience, which comes at the price of declining the city's condition even further. It's an interesting dilemma, and I really like how you can maximize your experience by finding all the "clues" about a character that tell you more about who they are. The combat is a blatant ripoff of TW3, down to even having a rough equivalent to Quen, but I guess there are worse games to emulate. Anyway, the game's biggest flaw is the setting. It's dull and gloomy, repetitive, much too small, and most annoyingly of all, presented as a very confusing labyrinth where most passages are gated off. In retrospect it's okay.
Superhot
Superhot is the most innovative shooter I've played in years. The gimmick is that time slows almost to a standstill while you aren't moving, allowing you all the time you need to take in your surroundings, anticipate your enemies' moves, and plan your attack. At the end of every level, you're shown a replay of what just happened in real time, which inevitably makes you feel like the world's greatest badass as you watch yourself dodging bullets, disarming enemies and snatching their weapons from midair, and dispatching foes with maximum efficiency.
The Talos Principle
A fine puzzle game with an interesting level of philosophical depth behind it. As I've mentioned on IRC before, I do dislike one minor feature where a quasi-antagonist engages you in a series of debates on ethics, consciousness, and other heavy subjects. It's not a bad idea, but the problem is that your opponent frequently asks you loaded questions, strawmans any position you put forward, moves the goalposts mid-discussion, and so on - and not only are the dialogue options in these debates very limited, there's also no option to call him out for his blatant logical fallacies. Rushy has argued with me on this point before that the character's fallacious logic is deliberate, and his purpose is to annoy the player rather than challenge their beliefs, but I simply don't believe that was the intention, nor that such an interpretation really fits with the setting. It makes sense in a world where you're grappling with issues of free will and identity that a character like this would be there to have you critically examine your own beliefs and either defend or change them. What doesn't make all that much sense is having a character that's just there to piss you off. I really do hate to be this nitpicky, because I don't think I've ever seen a game that managed to be this thoughtful without also having its head rammed up its ass. It's just a tiny little detail that bothered me.
Katamari Damacy/We Love Katamari
How had I never played this series until now? These games are whimsical, humorous, creative, family-friendly, reasonably challenging without being frustrating, and in general just a wonderfully pleasant and wholesome breath of fresh air. We need more games like this. Stop making games about grim and gritty dark-haired white guys fighting in a grim and gritty world and make more games that are this unique and charming.
Super Mario Sunshine
Not as good as I had hoped or expected. In fact, it's not very good at all. The controls, and in a broader sense, the overall gameplay mechanics, are just too finicky and unintuitive. They've taken a format that was clearly designed for 3D platforming and slapped some light shooter elements on it. The result is a game that feels like you're constantly switching between two modes, so to speak, one for exploring the world and one for properly interacting with it. It's like you have to completely switch focus and get yourself in a different frame of mind whenever you have to spray something, as the smooth controls for platforming go out the window and you have to clumsily manipulate the slow and sluggish FLUDD. Spray the ground beneath you if there's slime there. Respawning enemies are coming at you, better spray them quickly! Now you can focus on your main target - no, wait, you were too slow, now you have to spray the ground again. Here come more enemies! And now you're out of water and have to refill your tank. This is all on top of contending with the awful camera. How did they manage to make it so much worse than it was in 64? And while it's far from the game's biggest problem, I don't think they could have given us worse voice acting if they had tried. Every voiced character sounds like nails on a chalkboard. FLUDD's obnoxious whine is the worst of all. "Mario. Mario. Mario." Did they learn nothing from the reaction to Navi from Ocarina of Time?
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Yes, I hadn't played anything after Melee in this cherished series. Shut up. This was a good next installment, with a great new selection of characters, stages, and items.