BAKOON is Bay Area artist Oliver Leach. When he's not creating his art, he's being a good boy on Twitter and Twitch.

Hi again everybody. How is your hammer hanging. Welcome to the 5th annual list of video game things I liked this year.

The hand-axe throw-and-return felt cool as shit, every single time. It made a lot of money so hopefully they will do another one. Egypt or Japan, right? Maybe modern day like Castlevania: Lord of Shadow 2. Kratos taking on the god of the modern age: the almighty dollar. Did I, in fact, just blow your dang mind?

From 2017 but I didn’t get around to it last year, so lick me. This Prey rules. The last one had that opening bit in the bar and some nice anus doors, but this one was actually interesting and fun to play. Felt like System Shock with an X-Files plot with a little nug of Philip K. Dick in there as well.

They could have just had one kind of bird and let everybody go home from work early and this game would have still been a really great little debauched cowboy sociopath sandbox. I would have had a good time if there was just [BIRD] instead of like, three dozen different kinds of swamp heron.

Also, it was an interesting iteration of the binary video game morality system. It wasn’t a measure of whether you were a good or bad person, but instead a measure of public perception of your morality. You could be a paragon of virtue, a true wild-west hero, and still lure people away from town at night and hack them to pieces in the woods. Just like in life I guess. Please don’t actually hack people to death in the woods.

Just kidding, this sucked nads. The video game equivalent of watching a parkour guy take a fat shit onto a balloon while Reel Big Fish plays out of his phone speakers. The Fuck happened here?

When you are in a combat situation in this game and you are on top of your stuff you feel unstoppable. Devil May Cry 3 vibes. The best non-fighting Marvel comics video game title. Second place is easily Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the PS2. Or Maybe that Punisher game where you can feed dudes to a polar bear.

I played Risk of Rain until my eyes bled, so Dead Cells was right up my alley. Controls felt perfect, like moving Alucard around in Symphony of the Night. That is the highest praise.

Snappy, fun as shit, and made by some decent people.

Uh oh Uh oh here comes the dude / And now he’s running up and down the street with the juice.

I’ve played the Yakuza games since the shitty PS2 dub of the first one, their systems are etched onto my soul. I also love to watch people getting poked once by a screaming man resulting in their head exploding out of their asshole while they scream for mercy. This game had those two things together, at once.

I never got around to Recettear so this was my first time with a game like this: an action-RPG, inspired by 16 bit era stuff, where you play the town’s merchant instead of a roaming hero. The look of it was nice and it was an interesting concept. Sell nasty garbage you beat out of monsters to idiots.

The last game in the Soul Blazer series by Quintet for the Super Nintendo. I hadn’t played it in long enough and it is still amazing. You play immortal hollow earth action Jesus, traveling through history, righting wrongs and helping create the globe-spanning parasite known as human civilization. Never came out in the States for whatever reason. If you’ve never got around to it or never heard of it maybe you should remedy that situation, it is a great one. Now playable on the SouljaConsole.

This is a movie, not a video game, but I put it on this list anyway. A guy picks up another guy from the floor by his dick and balls with a meathook. He then rips off the other guy’s dick and balls with the previously mentioned meathook. True masterpiece.

The perfect length of a game and some legitimately great music. The duck quacking, dog barking beat that plays when you finish a level is immense.

A real pleasant and wholly satisfying experience, my friends.