Abiotic Factor
Easily game of the year for me. Amazing half-life vibes mixed in with great RPG survival craft gameplay. The game has so much content for what you're paying and more is still coming. Great atmosphere, interesting environments, compelling story and personally just a fuck ton of fun and one of the games I going to remember playing.
Once Human
Chinese mobile dev creator so didn't expect much, but liked the concept art. Game ended up being pretty cool from an artistic standpoint, enemy's were cool looking, gameplay was decent, and what was nice was that it wasn't insanely pay to win or full of micro transactions. It had them, but it wasn't in your face about them. The major downside was the progression gatekeeping that made it so you could only get so far, which was really annoying once you hit it.
Planet Crafter
It was in beta for a while but 1.0 came out this year. Fun little open world survival craft style game, nothing crazy, but has a really comfy vibe and an enjoyable exploration loop. Build things, planet gets more open, build more things, explore more planet. Simple game you can literally 100% in just a few days. Also has new DLC that just came out that essentially doubles the playable content.
Core Keeper
Another game that's been in beta for a while but had the 1.0 release this year. I'm sort of torn on this one honestly. It's an open world survival craft with mining, farming, and dungeon crawler elements. The game definitely has it's charm and is a pretty fun little experience, but it's in this weird space where there's more content than game, if that makes sense? There's a lot of building creativity and automation that can be done where you can make amazing bases and farms, but when it comes to the actual things you need to do to beat the game, there's just not that much. There's no real need to have more than one base, and the best most optimal place to build is right at spawn since it's in the middle of the map and since you need to travel all over the map, compounded with the effort it takes to build a base and the pain it is to move items, it just feels like there's so much you could do, but not much of a reason you should do it.
Pokerogue
Yea, I know, tranny infested pokeslop that was a whole shit show, but fuck, was it fun for about a week. I am not much of a Pokémon fan, and haven't bought/played anything Pokémon in over 10 years, but I saw it and thought fuck it, could be interesting, and damn it was for a little bit. Fun gameplay in the old good 2D style, what more could you ask for?
Palworld
Honestly I'd love the game even if it were total shit, just because of how much of a fuck you it was to Nintendo. What can I say though other than, pokemon with guns. It was a cool multiplayer experience that was really fun while everyone was on the band wagon. If anything I'll remember the game as a fun knock off that pissed off one of the biggest slop producers currently out there.