I finally finished Spider-Man 2 over my holiday vacation. I actually finished it so early in my vacation that I forgot that I never wrote about my final thoughts and impressions of it, which feels like a disservice to what was an incredibly memorable game. As I said in my last post about Spider-Man 2, this game has improved on every part of the previous games, not only mechanically but in terms of storytelling and game craft. It feels like a triumph that somehow got overlooked by most of popular media as it somehow vanished incredibly quickly from the public consciousness in the weeks after its release. I honestly don’t think I could recommend any other Spider-Man game after playing this one, except as a way to get caught up on the plot and so the payoff of events from older games can actually hit as hard as they would if you’d spent so much time getting to know the characters. All in all, Spider-Man 2 is definitely one of my top games from 2023 and I think I got more genuine emotional responses from this game than I did from my hundreds of hours playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (which is the only comparison I’ll make since any other comparison of these two wildly different games is a disserve to two stellar releases from 2023). It just delivered on everything I wanted from it and even went so far as to deliver plenty that I didn’t even know I wanted.