In gaming circles, "GOTY" is a well-recognized acronym. It's the crown jewel of gaming accomplishments, the proclamation that something is the Game of the Year. Most people who play video games use it as a shorthand to identify our favorite titles. And I usually lose countless hours sweating out my pick at the end of each year. The world is in a golden age of gaming.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. I have a long, emotionally-significant history with Elden Ring's developer – I was the first person in the world to review Dark Souls, for heaven's sake – but I still haven't found time to play FromSoftware's latest title. I once flew to California to play Dark Souls for 24 straight hours on a live stream. These games are IMPORTANT to me!

It's rare to find a sequel that manages to outshine its predecessor. To add new depth to its characters, flesh out more of the world, and raise the stakes in a way that feels grand and epic without being silly. A sequel that's more Empire Strikes Back and less Home Alone 2. This kind of achievement is rare enough in movies, rarer still in video games. But at least one game has pulled it off. The first game, Horizon Zero Dawn felt so perfectly self-contained. Or at least so I thought.

Sony Group Corp. released the highly anticipated new entry in its Horizon video game franchise on Friday, and reviews suggest it's primed to be another big PlayStation hit. Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to 2017's Horizon Zero Dawn, earned an 89 on the review aggregation website Metacritic. Bloomberg called it "fantastic" and a worthy successor that's bigger, better and more beautiful than the original. The action-adventure game is set in a post-apocalyptic world full of warring tribes and robot dinosaurs. This new Horizon is the first big PlayStation launch of 2022 and reflects Sony's strategy of releasing blockbuster exclusives that can only be played on its consoles.

However, there's a slight catch: Each skill tree is tied to two weapon types. That means if you have a specific weapon in mind that you want to beef up with new abilities, you're going to have to pour skill points into whatever skill tree it's tied to before the option becomes available to unlock those techniques. Techniques for the Blast Sling, a slingshot players will recognize from "Zero Dawn" that fires bombs and deals damage to a large area, are available through the survivor skill tree -- another reason to invest your points there first, as Blast Slings are some of the more powerful weapons you gain access to early on.

Aloy surveys a vista from'Horizon Forbidden West.' Sony Interactive Entertainment hide caption Aloy surveys a vista from'Horizon Forbidden West.' Horizon Forbidden West returns to a post-apocalypse brimming with wondrous scenery, bestial robots, and scrappy civilizations that arose a thousand years after ecological catastrophe. It's topped my most-anticipated games list for years -- and I know I'm not alone in saying that its predecessor, Horizon Zero Dawn, is one of my favorite games of all time. Yet, I had some trepidation when I finally got my hands on the game. I didn't have to worry; Horizon Forbidden West surpassed my incredibly lofty expectations. I adored getting to know this outcast who grew up shunned by her tribe. Her driving motivation in exploring the mysteries of the world around her was very internal -- sure, she wants to uncover the secrets of what happened to the Old Ones and their ancient technology, but this journey is much more personal for her.

When Guerrilla Games revealed that Horizon Forbidden West would have underwater gameplay, I was not excited. I was in the minority with this feeling, but I have a ridiculous, lifelong fear of large things in deep bodies of water, and games in these settings genuinely freak me out. However, Forbidden West has won me over, thalassophobia and all. The underwater environments are terrifying and filled with gigantic robot monsters, but they're also beautiful and rich, inviting Aloy to explore new layers of her world. From the submerged ruins of Las Vegas to a volcanic hot spring buried under a mountain, swimming is shockingly one of my favorite activities in Forbidden West.

For a big-budget blockbuster game, Horizon Forbidden West is extremely weird. It is a detailed science-fiction story about a red-haired outcast warrior, the tribes that inhabit a post-apocalyptic Earth a thousand years in the future, and a bunch of robot dinosaurs. It's a tangle of different ideas and complicated systems that only reluctantly interact with each other. It's also a damn good time, and especially on PlayStation 5, a stunning example of just how good video games can look in 2022. You kind of get used to its beauty while you're playing, but I found that whenever I returned to the game after making a cup of tea I was newly struck by whatever awesome scene was frozen on the pause screen: Aloy mid-roll away from a murderous mechanical hippo, or standing in the foreground in her war paint with an extraordinary view of mountains and snow behind.

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. The premise of the 2017 video game Horizon: Zero Dawn might sound a little silly to the uninitiated: It's the story of a teenage girl Aloy, an outcast with no parents in a post-apocalyptic world filled with giant robotic dinosaurs known as "machines," which are terrorizing the tribal populace.

The game follows Aloy once more, an outcast turned redeemer of a world in ruins. Set long after a plague of killer robots consumed all life on Earth, a primitive society has sprouted with the help of project Zero Dawn, a global network of terraforming systems and biomatter incubators built as humanity stared down imminent extinction. An AI named Gaia was designed to operate the system autonomously and revitalize Earth using nine subroutines, each with a specific function to make the planet hospitable again or restore life (purifying waterways, making the air breathable, reintroducing animals created from genetic stockpiles, etc.) Terraforming machines with designs inspired by birds, deer, dinosaurs and other animals were originally intended to help maintain the delicate ecosystem, but in recent decades they've fallen out of humanity's control and grown violent.