I don’t have an aggressive preamble this year. These are 2015’s best games.
CIBELE
Star Maid Games
Finding yourself is difficult. Finding someone else is complicated. Cibele bears both burdens in a candid and empathetic glimpse of burgeoning love in the 21st century. So many games either waste or misunderstand their medium as a storytelling device while Cibele thrives inside of its own technology. By no coincidence, it’s one of the most human and relatable games, too. My review.
XENOBLADE CHRONICLES X
Monolith Soft
Xenoblade Chronicles X is a boundless demonstration of the relationship between scale and structure, and its myriad of frenzied ideas are willed into cohesion only by the congruence of its supporting systems. Xenoblade Chronicles X may be obsessed with scale (and proudly so), but it doesn’t leave the player feeling consumed by it. My review.
SUNLESS SEA
Failbetter Games
Sunless Sea stresses an appreciation for resource management, vaguely turn-based combat, roguelike principles of calculated disposability, and basic role-playing. All of this builds to a confident level of intimidation – it can require an exceptional amount of time to procure the particular nature of Sunless Sea’s identity and intentions – but not without a certain indelible magnetism. Making sense of Sunless Sea’s complexity just seems to be one of its underlying challenges. My review.
ROCKET LEAGUE
Psyonix
Most sports would probably be better if human participants were replaced with cars. While this thesis is typically reserved for late night conversations with close friends, Psyonix accepted it as a genuine assignment and produced Rocket League. It’s soccer with cars—and the execution of this idea has no business being as good as the fantasy. My review.
HER STORY
Sam Barlow
Her Story’s novelty is based on its noteriaty as a game with full-motion video. Its strength is that its uses its gimmick as an asset, rather than a selling point. Wirehead, Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and countless other misguided efforts from the 3DO and Sega CD salted the Earth for decades, but Her Story persevered through, rather than because of its presentation. It was fun make sense of its disorganized and deliberately non-linear mystery by watching specific clips a dozen times, temporarily learning Morris Code, and filling pages and pages of a notebook with supposed clues. Her Story purged the rigid trial-and-error modus operandi of FMV games and replaced it with sequences that felt comfortable inside of their medium.
THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT
CD Projekt RED
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an exhibition of lessons learned not only from CD Projeckt RED’s past work, but also from a spectrum of open-world and role-playing contemporaries. It’s expected for games of this nature to excel at taking your time away. What’s most impressive about The Witcher 3 is that rarely seems to waste it. My review.
BLOODBORNE
FromSoftware
With aggression as its invitation, Bloodborne invokes a calculated shift in Souls parlance. Its aim isn’t necessarily a course correction, but rather a Y-axis slant into an alternative series of objectives. Sacrificed are a few degrees of personalization, only to be replaced by a renewed sense of distress and wonder. Bloodborne’s demanding novelty, even with its unrepentant focus, feels built to last and different enough from its Souls cousins. My review.
WESTERADO: DOUBLE BARRELLED
Ostrich Banditos
The search for truth may be the driving force of any revenge tale, but whether Westerado’s truth is fabricated, earned, implied, or rejected is left to the player. You can practically do whatever you want, and, rather than damn the consequences, Westerado makes it easier to embrace them. Furthermore, Westerado functions as an ideal medium between the overbearing narratives of modern adventure games and the sacred-content design of open-world peers. Much like your protagonist, Westerado is humbly fearless. My review.
LIFE IS STRANGE
Dontnod
I don’t know if I can accurately articulate how authentic it felt to be a teenage girl in art school in the year 2013, but all five episodes of Life is Strange sold it pretty well. When I look back on Life is Strange I actually don’t think of the (actually really well done) time travel mechanic, or how said mechanic is so neatly woven into the narrative, but rather what it feels like to be that person in this specific time. Comparing Life is Strange to My So Called Life is an obvious connection, but it’s no less true. It’s more about mood, theme, time, and sentiment than any other definition. Read Nathan’s reviews of Episode 1 and Episode 2.
GALAK-Z: THE DIMENSIONAL
17-BIT
Galak-Z pushes the freewheeling buoyancy of 80’s anime against a hostile ecosystem of evil empires, insane pirates, and skeevy space bugs. Beneath this veneer of chaos is a shifting alliance of applied skill and honest luck, and muscling toward the former forces the player to fight every fight like it’s their last. As roguelikes go, Galak-Z’s tireless air of optimism makes a case for its own dimension. My review.
Past year’s top ten lists: 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014
Other games I greatly enjoyed this year:
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture – Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s take on interactive fiction is admirable, even in its struggle to manage personal discovery alongside narrative composition. I love its calamitous tranquility, I identify with the plights of its characters, and I’m enamored with its confident storytelling, but its reluctance to disclose its disposition adversely affects its capability. My review.
Until Dawn – Characters that were dumber than dirt may have been a deliberate decision, but it adversely affected my enjoyment of the game. In any case the consequences of my decisions In Until Dawn mattered slightly more than they did in most modern adventure games, and it’s a commendable step in nudging the genre forward. Nathan’s review.
Grow Home – While other 3D platformer revivals trade on nostalgia, Grow Home accepts its trappings and makes something brand new out of them. It’s (probably) the most accomplished pure-climbing game I’ve ever played, and growing buds literally wherever I wanted provided a neat sense of ownership over Grow Home’s world. Incredible scale, a streamlined and great-feeling set of mechanics, a god damn jetpack, and the courtesy not leave before the party’s over all helped make Grow Home 2015’s finest 3D platformer.
The Magic Circle – The Magic Circle is a playable videogame about a broken videogame made by people who aren’t good at making videogames. While you’re busy sorting between layers of candid reality and marginal fiction, The Magic Circle swiftly installs an impressive degree of agency behind its narrative and mechanics. It’s not exactly commentary or criticism, but a relatable demonstration of game development hell and, ironically, one that’s fun to engage as an untethered party. My review.
Neon Struct – Neon Struct conceals a modern society engulfed in menacing surveillance programs by drenching itself in the soothing aura of 1985’s neon nightlife. It’s an unexpected dichotomy—tranquility isn’t the sort of evocation expected of extremely topical police-state paranoia—but one that Neon Struct dispenses with plausible seeds of insurrection. Colorful symmetry is the expected outcome, but Neon Struct surprises with plenty of shades of grey, too. My review.
3D After Burner II, 3D Outrun, and basically all of M2 + Sega’s 3D classics on 3DS – Have you seenOutrun on a 3DS at sixty frames-per-second with 3D at full blast? My god.
Gravity Ghost – The impartial reality of childhood promises tragedy is treated with same innocence as prosperity. We’re better equipped to learn from mistakes than act on advice, a phase of humanity Gravity Ghost both indulges and exposes to its own limitations. Expressed as a product, Gravity Ghost is an inventive platformer with a precarious and affecting narrative. Absorbed as an experience, Gravity Ghost makes a better case for the union of interactivity and storytelling. My review.
Dying Light – Dying Light presents a dynamic and frustrating parallel; it’s quick to dazzle its audience with heaping stacks of energetic (if not wholly borrowed) content, but equally capable of unravelling under the burgeoning stress of weaving it all together. A reticence to acknowledge its own pratfalls leaves the responsibility of proper assembly to the player. If you’re up to that particular challenge, Dying Light’s one of the more impressive games of this emerging generation. My review.
ScreamRide – Peers in seemingly disparate genres have assumed mastery over impulsive tests of skill, the strategic obliteration of unreliable architecture, and a judicious regard for practical engineering, but none have been arranged together as uniform and effective as ScreamRide. For a game so persistently engrossed in outlandish destruction, it accompanying structure is surprisingly sound. My review.
Final Fantasy Type-0 HD – Only Final Fantasy could get away with the paradox of a clean slate that simultaneously references countless tropes endemic to its name. Type-0 HD can feel like the tortuous result of hasty assembly, but if allowed the time and energy to piece itself together, it stands as clear and original as others bearing its exalted title. My review.
Soma – I Like Soma! I haven’t finished Soma! My wife and I sit down to play this every now and then but we never get very far before our collective anxiety gives way to interactive paralysis. Steven’s review.
Transformers: Devastation – It’s sort of a miracle that Activision green-lit a Transformers game based on a thirty-year-old interpretation of the Transformers license. It’s another miracle that PlatinumGames got to make it. It felt like a lost episode of the old TV show, and while most the mechanics (and some of the same animations!) were lifted straight from Metal Gear Rising or Bayonetta, it was enough of a novelty to last through its six hour run time.
Crypt of the Necrodancer – The will to power seems incongruous with impulsive action, but it’s through this passage of devilish irony that Crypt of the NecroDancer thrives. It’s the acquired and applied knowledge of a roguelike against the demanding drive of a rhythm game, and yet Crypt of the NecroDancer escapes the gaze of a simple curiosity and leaps to an ideal hybrid of two disparate genres. My review.
Games I regrettably missed this year: Axiom Verge, Yakuza 5, Tales from the Borderlands, Undertale, The Beginner’s Guide, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, Yoshi’s Woolly World, Splatoon, Fallout 4, Metal Gear Solid V, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Downwell, Super Mario Maker
Greatly looking forward to in 2016:: Persona 5, The Last Guardian, Final Fantasy XV, Firewatch, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Dark Souls 3, Mass Effect Andromeda, Tacoma, Far Cry Primal, Star Fox Zero, Nier Automata, Allison Road, Crackdown 3, We Happy Few, Bravely Second: End Layer, Yakuza 0, Scalebound, hopefully more of Kentucky Route Zero, and VR.
