I decided I wanted to write something for the games that I
played this year, but I didn’t want to do the vanilla blurbs for each game, or
write a top 10. Instead, here they are, all the games I’ve played (for more
than an hour or so), plus one thing that’s stuck with me from them, plus how
you should play them.
Editing will happen some other time probably never,
because I want to finish this and post it.
Also, I think only five of these games actually came out this year. Look, I'm behind the times.
Saints Row, 3 and
IV:
·
This was the best gaming experience I had in all
of 2015. I’ve laughed plenty at games, but this is the funniest a big-budget
game has ever been for me, and the humor keeps up for tens of hours. The
gameplay may not be challenging, but it feels
great, especially in SRIV when the team really understood their systems.
·
Keep a notebook nearby to write down the best
lines, and drink every time you do.
Digital: A Love Story,
Analogue: A Hate Story, and Hate Plus
·
The biggest drag of most visual novels is their
interface, with character portraits slightly changing their expression as you
click through a waterfall of chat boxes. Christine Love doesn’t fall into this
trap: Digital is played out in a DOS interface, through BBS messages and
console commands, and Analogue and Hate Plus are storytelling-via-Wikipedia. Digital
especially brings its 90s setting bone-deep with the interface.
·
Put aside your cynicism and let yourself fall a
little in love through your screen. Also, be prepared to look up info about 13th-century
Korean society.
Transistor:
·
If you aren’t playing with the Limiters, you
aren’t playing right. The combat in Transistor was unexpectedly amazing, after
we were all expecting it for the story. Playing with the Limiters – additional negative
effects or events, like Halo’s skulls – forced me to engage with the millions
of possible power combinations, instead of just finding favorites and using
them exclusively.
·
Don’t play all the challenge rooms at once. Get
through the entire game, start a Recursion (New Game +), then go through all
the challenge rooms. They’re great puzzles, but you’ll get so sucked into them
that you’ll lose track of the plot.
Europa Universalis IV:
·
Is there a better way to learn the mosome of tives of a
historical culture than to face the same challenges? I never would’ve learned
about Ming China’s problems with rebels and steppe tribes if it weren’t for
EU4, and from there it’s easy to see some of the fears that haunt modern China.
·
There are two ways to play Europa Universalis:
Either you play for eight hours at a time, for forty hours per game, with a TV
show going on your second screen, or you don’t play Europa Universalis.
Risk of Rain:
·
One of my dream games to make is a roguelike
platformer, and although my game would have more emphasis on personality, RoR plays
brilliantly in that vein. I don’t think it has the randomness to be thought of
as a true roguelike, but it’s another good entry following up on Rogue Legacy.
·
It’s less how you should play it, than how you
don’t need to: You don’t need a wiki. In most roguelikes, new items have
confusing functions, and you need a wiki to really understand their
intricacies. This is just a personal evaluation, I admit, but I greatly prefer
how simplified RoR is, with a limited list of abilities, specialization, and
items.
Hotline Miami:
·
This is actually the first time I can claim
indie cred: I was playing Cactus’ games back when they were shmups about
shooting the rebellious, escaped eyeballs of humanity. It’s pretty easy to see
the through-line of style in Hotline
Miami, the eye-melting colors and pulsing music.
·
Don’t play this game drunk or high. Seriously. It might
seem like a good idea, because whoooooaaaaaa maaaaaaaan the coooooolooooors,
but this game is difficult and you will lose.
Beyond Earth:
·
There’s a line in an old Irrational Interviews
podcast where Brian Reynolds says that Alpha
Centauri was filled with all the political fever-dreams from his 20s. Beyond Earth, on the other hand, has…
different colors? Minor mechanical differences? This was the most flavorless 4X
I’ve played more than a few hours of, and as a result it helped me figure out
my problems with 4X games. I could play Europa
Unversalis for years because it lets me rewrite history, but there’s no
story to be written in Beyond Earth.
·
Play this as a raw strategy game. The mechanics
are good, there’s lots of room for planning, so you’ll enjoy this if you pore
over wikis and search out optimal strategies.
To The Moon:
·
I keep comparing it to Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle. To
The Moon is extremely beholden to the JRPG style, not just in the gameplay,
but in its tone. The perspective characters (the scientists) emote just like
you’d expect a JRPG protagonist to do, and they’re the weakest part of the game
as a result. The lens through which we view the story is weak, but when we
start looking past the lens, the story we see is spectacular. Except the
ending. Still got problems with the ending.
·
Play it in one sitting if possible, linger on
the piano melody, and keep Kleenex nearby.
Halo 3 (again), ODST, Reach, and Halo 4:
·
Halo 4 is probably the best Halo game that’s
ever been made. The encounter design feels as inspired as the original trilogy,
but without stupid-frustrating enemies: No giant sacks of health like the
Brutes in large groups, and barely any Hunters. The story retains the galactic
implications of the original trilogy, but benefits hugely by keeping the
operational area and list of characters very small. There isn’t a wasted inch
of narrative in that game.
·
All of these are games to be played over a
weekend, each taking two six-hour sessions. You won’t get rusty, the story won’t
be stretched out over too many sessions, and you won’t be stuck on one
encounter for the majority of your session.
Gone Home:
·
I played this on January 1st of 2014,
so it counts.
·
(Spoiler warning) I think I’ve had exactly one
friend come out. I’ve known people who I assumed were gay, and I know friends
who are gay or trans, but I’ve never watched someone go through the process of
accepting themselves and re-identify themselves to their friends and family. This
game is the closest I’ve come to seeing that.
·
Play this in one sitting, then sit on your hands
checking the clock until Life Is Strange
comes out.
The Wolf Among Us:
·
If a branching storyline lets you define the
relationship between two characters, but that relationship is one of the
linchpins of the story, how much does that hurt the narrative cohesion?
Throughout The Wolf Among Us, I felt
that the romance/partnership between Bigby and Snow was a key emotional beat,
but player decisions could easily torpedo that relationship. I haven’t replayed
the game with different choices, so I could be misinterpreting it, but having the
ability to completely destroy a plot thread is strange. Possibly empowering, but
without being sure of the breadth of possible outcomes, mostly just awkward.
·
Take it slow. Dig into the atmosphere. Click
everything. The Telltale engine, from the pacing of its character animations to
its cel-shading, will never be better used than in this jeu noir.
Star Trek Online (Disclaimer: This is one of my company’s
games.)
·
How much raiding and team content is needed
before level cap? There are some queued team-ups available in the lead-up to
the level cap, but it’s not until then that you pull the cotton balls out of
your nose and WHOAH that’s where the Dyson spheres, the Borg hives, the
dinosaurs with guns, that’s where all the new smexy is. I don’t have an answer
for this, but it struck me as odd that all this content was just at endgame,
after about twenty hours of leveling in solo content.
·
Play this with TNG on the other monitor. Duh.
FEZ:
·
I think this is the last of the indie darlings
from the XBLA era that I hadn’t played. There’s an era of games I think of, and
even though FEZ came out much later, I group it with Braid, Bastion, etc. That
era is interesting to me because all these acclaimed games were coming out on
XBLA, but I was locked in on the freeware; now most things except the art games
and game jams have gone paid, and the indie movement is still going strong. The
pricing structure changed, the art didn’t.
·
Don’t read any spoilers. Seriously. Just keep
playing until you think you’re done with the game, then give it another hour.
You sunk fifteen hours into FFXIII because “it gets way better after that”, you
can afford to spend an hour flailing blindly trying to figure out what’s next.
Tales from the
Borderlands:
·
Is there a better example of conversational
combat than the con in the first episode? Between this and the quasi-trial in The Wolf Among Us, this rode the line
for conversation that gets ridden in the best stealth games: high tension, with
the knowledge that you’ll have to live with the consequences if you slip up
instead of instantly failing. All too often conversational games either have no
consequences, or just restart you if you make the wrong choice.
·
Play with the barest idea of the plot of
Borderlands 2. Only watched the trailers? No worries! Handsome Jack is bad,
Vaults have cool tech, Pandora is a frontier madhouse of murder. You’re good to
go.
Dungeons and Dragons
and Secrets of Zir’An:
·
I ran a combat-heavy DnD campaign for my
co-workers, and a series of heists in the Secrets
of Zir’an world for my friends. I may have cross-pollinated some puzzles at
certain points.
·
Don’t prep. If you’re spending more than an hour
preparing your adventure, your players have to be 100% on board with following
your narrative. If your group’s characters shine in Firefly-esque banter and seat-of-your-pants
flying, you should be improv’ing as much as they are.
League of Legends:
·
I have played probably over 700 hours of this
game, and I still can’t transfer my
knowledge into playing consistently better.
·
If you’re going to play this, make sure you eat
food before you play, otherwise you’re going to look up hours later and realize
that, maybe, your crappy play was because you were cripplingly hungry. Personally,
I can’t afford to spend three hours a night playing LoL anymore, so I’m taking
a break.
