We survived 2017. Good for us. I sincerely believe that 2018 (aka The Midterm Year) will be better, but just in case it isn't, let us reflect on the one thing that can be relied upon to provide us with endless, joyous escapism: the games.
Since there were far too many exceptional titles to squeeze into a mere ten this year, I'm devoting this entire intro segment to the honorable mentions, which are extensive. Firstly, I'm not an easy lay when it comes to the narrative adventure genre (I'm trying to go cold turkey on the term "walking simulator"), but there were two class entries this year:
What Remains of Edith Finch, a whimsical yet heartbreaking exercise in visual storytelling that only occasionally lets its narration get in the way, and
Tacoma, a sci-fi mystery in which the twists take second fiddle to well-sketched characters and authentic-sounding conversations.
Also, since one of the qualifiers for my top-ten list is that I need to have actually finished the game (since you never know when something's gonna pull a
Final Fantasy XV), here are a couple of excellent titles that I'm still working on.
Golf Story ranks as one of the year's biggest surprises, a charming and often hilarious RPG that's also a perfectly solid golf sim.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is essentially
XCOM without all of the stuff that made me quit
XCOM. Finally, I've only just started
Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but I'm already more invested in it than I've been with any other JRPG in ages.
A few other standouts from throughout 2017:
Sniper Elite 4 is the best Nazi-killing game of the year (yes, to my great surprise, beating out that other one),
Snipperclips was a delightful slice of old-fashioned couch multiplayer,
Gorogoa is odd and creative and difficult to describe,
Arms is maybe the best use of motion controls ever in addition to being one of the few fighting games I actually understand, and
LawBreakers was a fantastic throwback to
Unreal Tournament that would easily have made my top ten if the servers had been well-populated for more than a few weeks.
And at the end of the day, I do want to give a shout-out to both
Horizon: Zero Dawn and
Super Mario Odyssey. While I'm not as head-over-heels with them as the rest of the gaming community is, they're both fine titles that would certainly have been top-ten contenders in a less stacked year.
By the way, I was on the
GameCritics Game of the Year 2017 podcast, so go listen to that if you want to hear more of my thoughts.
Now then...
10. Distrust (PC)
"Don’t play Distrust anticipating a playable version of [John] Carpenter’s cult classic [The Thing]. Play it, instead, for being an intelligent strategy-survival game that’s atmospheric and tense as hell entirely on its own merits... Distrust is a roguelike, though it’s the good kind where there’s a valuable lesson in every failure... A terrific engine for emergent thrills, often due to the player’s own negligence... It’s the sign of intelligent and well-considered mechanics that something as inherently repetitive as Distrust never once felt tedious to me." (
Review.)
I thought I'd grown allergic to the word "roguelike," but it turns out that I'm only repelled by the side-scrolling action/platformer variety (of which we have most definitely had our fill by now).
Distrust is a near-perfect exercise in the roguelike subgenre. Nothing about the game is overtly cheap or unfair, which lends leeway to the permadeath mechanic, and while there are numerous rules to be learned, they're both logical and consistent. Each run leaves you more prepared for your next, and the game is inherently unique enough (survival that channels at least the tone and aesthetic of
The Thing) that I took pleasure in dipping back in even as I was partaking in randomized variations on the same handful of tasks.
I used to think that the only way for a roguelike to hook me was for me to carry
some degree of progress from one run to the next, for a death to not wipe the slate completely clean. And although that usually helps,
Sundered, my least-favorite game of 2017, demonstrated how unrewarding a roguelike can become when it's
entirely about grinding for accumulated stats, with nothing to actually be learned. Though it took many tries for me to finish
Distrust, I left the game with the satisfaction of having mastered something with zero hand-holding. It's a brutal game, but exquisitely balanced.
9. Prey (PC)
Well, this was certainly a nice surprise. Arkane Studios' world-building-first outlook on narrative design has made me increasingly less interested in their
Dishonored series, in which the finer details are wasted on stories and exchanges so devoid of wit or energy that I can't be bothered to care.
Prey turns out to be a far better use of their talents, as its setting
is its story, and by keeping its most important characters off-screen for the majority of the game, whatever plot developments that may have come off as unconvincing if presented to us directly instead unfold in our minds as we explore the magnificent Talos I station and piece together the mysteries surrounding this magnificent imaginary environment, a place that existed long before our main character arrived.
This
Prey reboot (which, to my knowledge, shares its title and literally nothing else from the 2006 release) owes a lot to both
System Shock and
BioShock and yet is, to my mind, far superior to either of those franchises. It beats
System Shock by not mistaking complexity for depth, building systems in which players are rewarded for genuine resourcefulness (like the ability to break down any item into raw materials which can then be re-purposed, ensuring that anything the player picks up is theoretically useful). And it beats
BioShock because its attempts to narratively justify its more fundamentally game-y elements succeed, because why the hell would anyone in Rapture have the need to set other people on fire?
I daresay that Talos I is the best setting of any video game this year. If someone were to collect this station's collision data and assemble an interactive 3D map
the way someone did with Dark Souls, I'd be stunned if the whole thing wasn't geographically correct, if each piece didn't fit together perfectly with the rest. But beyond that, it's the little details, like how each corpse throughout
Prey is attached to a specific name that can be found in the employee directory, or that the tabletop games and nerf gun shootouts these people were involved with can be scrutinized for no other reason than to give life and substance to this fictional world.
Prey is full of things that didn't need to be there, which is precisely why they
did need to be there.
8. Future Unfolding (PC)
The most important thing I can tell you about
Future Unfolding is that it isn't
Proteus. I say this because it'd be awfully easy to play this game for a couple of minutes, fail to see the point, and dismiss it as one of the countless pretentious "art games" that flash colors in your face and amount to nothing if you're not on the exact wavelength as the people who made it.
The thing about
Future Unfolding is that it tells you
nothing. It drops you into a strange, vibrant world with a set of two verbs - dash and interact - and forces you to decode the abstract but consistent rules by which this place abides. It asks you to be curious, to observe and experiment. It asks you to be a scientist. As the world of
Future Unfolding begins to make more sense, it'll become increasingly clear what your objectives are, and that this is very much a game with a point and purpose.
There are two famous sequences in
Super Metroid in which players become stuck and are informed of their own capabilities to escape by observing what the local wildlife does in the same situation. While that's not
exactly what you'll be experiencing in
Future Unfolding, the same brand of wordless, purely visual tutorialization is on constant display within. It's not for everyone, and certainly not for those hoping the final cutscene will be any less ambiguous than the game that preceded it, but for those with the patience, it's beautiful, odd, and richly rewarding. Thanks to the folks at the
Computer Game Show podcast for pointing me toward this overlooked gem.
7. Snake Pass (Switch)
A couple of months ago on Twitter, I saw a montage image of all of this year's 3D platformers, and wondered aloud why the best of the lot,
Snake Pass, wasn't included. A friend asked me if
Snake Pass even qualifies as a 3D platformer, to which I replied that of
course it does. Just because a game doesn't sport a jump mechanic doesn't mean it breaks the spirit of pushing players through acrobatic challenges for the express purpose of collecting shiny things.
If anything,
Snake Pass's lack of a jump function is precisely what makes it such a standout in the genre. We know how to jump. We mastered it generations ago.
Snake Pass gives me the pleasure of mastering an entirely new mechanic, in which I must tuck, wind, and squeeze in order to maneuver a snake through obstacles which are more often than not constructed from shafts of bamboo. It's one of those games where you could watch it and think that no control scheme imaginable could give players the ability to perform such complex tasks in any intuitive way, but
Snake Pass's commands are simple enough to make you feel comfortable before cranking the difficulty to ludicrous levels in its final two thirds. Many won't be up for the challenge, but I devoured every second.
I also want to give
Snake Pass credit for being one of the first quality third-party titles on the Switch, and only the second release after
Breath of the Wild to truly win me over on the system. It was, in fact,
Snake Pass that helped me through what would otherwise have been a torturously long wait for my car to be inspected. Great title regardless, but hey, making my life outright easier wins it a few extra points.
6. Torment: Tides of Numenera (PC)
"The 'challenge' comes from the amount of information that players are expected to process while piecing together this alien world and finding the outline of their morals. It’s a mentally taxing game – one that I endured with many cups of coffee – but as with its predecessor, it’s ultimately a puzzle worth solving... Every conversation is a new journey... It's the perfect follow-up to Planescape: Torment, as thought-provoking, mature and challenging as its predecessor. For those who like their sci-fi more than a little weird, I can’t recommend it enough." (
Review.)
I'm gonna go bold here and state that
Torment: Tides of Numenera is a better game than its spiritual predecessor,
Planescape: Torment. Part of that is just personally preferring a sci-fi setting over a fantasy one, but I'm mainly talking about the fact that
Numenera's combat is both decent and completely optional. You played
Baldur's Gate or
Icewind Dale because you wanted to be challenged on the battlefield; you played
Planescape because you wanted to be challenged intellectually. Bringing that front and center, and allowing players to use dialog choices to sidestep confrontation, is a natural extension of that.
That's important, because
Numenera, even more so than other entries in the recent CRPG resurgence,
feels like an old game. There's barely any voice acting and the menus look embarrassingly archaic. None of that particularly matters unless it creates a barrier for newcomers, but the important thing is that for as much as
Numenera channels the games of the past, it doesn't repeat the mistakes of its influences. Instead, it's an homage that is simultaneously reaching to bizarre and thought-provoking new places.
5. Resident Evil 7 (PC)
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do it. In an almost overachieving effort to make
Resident Evil relevant again, Capcom has taken the core ingredients that have served the series well previously (the small, contained environments of the earlier entries; the set piece-driven pace of
RE4), disassembled what's
never worked and rebuilt it from scratch (the story), and injected the whole production with the look and feel of some of the most successful contemporary horror games, the ones that have proven it's possible to disempower players without constricting them to tank controls.
As I write this, I'm currently playing through some of the earlier
Resident Evil titles starting with the remake of the first and working my way up. Though I continue to love them from a design standpoint (the way they get the most out these small, contained environments by unraveling them in a
Metroid-like manner and constantly giving new relevance to areas you're forced to backtrack through), there's a
lot, mechanically, that doesn't hold up about them: the confusing camera angles, the limited number of saves a player is permitted, a combat system that's borderline unworkable against faster enemies (like those
damn dogs).
What a joy it is, then, to get a
Resident Evil romp that channels the series' early days without being bogged down by such annoyances. The scale has been brought down considerably from the Michael Bay-sized mess that was
RE6. The game takes place almost entirely on a single estate, but every inch of it is used effectively, in such a way that I could simply refer to "the kids' room" or "the basement" and another fan will instantly recall the segment and know what made it special and memorable. It may not be an innovator, but it's a collection of the most effective horror techniques used in video games throughout the generations, and marks everything this medium is capable of in regards to this genre. It's one of the series' absolute finest, second only to the unbeatable
RE4. (
Podcast.)
4. Battle Chef Brigade (Switch)
Here's one of those ideas that's so unlikely to work that it circumnavigates the globe and winds up on the opposite end of the spectrum, working beautifully. You know how developers will sometimes come up with a head-to-head mechanic so ingenious that they design an entire universe in which every conflict is resolved through said mechanic, the way
Pokemon envisioned a world in which cockfighting was the only sustainable industry? That's
Battle Chef Brigade, in which citizens settle disputes via
Iron Chef-esque cooking competitions.
In each match, players venture into the wild to hunt for ingredients via side-scrolling actioner segments reminiscent of George Kamitani's games (
Odin Sphere and
Dragon's Crown). Once they're stocked, dishes are prepared through a match-three mini-game in which ingredients manifest as blocks with multiple flavors. The weirdest thing about
Battle Chef Brigade is how much this mechanic actually
does feel like cooking - the acts of stirring, simmering and seasoning all have match-three stand-ins, and the game even emulates the stress of having to present dishes to multiple people at once, each in the mood for something different.
It's so good, and so completely unlike anything else I played this year, that my only criticism of
Battle Chef Brigade is that I desperately wish it included competitive multiplayer to extend its value. The single-player campaign is both charming and hearty, but the only thing resembling an online component is the "daily cook-off," in which players compete for high scores under new parameters each day. Imagine a full-on multiplayer mode with randomized judges and theme ingredients. It'd be amazing. Then again, if my only complaint about a game is that I want to play it forever, well, that's a good position to be in.
3. Divinity: Original Sin II (PC)
"Original Sin II left me consistently amazed not simply by the number of options, but by its ability to make every path special... Since nothing respawns, experience points are a limited quantity and everything that happens throughout the game is a unique, one-time experience... That’s how an adventure like this is as entertaining in its closing moments as it was during its earliest, and how a 125-hour game can still leave me wanting more by the time the credits roll." (
Review.)
I can't really go any higher than third for this one, since its predecessor
was my Game of the Year back in 2014, and this one's only a marginal improvement. That having been said, I've often called the first
Original Sin the best RPG I've ever played, so for its sequel to be any kind of improvement at all is a gargantuan accomplishment. It is a
staggering triumph for a single-player game to last me 125 hours and for not a single minute to feel wasted or redundant, for every quest to have its own quirks and memorable takeaways, for every combat scenario to be unique, for each area to be fun to explore. It's an overwhelmingly complete-feeling RPG, bolstered by its complete lack of grinding.
The only thing missing is technical stability. Review codes for
Original Sin II (a game that ultimately took me 125 hours to complete) didn't go out to anyone until a day or so before release, not because Larian wanted to avoid critical scrutiny - this game has been bombarded with praise - but because they really needed all of the time that they could get to tighten the screws. A few more months not only would have resulted in an arguably perfect RPG, but also would have pushed the release to a less busy period. I remain the only person I know who's finished
Original Sin II, and in fact, I know a number of people who
want to play it but are afraid they don't have the time. All I can say is that however long it winds up taking, the journey's worth every second.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch)
"Breath of the Wild’s shakeups make it feel like the series’ most substantive step forward in nearly two decades, and it’s been a long time since a Zelda release was such an event... Whereas too many open-world games boil down to endless waypoint-chasing because they lack the guts to truly turn players loose, Breath of the Wild restores a sense of discovery to a genre that should be defined by it... It embodies the vision for the series that Miyamoto and Aonuma have never been able to realize until now. It’s a game three decades in the making." (
Review.)
I'm sure it's an eye-roller to begin one of these things by asking, "What else needs to be said at this point?" Yet the way Breath of the Wild has been scooping up year-end awards - I honestly can't name a single major website that hasn't named this their Game of the Year - kinda makes all of the praise I want to heap upon it redundant. It reinvigorated an important but aging series. It led the charge on Nintendo's wildly successful Switch, which has since become history's fastest-selling console in North America and sported easily the most impressive first-year lineup I've ever seen. It's been making developers re-evaluate even though it's Nintendo's first true foray into the open-world genre. Breath of the Wild is amazing. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.
All I can add is that I'm just old enough to remember when 3D graphics were a relatively new thing in the gaming world, meaning I was lucky enough to appreciate how revolutionary certain titles from the N64/PS1 era were. Though Ocarina of Time is often criticized by its detractors as being a formulaic entry in a franchise that itself wallows in formula, that undercuts what a pioneer it was in the use of 3D space. We've moved both forward and backward in the nearly two decades since its release - we now have (to use Assassin's Creed as my punching bag) the technology to render entire cities from historical periods in exquisite detail, yet it's wasted on tiresome waypoint-chasing that gives us no reason to appreciate them. So I'm thankful that the series that made me fall in love with 3D worlds has finally made me fall back in love with them.
1. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (PC)
"It’s the rare game that has no intention of being 'entertaining' in the traditional sense. Its goal is not to exhilarate or empower us, but to baffle us, wear us down, and beat our senses in... The world doesn’t seem to abide by a consistent set of rules and Senua is often on the run from thinly-defined (but nevertheless lethal) threats... It takes guts for a game developer to deliberately forgo traditional entertainment value in order to make a broader point... Hellblade is one of the game industry’s few genuine dramas – a dark, uncomfortable experience that makes players suffer alongside its protagonist... One of the boldest and most important artistic endeavors games have seen in quite some time." (
Review.)
By early March, I thought this contest was already a wrap. But at the end of the day, no matter how much
Breath of the Wild re-lit its series' fire and gave developers of other open-world titles something to think about, that'll never hold the power of a game that connected with me on a level no other game has. There are a million terrible low-budget indie games on Steam that address mental illness, attempting to fill a hole that no triple-A developer really has until now. Ninja Theory aren't scrubs. They have the resources to exhaustively research their subject matter and the budget and talent to bring their world to life. They've worked with Andy Serkis - twice! - to ensure that their motion capture technology is the best in the business, recreating every nuance of Melina Juergens's performance as the title character in breathtaking detail.
And they use all of these tools at their disposal to create a world not in which we're happy to get lost in, but from which we're desperate to escape. And because of that, I want to challenge anyone reading this to play
Hellblade the same way I did: in a single sitting. I realize that for many adult gamers, plowing through a seven- or eight-hour campaign with no intermissions isn't feasible, and for plenty more, it's undesirable. But Senua's constriction to a peril from which there is no true escape, and Ninja Theory's efforts to entrench you in her universe, won't connect completely if you're able to pull yourself away from the screen, take a long break, and reflect on what you've seen. Experience her confusion, frustration, and horror - and then see it all paid off in the most enlightening way.
Most overrated: Hollow Knight
Most underrated: Torment: Tides of Numenera
Most overlooked: LawBreakers
Most visually striking: Cuphead
All-out best-looking game: Horizon: Zero Dawn
Best story: Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Best writing: Tacoma
Best character: The Red Prince (
Divinity: Original Sin II)
Best original soundtrack: What Remains of Edith Finch
Biggest surprise: Prey
Biggest disappointment: Yooka-Laylee
Comeback of the year: Resident Evil 7
Most enjoyable bad game: The Surge
Least enjoyable good game: Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Best free game: OLDTV
Game that I spent the most time with: Divinity: Original Sin II
Game that I spent the least time with before dismissing: TumbleSeed
Game that I most wanted to play, but didn't: Hand of Fate 2
Game I literally own that I most wanted to play, but still haven't: Kindergarten
Best game that I still haven't finished: Xenoblade Chronicles 2
All-out worst game that I played: Sundered
Best non-2017 game that I first played in 2017: Wolfenstein: The New Order
Best remake/re-release: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Most anticipated game this coming year: Monster Hunter World
