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badseed

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Game of the Year 2015

Ok to preface this pretty strange top ten list: Up until the release of Rock Band 4 I didn’t own any current gen consoles, and RB4 and the pack in Rise of the Tomb Raider are still the only games I own for the Xbone. I’m primarily a PC gamer these days, backed up with a 3DS and a Vita. I also haven’t bought or gotten around to playing a lot of the major releases this year so it’s a bit of an eclectic list. I should mention some games that didn’t quite make it on to the top ten (in no particular order):

Downwell, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Massive Chalice, Not a Hero, Pillars of Eternity, Project Cars, Ronin, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Axiom Verge, Cities: Skylines, Grim Fandango: Remastered, Contradiction: Spot the Liar, Broken Age, Fallout 4

If you’re upset that I don’t have the likes of The Witcher 3, Just Cause 3, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, Batman: Arkham Knight or Bloodborne on this list it’s because I haven’t gotten around to them yet, a testament to how rich with good games this year has been (or in the case of Bloodborne, because I don’t own a PS4)

List items

  • At the start I heard a lot of people complaining that the characters didn’t talk the way actual teenagers talk, I thought it sounded perfectly ok but being a mid thirties white male from Sweden I might not have the greatest grasp on the teenage vernacular of American youths. The initial hook of the time rewinding powers carried me through the first episode, but somewhere during the second episode it clicked: The relationships between Max and the rest of the denizens of the small town all work, and almost every character has more depth to them than at first look. But the most impressive part is how they make you care about her friendship with Chloe and how fiercely I was prepared to fix a world that seemed out to get her. I would love to see more stories like this from this team, but I hope they leave Max and Chloe as they are, their story feels perfect as is.

  • I don’t include early access games or episodic games that aren’t finished yet on this list, sometimes that means that when those games finally qualify I’ve gotten a bit burned out on them or the wow factor has died down and they miss their chance at the top ten, this is not the case with Kerbal Space Program. It’s been in early access for ages and I can’t tell how many hours I’ve spent with it pre-release, but it’s still got its hooks in me. I’m pretty far from any kind of expert and most of my brave but foolish kerbals have died in spectacular explosions and crashes or are sailing off into the frozen depths of space without hope of recovery. But I keep going on, hearing people are building space stations seem pretty far from my grasp, but finally putting a kerbal on the Mun and then bringing them back again is one of my best gaming experiences ever.

  • Confession time, I like David Cage games. I’ve always liked games that focus on narrative even if a lot of them fall short on the game play side. I’ve played a ton of FMV games in the past (like the Tex Murphy series), and I played Mass Effect 3 on narrative difficulty. Sure the game play is just a series of QuickTime events, but in the right wrapper games like that can be awesome. I hadn’t heard about Until Dawn until the Beast crew played through it, I was so impressed by what I saw that I bought the game despite not owning a PS4. Instead I visited friends with PS4s and played though the game several times as the co-pilot introducing other people to its twists and turns, making it one of the best social gaming experiences of this year. Also that opening song is pretty damn kickass.

  • I first heard about her story when the quick look went up, after watching a couple of minutes I turned it off, I simply had to experience this for myself first. While the actual game mechanics are very simple it’s presented in a very compelling way, its fun working with the simulated antiquated desktop entering keywords to puzzle the narrative together. The main star of this game is the performance the titular character, even when the narrative dips into some dubious material she knocks it out of the park.

  • Is it just more Rock Band 3 but with less modes/instruments but working for the new generation of consoles? Yes, however Rock Band 3 is probably one of my favourite games of all time. When my 360 started showing signs of breaking down I ended up buying an extra 360 in order to feel secure that I could continue playing Rock Band 3 with friends. I had also decided to get out of console games and concentrate on the pc post 360/ps4, Rock Band 4 was the game that made me buy an Xbox One. Combined with most of the music library moving over and my old instruments still working just sweetened the deal. Still my favourite social gaming experience.

  • If we judge a games quality based on how much money we spend on extra stuff for playing it (see my Rock Band text above) then Elite: Dangerous could not not be in my top ten. Making me finally buy a hotas setup and a TrackIR. The extra equipment isn’t cheap, but boy does it make the game shine. It’s not just the extra toys though; on its own it’s a really fun space sim. Looking forward to the horizons expansion that I haven’t purchased yet.

  • It seems that fans of metroidvania style games fall into two camps in regards to the two big games that came out this year, those that prefer Axiom Verge and those that prefer Ori. Axiom certainly hewed closer to the style of Metroid and while I enjoyed it, I felt it relied a bit too much on gimmicks. The visuals and the music of Ori are fantastic but above all that the game plays perfectly.

  • One thing I keep coming back to on this list is gaming with friends, and this game is great for it (to be fair, it’s nothing without it). When I first heard of this game everyone was still talking about it as a VR game and as such my interest was mild. When it showed up in the extra life stream as a regular game I leaped at the chance to play. I even translated the entire manual into Swedish so I could play it with my older relatives over the holidays.

  • Ok, the one reason this is so low on my list is that I don’t own a WiiU and I only have one friend who does. Still sitting at his place and making level for each other is super fun if only I had more time with the game this would probably be way up there. It’s almost the game that made me buy a WiiU, if Nintendo hadn’t already announced their next console I probably would have bought one, as is it feels a bit late in the game to invest in one. Holding on to hope they port it to the 3DS

  • I was super on the fence at weather to get this game or not. While I like the Metal Gear series, my interest in Big Boss is low (2 and 4 are my favourite games in the series, in that order) and it seemed as if the game would be low on story, which traditionally is the reason for playing one of these games. Add to that the frankly embarrassing visual of Quiet and my expectations were low. I was so wrong. What the game lacks in story it makes up for by being the best playing Metal Gear game ever by a huge margin. Sure there is a lot of repetition in the game, especially in the second act where you literally repeat missions, but everything feels so good you don’t even care, you just want to run around the map with your pet wolf kidnapping soldiers, stealing cassette tapes and fultoning everything in sight, even Quiet turned out to have a pretty good story even if the justification of her nakedness is still deeply stupid and undercuts her arc. Oh and D-dog is the best.
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