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berjiwhir

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GOTY 2015

Last year I was scrambling to find games to fill out my list. What a difference a year makes. At the time of this writing, about two weeks shy of 2016, I see my year's backlog still clogged with noteworthy and interesting titles. There just was not enough time to get to them all. I'll still playing Until Dawn and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. I'm going to finish the wonderful Broken Age. But I simply ran out of time to play everything that I wanted to, which, in light of the alternative, is a fine problem to have.

List items

  • I could go on and on about how much I love the Witcher 3, but I can sum it up with one example. About midway through the game, Geralt finds himself in an upscale tavern in Novigrad. He's there searching for his friend Dandelion. A woman named Priscilla is performing on stage, and Geralt needs information from her.

    Rather than skip ahead to the action that will advance the plot, the game lets you watch as Geralt and the rest of the tavern patrons slowly stop their conversations and listen to the woman sing. The performance is so good, so convincing, so moving, that I just sort of started slack-jawed at the screen. That the game was confident enough to allow Geralt's emerging reaction to a painfully beautiful song carry an entire four-minute scene was incredible. I knew something about the world in that moment, about Geralt, about the position of art, about class, and about the game's ultimate goal. The game is full of little moments like this which, when taken together, add up to something to rich and so alive and so damned beautiful that no other game this year could even hope to match.

    There are only so many superlatives one came lavish on a game before it starts to feel disingenuous, but let me say this: when I was trying to convince a friend of mine to play The Witcher 3, I told her that it was as good as Mass Effect 2.

  • On paper, Rocket League is absurd. Heck, on screen Rocket League is absurd. You control a highly cosmetically-customizable car and play soccer. That’s kind of it. But that's also not even close to it. During the height of summer, when it seemed like everyone was talking about the game, I thought I was pretty good at Rocket League. I could count on scoring at least once per game, and I was getting good at defense, managing the boost plates on the course, and generally contributing to my team.

    Then I looked at some videos online. I am not good at Rocket League.

    For such a simple game to have such a wide and varied level of player skill makes each match feel like a genuine contest of skill. It’s not about having a better gun or adopting a certain kind of play style or always playing a specific game type. Rocket League is a flat competitive space in which anyone can have fun and contribute meaningfully.

    I never thought I'd have as much fun with an online competitive game that did not have you shoot guns. But who needs a machine gun when you can boost off an inclined wall, pinwheel in midair, and knock a big ball into a goal as time expires?

    I’ll take that over headshots this year, and it’s not a close contest.

  • I almost always love Bethesda games, but I also almost always burn out of them before I get through even the main content. There's just so much to them--so much to see, so many locations to explore, so many people to talk to--and the thought of trying to see it all actually usually butts against my desire to see it all.

    Fallout 4 changed that. It seemed like everywhere I turned, I was finding something I was excited to do, and, near the end, it forced me to make some legitimately tough decisions.

    Playing Fallout 4 is the only time I can remember lying awake at night, agonizing over a choice a video game presented me with. The choice of who to side with at the end of the game's lengthy campaign is far from easy--it's pretty hard to feel good about your decision. Ultimately, I made my choice, hard as it was, and finished the game. I was pretty sure, setting the controller down, that I was done with the game. A week later, I loaded an older save and played another ten hours. I went down a completely different endgame quest line. I saw things that I completely missed in my previous playthrough, and it gave me a very deep appreciation for the amount of narrative content.

    There are a lot of problems with Fallout 4. But in a year where it seemed like every reviewer couched all of their inevitable praise in a thorough disclaimer about technical problems, I found that I didn't really care about many of Fallout 4's obvious issues. It's a wonderful game, and even though I've seen it through to the end (sort of twice), I'm sure I'll dive back in and explore the Commonwealth some more.

  • The Phantom Pain was my first Metal Gear game. Leading up to it I watched all of the Metal Gear Scanlon videos kind of obsessively, and when it was clear I was going to be able to go into Metar Gear V with all necessary information, I became even more excited to play it.

    The Phantom Pain is unquestionably a remarkable game, but it is also one that is marked by its contradictions, jettisoning much of what players might expect from a Metal Gear game, while offering up somehow more than any other game in the series has.

    I got way into building up my base and leveling up my companions. I put actual thought into what weapons to research and what sort of loadouts I wanted to take into the field. I've never been good at stealth, but I didn't want to go in Rambo-style, so I settled into a comfortable groove of tranquilizer sniper rounds and headshots. On the frequent occasions my plans went south and I opened up with a rocket launcher, I never felt like I was being punished for playing the game that way. It was just another way to play.

    The main story missions are well-crafted and hold up remarkably well to repeat plays, and the game's just so jammed packed with content that I put 50 hours in and still barely cracked 50% completion.

    And yet.

    And yet there's something sort of hollow about MGS V. Some of the magic of the previous games has been sacrificed. Whether that happened in service to the new play style, or on some conspiratorial altar deep in the dark heart of Konami, something about The Phantom Pain feels absent. I loved this game while I was playing it, but at the end I found it very easy to set it aside once I'd seen all the story there was to see.

  • Arkham Knight has a lot of baggage behind it. Between wrapping up two (okay, three) previous game’s worth of continuity and moving the operation to a new hardware generation, Arkham Knight seemed poised to end the series in the best way possible. And, for the most part, they do just that. They check pretty much every box. New villains show up. The Joker is up in the mix. Players watch Batman experience some of the darkest moments of the series. It's a 2015-ass 2015 Batman story.

    And even while meeting these baseline expectations can be seen as a given, aspects of the game have never been better. Graphically, it of course looks incredible. But digging deeper, we find a refined upgrade system, a more streamlined approach to tracking side content, and a wealth of stuff to do.

    Unfortunately, it’s that extra stuff that weighs Arkham Knight down. Each successive Batman game has been more jammed with stuff than the one before it, but Arkham Knight is the first to obviously suffer for it. I did all of the side stuff with the exception of the Batmobile, and, sadly, very little of it really had the feeling of being momentous or significant. I cleared out this bad guy hideout? Cool, cool. I guess I'll do five more, I guess.

    Perhaps its telling (and not necessarily in Arkham Knight’s favor) that playing it led me back to the older and, in many ways better, games in the series. Arkham Knight is still a game of note, and one that I enjoyed very much in 2015, even though it highlighted for me the series' tendency toward video game maximalism has diluted the experience rather than enriching it.

  • I didn’t play Destiny at all last year. Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year discussions were enough to put me off of trying Bungie’s loot shooter until the developer had a chance to make some much-needed changes.

    A year later, here I am, having a blast with Destiny. My first point of contact was the fantastic Taken King DLC. I started a new character, boosted to level 25, and started in with the new content.

    And still, there’s a lot about Destiny to criticize. The story, for someone like me who is not really willing to dive into the Grimoire cards, is pretty thin. And because I could hop around to any available story mission after boosting my character, the narrative made even less coherent sense. I realize that's a consequence of the way I played, but the fact that the game is structured in such a way as to allow for that is sort of odd.

    But, here’s the thing. I didn’t care. Because no other shooter feels as good as Destiny does during the nuts and bolts action of raising up and gun and firing it into aliens. I found myself, pretty unexpectedly, caring about my loadout and my Light level, going so far as to grind out Strikes I’d already done in hopes of securing a more powerful drop.

    Still, I know my limits. I’m probably never going to party up. I’m almost certainly not going to ever do that raid. But that’s alright, because the content that I actually did want to tackle was enough to sustain my interest. I’m not sure how much more of this iteration of Destiny I’ll play, but I had a really good time with The Taken King.

  • Even beyond my appreciation for the tight progression, the eerie science-fiction body horror aesthetic, and the fluid mechanics, I admire Axiom Verge most because it is a complete, robust piece of work that was done by a single person. That’s amazing to me. Video game production, at least for a humanities major like me, is an arcane and dark sort of magic. The fact that one developer did everything in this game, and the fact that it turned out as sterling as it did, is extremely impressive.

  • Grow Home was a delightful palate cleanser to get the year started. Behind the cute graphics and cheerful tone, there's a lot of really impressive tech at its core. Watching your weird alien bean stalk steadily stretch toward your home ship was an empowering experience (when you successfully scaled it) and also a harrow one (when you fell. And I fell...a lot). But the dauntless BUD robot just hopped in the nearest available teleporter and kept riding the shoots and sprouts up into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. It's a perfect little game.

  • I don't know if I played Her Story right. Maybe no one does? Maybe that's the point? The reason this game is on my list is because it feels utterly fresh. I sat at my computer for several hours piecing together the story of this woman (these women?) by painstakingly trying every possible keyword I could think of to reveal more entries.

    When I was done, I was pretty confident that I knew what the story actually was, but hearing many people on podcasts talk about theri interpretations made me rethink all of my assumptions. And even after all of that, I'm not sure what I believe is the truth. The game props itself up on that ambiguity, trusting in the player to scour its systems to create a story on his or her own. In 2015, a year of refined iteration, that was very exciting.

  • I really did not expect to get into Lifeline. The idea of a text-based space adventure sounded cool, but it wasn't until I realized how the game leveraged the unique capabilities of my phone that I became hooked until the end.

    You get messages from and respond to a stranded astronaut in real time on your phone. Every few entries, you'll hit a timed story event, which will require you to set your phone down and check in later.

    Every time I went on lunch, I would check for a new update from my little pocket astronaut, stranded out there on some alien planet. Sure, the writing was a little hokey, and there's not really a lot of different possible outcomes, but the novel delivery mechanism was enough to keep me playing Lifeline until I had seen the adventure of my astronaut friend through to its completion,
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