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berjiwhir

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GOTY 2017

2017 was, of course, a largely garbage year. But, thankfully, more than just being a good escape, video games in 2017 were great in multifarious and amazing ways. From smart refinements of existing genres; to brazen, total reinventions of familiar and once-sacred properties; to completely new video game platforms, this was a freaking great year to play games. Maybe the best time to be playing video games. I have not even had a chance to play a quarter of the amazing games that came out this year. There were just too many. Still, this list represents my favorite experiences of the year, with the obvious caveat that, had I more time or more money, it could have been twice as long.

List items

  • The best Zelda ever made, and the best reason to have jumped on the Switch early.

    So much has been written about this game, and it seems to have meant so many different things to so many different people. My favorite memory of this game is not even me playing it. We bought our Switch right before taking a road trip to Kansas for a wedding. I did the driving, which let my wife sit next to me and play Zelda for the entire trip. Hearing her reaction to diving into this world for the first time only whetted my appetite to dive in for myself. And by the time I did, I saw what all the fuss was about. The game is really special.

  • I think it speaks volumes about the amazing year the Nintendo Switch had that they released, after years of gestation, not just one fully-formed, masterfully designed update to one of its core franchises that simultaneously pay homage to their long and storied pasts while flawlessly updating themselves for modern sensibilities--but two of them. And one of them has to be number 2 on my list.

    Super Mario Odyssey is a master class of game design craft. It seemed like at every turn it was finding new ways to surprise me. You can possess a dinosaur (it gets a little mustache!); you can possess a little RC car help a dim-witted dad; you fight a damn dragon; you go to THE MOON. Each stage is absolutely brimming with cool stuff to do and things to see, and while it's a fair criticism that your only tangible reward for doing those things is yet another Power Moon, Odyssey's true value comes, I think, from its less tangible rewards. Everywhere I went, nearly every moon I earned, every jump I made and enemy I possessed, I was steeped in a feeling that I don't often experience in games--joy.

  • Pyre was exactly the kind of story I needed in 2017.

    I wasn't sold on the pre-release coverage of this game. I came to Supergiant's work for beautiful art and fast-paced action gameplay. What was this? Fantasy basketball?

    Yes, but fantasy basketball with a whole lot of heart. The sport is polished and fine on its own, with layers of strategy and just enough blind luck and randomness to lay all your carefully laid plans to ruin. If that game was just the sport part, it'd be fine.

    But where Pyre shines, and what makes it my favorite Supergiant game, is the story. Focusing on a rag-tag group of rejects who are just trying to get back to their lives. In learning their intricate and often heartbreaking stories, I developed a deep connection and desire to help them reach their goals.

    And in Pyre, to help a character succeed, you have to let them go. This it he game's design masterstroke, in my opinion. I loved Sir Gilman, the steadfast little knight-worm. He was always there to offer encouragement and support when my characters needed it. I held on to him for as long as my conscience would let me. But there came a time, near the end of the game, when it was time to say goodbye. Not because I didn't want him in my party anymore, but because he was my favorite. He deserved to be free of this blighted, exile world. And I felt that way for almost every character I gave up. Because we all make mistakes, and we all have regrets, and everyone deserves a second chance.

    Pyre is a special game that I still think about, long after the last Rite was won.

  • All signs pre-release pointed to Horizon being a competently designed and visually arresting open world game. What I wasn't prepared for, in this post-post-apocalypse, machine-dominated world, was the overriding sense of humanity. Aloy's journey from tribal pariah to world savior is told with surprising nuance, with incredible performance capture and voice work. I was also surprised to be so drawn into the fiction of the universe, which provides not only a convenient explanation for the current state of the world (and also the answer to the question of, "why robot dinosaurs, though?"), but an elegant and affecting one as well.

    Add to that the satisfying Frozen Wilds DLC at the end of the year, and you have a large, polished package that perfects many of the tropes of current open-world game design, while also signaling big things for the franchise's--and the genre's--future.

  • Dream Daddy is a wonder. I first experienced in on Twitch, and, later, when my wife bought it, we played with a group of people in our home. To see our friends move from begrudging skeptics to fully-engaged players invested in the happiness of our created character and his plucky daughter was a wonderful experience. We wanted to get those eggplant emoji responses so badly!

    Dream Daddy succeeds because of its unflagging good humor and respect for its core cast. It would have been so easy for a gay dad dating sim to come off as callous or pandering, but Dream Daddy is neither. It's a story about people defined by more than their sexuality, a game about the importance of familial connection, about the necessary place of romance and physical love, about what it means to build a meaningful life in face of upheaval and change...Dream Daddy is about what it means to be a human being.

  • Look, I loved Uncharted 4. But before its release that game felt like an unnecessary extension of a franchise that seemed long-finished. I was very happy to be proven wrong, but Uncharted 4 so definitively ended Nathan Drake's story that the idea of another Uncharted game so soon after its release seemed not only unnecessary, but even a little vulgar. Lost Legacy's transition from a piece of DLC to a stand-alone product should have signaled to me that the developer had bigger things in mind, but it seemed very much like something I didn't need to play.

    Holy crap, am I glad I took a chance on it. It turns out that, while Nathan Drake's story is very much done, there's still meat on these old bones. The game is carried by the twin superlative performances of the actresses playing Nadine and Chloe, two complicated and compelling woman who, over the course of the game's 8-10 hours, are given space to be two complicated and compelling women. Add to that the best parts of the previous Uncharted games, trim the length by half to ensure that it's dense with wonder and light on filler, and you have what just may be, for me, the best Uncharted game.

  • By the time I jumped into Nier: Automata, it had been hyped to death. And for the first bit, I liked it. I thought it was okay. I played through Route A and stalled on the transition to Route B. But once I started down that path, there was no stopping until I saw it all the way to the end of Route E. It made me think how rare it is to have a game that is jubilant in its somberness. A slightly broken game about broken characters trying to do their best in a broken world. A game about failure. It's perhaps too long, it makes you replay large chunks of the game twice for no real good reason, and it looks like it could run on the PS3. But it's also a complete masterpiece of a game.

  • The best thing about Destiny 2 is playing with the your friends. Even less its role as a video game I played, I'm most thankful for Destiny 2 this year for the time it allowed me to reconnect with some old friends and, though separated by the internet and distance, just hang out for long stretches.

    I'm never going to be the player who maxes out three characters. Hell, I didn't even do a Nightfall, let alone the raid, but the time I spent with Destiny 2 was almost always fun, even if, by the end of it, the experience felt a little empty. I don't think I'll get any DLC unless they release some titanic, Taken King-level reset, but, for the 60 or so hours I put into it, Destiny 2 was a special thing for me in 2017.

  • I liked Mass Effect: Andromeda more than just about anyone I heard discuss it this year...but, yeah, it's got some serious, total bummer issues. I didn't experience any of the major, game-breaking glitches that we saw so many gifs of this year, but even when the game was working perfectly, what I was left with was a Mass Effect game that, while taking place nominally in the same universe as some of my very favorite games of all time, felt, tragically...less.

    I'm sad that the game performed so poorly that we'll never get to see a sequel, because I think there's a nugget of something really special in this game, but it, while that glimmer is enticing, it ends showing that a glimmer was all it had. They killed Mass Effect.

  • Metroid: Samus Returns should have been my jam. I love the Metroid series and other games in the genre it helped to create. All the pieces are there--the game plays well, looks great, and runs like a dream on the 3DS. It takes the overlooked Metroid II and updates it for modern sensibilities.

    And yet, I didn't finish it. For all the amazing variety and artistry in the level design, the enemy encounters (at least for the first half) were painfully similar and not very engaging to me. In a perfect world, I'd give this game another shot, but in this world, I traded it in and bought Nier: Automata instead.
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