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Favorite Games of 2018

A list first constructed at the end of 2018 but it can be updated in subsequent years as I play games I missed.

I ended up swapping Into the Breach and Celeste after putting another 15 hours into the former. As December came to a close, it became the kind of thing I had visions of in my head as I was trying to fall asleep.

As usual, this list is primarily mobile games for starters. Most iOS games were played on a 9.7 inch iPad.

There are some notable 2018 games I spent a time with that did not make the list: Donut County (did not like the writing), Metroid: Samus Returns (did not like the controls). There are some other games not in the GB database that I need to add in order to get them on this list but none of those would be in the top 10.

List items

  • I enjoyed PlayerUnknown's Battlergrounds on PC but I wasn't particularly great at it and it required intense focus and dedication. When PUGB Mobile released in March to compete with Fortnite and the many PUBG-clones, it was unclear how a hardcore shooter would translate to a touchscreen. And it didn't help its reputation that the 100 player population was in part bots. It uses an auto-pickup for the best weapons auto-equips attachments. The minimap shows directions of footsteps and where shots are coming from. But those are exactly the reasons I've played nearly every day for the past nine months on my iPad.

    PUBG Mobile is a game I can play on the couch with the sound off if I choose to. It's a game where I'm likely to kill a few players. It's a game where I can get at least one chicken dinner a week. Is it less "hardcore" than the desktop counterpart? Definitely. Is this a problem? Absolutely not. It captures all the fun of looting and strategizing movement without the constant threat that one misstep will end the game abruptly.

    Yes, it's full of too many currencies and loot boxes and cosmetics, but all of that is entirely ignorable. The core of the game—bots or not—is fun action that better appreciates the player's time than the desktop counterpart. And that has earned it the spot of my game of the year!

  • Plan, execute, then press the wrong button on the controller and try to minimize the damage of your mistakes. That's the Into the Breach drama I'm looking for!

    Okay, my inability to remember the Xbox face buttons from the Switch face buttons aside, Into the Breach is great. I love games that are about planning and executing and this one messes with that by making the next turn unpredictable. Every successful turn is like a mini victory—a sigh of relief until another terrible thing happens. I've been going back and forth between easy and normal modes as I try out new strategies, units, and powers. It can be played casually or intensely, depending on whether I'm kicking back and watching TV or highly focused on succeeding.

    It feels less forgiving than FTL but the runs don't seem as laborious, in part because the path through the game always provides a reasonable out if you need it. I like that there aren't that many items to spend currency on, which speeds up the rounds, though I do wish there were more opportunities to earn and try out abilities (like, keeping one ability persistent between rounds in the same way you do a pilot). But that's probably why I hear people talk about putting hundreds of hours into this game.

    Rustling Hulks for life.

  • I don't care much for hard games like splatformers. But Celeste had been talked up so much that I wanted to give it a go. I thought about setting the difficulty to the easier mode when I began but decided I'd at least like to see what the normal difficulty is about. Despite a few expletives and threats to uninstall it from my Switch (which may not have been the optimal controller to play with), I'm glad I played on normal because I felt I earned my victory.

    Of all the things people talk about in this wonderful game, I find myself having a contrary opinion on one aspect: the story. "Ohhh, the mountain is a metaphor." I found the characters too chatty and the only one I liked was the hotel clerk. I have also realized that stylized conversation windows (like this and Donut County and Golf Story) annoy me. But it didn't detract from the game.

    I actually would have loved to 100% the strawberries in the A-side of the game but after missing a few here and there I didn't want to have to traverse the entirety of a chapter just to get to a room I neglected to find.

    It's also great that I can show the Celeste PICO-8 version to my students to profess the merits of smaller game-making tools as prototyping platforms.

  • Hell yeah Wario is back, baby. Most importantly, WarioWare Twisted is back but I'll take the rest of it as a result.

    Let's get this out of the way: Warios should not talk. But the little interstitial scenes are amusing in the tradition of the old games. I pretty quickly buttoned through all of these to get to the microgame meat of the action and it's as good as ever. I really appreciate having an archive of this 15-year old series with some new microgames thrown in for good measure.

    And this reminds me: they need to bring back NES Remix but throw Wario onto it.

  • It's pretty much a guarantee that a The Room game will make my top 10 in a year its released. Old Sins spins off the series in a way that returns to its roots: a single elaborate puzzle box in the form of a dollhouse. It tells a self-contained story that fleshes out some of the The Room's fiction. I really appreciate the way pieces from one room interconnect with another and how quick it is to move between the puzzles. I've tried playing other similar games but nobody can touch Fireproof for intricacy and game feel.

  • Similar to how Old Man's Journey is a "nice short story," Florence is one of those game experiences that tells an impactful story in a small package. The folks at Mountains did a wonderful job of marrying interaction design and storytelling in a way I had never seen before. It gave me the feeling that this was the only venue for telling this story and is one of the best examples of the genre.

  • Zach Gage is back at it again with another clever take on a familiar game. This time, billiards is turned into a high score game. Each pocket is a multiplier that increases the value of the ball shot into it. But you only get three misses/scratches before it's game over, so you have to play tactically. The core mechanics are clever, but it's the different modes and use of leaderboards that make the game unique.

    Normal games begin with a break but the "Break of the Week" mode is a "puzzle" with balls already spread out across the table in which the player can work toward getting a perfect score as they replay.

    This is a fun mode but there's another feature that really made this interesting: "Insta-tournaments." Gage uses a seed value that generates a one-time table every ten minutes or so. A few tournaments are available at any given time so players can drop in and compete with one another all day long. This mode was so successful that it's been introduced to Gage's other games. His genius with games like SpellTower, Typeshift, and Sage Solitaire is that he knows how to create ritual play sessions.

  • Minit is the game I wish I had designed. Or, it's the kind of game I would design if I were making games. Whatever the case, it's like the crew who made Minit read my mind. The practice of either running a loop or running a distance to complete an objective is elegant. It's structured game design in a way I appreciate yet doesn't fall into the trap of being too rigid.

    I only had to look at a walkthrough a couple of times to figure out the direction I should be going but other than that really enjoyed exploring in 60-second chunks. I totally dig the style, humor, and writing.

  • I played Spitkiss almost immediately after finishing Celeste and the similarities are striking despite how different a touchpad is from a controller. The goal is to maneuver a gob of spit through a vertical maze of walls and spikes. You maneuver by aiming the gob in a parabolic "jump" that shows the path the spit will travel and can "jump" again either when you land on a surface or a mid-air dot (much like Celeste or The Messenger). But because the gob slows down in mid-air, it gives the player time to plan out the next move. So, like all great challenging platformers, Spitkiss rewards methodical thinking and precision.

    It’s not too long (maybe an hour or so?) but it also has replay value through time-attack, special collectible, and “fewest moves” goals. You should definitely play this one!

  • Meteorfall is a deck-building roguelike that draws obvious comparisons to Card Crawl, Card Thief, and Miracle Merchant. Choose one of four classes and slowly build our your character by collecting, buying, and discarding cards from your deck. Interaction is in the style of Tinder/Reigns, which makes it excellent for playing on a train or other one-handed moments.

    It's a great concept and the execution is great except for one little thing: at a certain point it's really easy to get unexpectedly destroyed because you're unprepared but there was little you could do to prepare.

    I found the difficulty spiked in what felt like an unfair way. And it took a long time to get to that point which dissuaded me from wanting to play more. I probably played 100 rounds before deciding I had peaked and didn't think I could improve.

  • I wrote the description on the Twinfold wiki page but all you need to know is that Twinfold is Threes! meets Imbroglio. Job done.

  • The ultimate "waiting in line" game. Holedown is a fun distraction. What it lacks in depth it makes up for in gamefeel. The power-up progression helps with some of the slow pacing at the beginning but what really matters is that the ball bounces in a fun way. Reminds me a lot of Orbital, a terrific game from the early days of iOS.

  • Over the past decade platformers on mobile devices have improved dramatically. Runners or gimmicks seemed the best way into jumping around. And the number of 8-bit and 16-bit platformers has been overwhelming. So Oddmar is unusual: it's a lavishly animated platformer developed first-for-mobile with swiping controls. It's gorgeous, controls well, and makes creative use of level design and simple combat. (Also, it supports MFi controllers and is the kind of show-off game Apple should use to launch an inexpensive Apple TV stick.)
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