I've been poor this year and haven't had the time/money to play a lot of the more expensive AAA releases like Doom, Dark Souls 3, Dishonored 2.. along with some other stuff I really want to play like Firewatch. But here's 10 games I enjoyed my time with this year.
I've never played a Harvest Moon game before, but I've found myself addicted to other similar titles like Animal Crossing in the past so I'm not too surprised at the amount of time I've spent playing Stardew Valley. Amazing amount of content, it's easy to spend hours and hours in this game at a time.
Before playing I remember interviews with Jon Blow where he said part of The Witness was capturing the feeling of epiphany, and I feel like he captured that pretty well. Specifically with a certain subset of the puzzles. It's so hard to talk about this game without spoiling it still but I'm really happy it exists.
I loved the silent storytelling of this game; the world, the artstyle and colour palette, the music - it's just a really great little adventure game and a brilliant achievement for the dev team.
I think this game left me with less to think about than previous title Limbo, but the story beats and set pieces overall were a lot more interesting while I was playing the game. The last 30 minutes is amazing.
I wasn't initially too wrapped in Momodora 4 -- its Dark Souls influence is quite clear and it can be very punishing, but sometimes to an unfair extent. But I found myself coming back to the game on multiple occasions in spite of this, and it gradually won me over. I'm really impressed with how far the developer has come when looking back at the previous entries in the franchise.
Gonner is like the Downwell of this year - an indie roguelike platformer with a really neat artstyle, great controls and superb soundtrack. The sound design in particular of this game is super inspiring to me personally.
I really like the dialogue engine in this game and how naturally speech seems to flow compared to some other games of the genre. The gameplay isn't very taxing, but I enjoyed the story and thought there were a lot of cool ideas in the way it was presented.
I put a couple dozen hours into Darkest Dungeon and admittedly don't think I got too far, but I adore the bleak atmosphere it creates and the emergent moral choices you have to make when sending your party on expeditions: whether to keep all of your characters sane and healthy, or to use some to gather supplies before discarding them at no penalty.
Amazing pixel art, animation and music that really sets the bar for a lot of indie releases. Unfortunately I didn't find the gameplay as fun as I was hoping - here was a game that I really desperately wanted to like, but could never completely lose myself in.
I want to make myself clear when I say that I think Pokemon Go is a very poorly designed game. Yet, there was a period of a few weeks when this game launched in its buggy state where I could only smile when I walked around my home city and saw everyone stopping to catch monsters, including suited middle-age business men on their lunch breaks. It was a phenomenon I've never quite seen before and doubt will ever happen with a game again, but I'm glad to have been a part of it for its short lifespan.
