First year I've formally made my list and made it ten, but something made me feel like I should start doing it for the sake of remembering what my favorite games in any given year were, I tend to forget all but my very favorite from any given year and that seems like a shame.
Turn based RPGS of the nonstrategy nature are my first and foremost top genre of games, from the time I first picked up a controller and started pressing "Fight" in the first Final Fantasy I have been absolutely enamored with the JRPG style of game, and have spent way too much of my life playing the good, bad, and bizarre incarnations of it. Undertale shows both reverence and disdain for the tropes of these games, and it does both things exceedingly well. The bullet hell type defensive combat is incredibly unique the way it's used as well, but what I find so great about undertale goes deeper than nostalgia/fanservice and solid gameplay. Undertale tells multiple stories, from very personal to larger picture with an incredible cast of characters, and tells them well. The humor feels natural and most of the time the game is trying to drag a laugh out of me it succeeds in getting me to very genuinely do so. It's like having a really funny friend compared to hearing a comedian, they're both funny but the friend has a way of saying things that really hit you because they KNOW you. Undertale often seems like it knows you the very same way that good friend does, But because it is not in fact your friend it's not above using that knowledge to frustrate, humiliate, or depress you a bit at times too. I'd say more but anything else I type feels like it has potential to ruin the game for anybody who happens to read this.
Turn based strategy RPGs and Roguelikes are two of my favorite genres, pretty much from the very first time I encountered each. I would say this is probably the single best of both those things to date. The stealth stuff sounded offputting to me at first, I've never been a big fan of stealth oriented games, however Invisible Incs use of the concept blew me away. The urgency that the difficulty ramp with time gives you and the desire to be careful to avoid the incredibly deadly guards and robots clash in a wonderful way that really keep me on edge no matter how smoothly a mission has been going. Plenty of times I've felt totally secure and then something happens I missed or didn't expect and one of my agents gets dropped like a rock, and plenty of others I've gotten into a situation that seemed inescapable and my agents squeeze out of it so well I feel like an absolute genius. The hacking/energy is perhaps the weakest layer of the primary gameplay but it's good enough that it ends up adding more to the dire feeling of skulking around the level and trying to figure out how you're going to buy enough time or reach a console to get enough power to get where you need to go. And then on top of everything it has the most satisfying end mission to a roguelike I could conceive of, culminating everything you've done up to that point fantastically, throwing everything dastardly the game has taught you to fear into the mix and challenging you to use the tools you've gathered and learned on your way, as well as sometimes hard decisions of sacrifice to meet your final objective, whatever the toll.
This is the prettiest game I've ever played, by a long shot. It's also absolutely boggling how much effort they put into it to make that first sentence true for me. The fact that every bit of the art is hand painted will probably never stop being just about unfathomable to me. Aside from art stuff though Ori is also the best controlling platformer I've ever played, and the "bash" mechanic is insanely fun to pull cool tricks off with. The game alternates between relatively mild sections to teeth grating challenge, and then occasionally you get a boss fightesque platforming chase and those got my adrenaline pumping harder than anything else I played this year. Also props for a great story to top it all off, though I know plenty of people didn't resonate with it the same way I did, it had me from the very beggining.
This game has perhaps an unfair leg up channeling the time period it does, that style reigned throughout my childhood and is one of my few real nostalgia buttons. Still, it's a style that I haven't seen in any successful games so this ends up being quite refreshing. The gameplay is solid as well, controlling your little ship feels great and they didn't make the mistake of making you take damage every time you bump up against a wall which I thought they might and it absolutely would have killed the game for me. Once you get the mech stuff ramps up in a way that I find delightful. I don't really know what else to say about this one, it feels like a game you have to experience yourself.
This one shocks me that it was on my list at all. I generally tend to dislike Bethesda games, haven't truely enjoyed any of the Elder Scrolls games, despite trying for many hours to do so with Morrowind and onward, and Fallout 3 and New Vegas were not much better faring in that regard. As I mentioned before I tend to get bored in games I deem aimless, and while all these games have the story paths, I just don't feel very rewarded for following along. Fallout 4 is no different in this regard, but the world seems more interesting for whatever reason this time around, the ongoing war between several factions feels real, the companions are more interesting, the shooting is WAY better than in 3 and NV and V.A.T.S. doesn't seem as lame as it did previously. Speaking of V.A.T.S. I really like what they did with it this time around, building around non-vats vs vats combat on your character in this game feels a lot like building as a warrior vs a mage in fantasy style games to me, even though either way you're technically using the same tools and that's great! The settlements also grabbed me and I feel like I should be ashamed to admit I maxed out charisma and got the most settlers I possibly could(sans mods) in every settlement I could find just because it was interesting to me thinking about designing the weird sort of ramshackle towns that spring up around whatever remains intact from pre-war structures. That stuff, like most Bethesda game stuff, is clunky as hell though and the number of bugs that rammed into me throughout my time in the game from all of the games various systems tore me out of the game pretty hard.
I actually do not have a whole lot to say about Grow Home in words. It's a fairly simple game, you grow, ride, and climb vines up and up and up and explore and collect sutff as you go. It's a simple concept, but it made me feel like those frontier days of the N64 in games like Mario 64 and exploring the games world was a genuine adventure because it felt like a new way to explore a video game. It's not quite as revolutionary as all that but it evoked the sense of it at the very fringe of my mind and then went deeper as I climbed higher and higher.
Like many people I acknowledge DBZ is kind of dumb, and that I still love it with a fervor that's probably at least a bit irrational. The games that it spawns are ussually pretty uninspired and don't capture much of what gets me pumped whenever I watch the anime, despite almost universally making every single DBZ game story just follow the anime's story precisely. Xenoverse also largely borrows it's story from the anime, but twists it just enough and then puts you at the center of it in a way that creates some of the best fanservice you could ask for in a game. The character customization is broad enough that if you want to you don't really see anybody that looks like your twin running around the multiplayer environment so that helps you feel like a special being in the universe as well. The gameplay is also solid but has some glaring flaws in places, I quickly found a couple infinites for the human female character(work in both co-op and pvp, assuming the other player runs out of stamina) that can trivialize a lot of stuff if you want to abuse them, and there are probably more infinites for other race/gender combos as well. Additionally much of the end game for the non-pvp side of things is fond of being hard by throwing a handful of characters at you that are just tremendous hp bags, and the pvp is not balanced in any way so both of those things can get a bit tedious at times. Still flaws aside Xenoverse is in my opinion the strongest game that's ever been made based on Dragon ball, and I had a load of fun beating up the epic heroes and villains of the series, new and old.
Probably the most creative take on a "metagame" to an xcom-like strategy comes from Massive Chalice and I'll be surprised if anybody usurps this opinion from me in the forseeable future. The generational mechanic is fantastic and by far my favorite part of the game. On top of that it's a very interesting world that sets you on the back foot from the get go and really makes you feel like you're struggling for your kingdom to survive for the first several playthroughs. The classes are also very unique for the most part, maybe bow-guy isn't incredibly new in the Hunter classes but the design of their weapon is pretty interesting. My biggest issue with the game is that I don't feel like finishing a run of it is as satisfying as the meat in the middle.
This one is on here I think primarily for looks, and secondarily for being a great sort of "do something else" game. That seems contrary to how harsh it can be to die I suppose but eventually you get secure enough in the universe of Elite that the light dogfight mechanics don't worry you too much while you watch a movie or what have you with one eye and swirl about probably the best rendered version of space I've encountered thus far with the other. It'd be higher on the list if I didn't get bored with aimless games so much faster than others.
The board game turned video game thing is pretty hit or miss when I see it so Armello was a pleasant surprise for me. The art is beautiful and animation is fantastic, while the myriad of victory conditions and strategies combined with a bit of RNG and your opponents own strategies mean that you may start the game with a path in mind and end up chasing a completely different victory condition than you were working on in the first half of a game, be it because you got lucky on some quest rewards that change your mind or because suddenly you REALLY have to kill that damn rat Mercurio over and over so he can't go for Kingslayer and it puts you on the prestige win track. I didn't get a whole lot of time with this one though so it sits solid at ten.
