FauxBen's FauxTen games of the year
By FauxWren 0 Comments
See, it's a joke, because I have more than ten games here.
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Here's the list.
11. Neko Atsume
I really, really like cats, okay. This is a game where you put out some food and some toys, and some cute fucking cats show up and do adorable shit in your yard. I don’t even need to go any farther than that. It’s precious and adorable and it made me happy every time I turned on my phone. End of story.
This is clearly some kind of time lost love letter to the bored third grade Ben who drew Super Mario World levels in his notebook instead of being an attentive student. It’s the game we’ve all been playing in our heads every time we swear that they should have made a level different, or wondered what it would be like if they made a level that was nothing but spin jumping on spinies while avoiding cannons that shot giant ghosts. The mechanics still hold through all these ludicrous ideas, and it gives you a complete appreciation for just how solid the guts these things are built on are.
And then on the flip side, it’s fun as hell just to make the levels. They turned work into fun! Listen, I am notoriously averse to anything that involves building. I don’t like Lego. I don’t like building shit in Minecraft. I was born with only the power to destroy. And yet even I can’t help but have a goddamn blast every time I’m putting an idea into practice in Super Mario Maker. Nintendo just made everything so infuriatingly joyful that I can’t help but have fun. Bastards.
God, I don’t know, people. I was one of those people that really enjoyed the original release of Destiny despite its (many, severe) flaws, and so when The Taken King hit and gave the game an actual story and a whole new set of areas to explore, I was a goner.
You’ve heard this before, but The Taken King makes Destiny the game it should be. It gives you meaningful subclass choices, a compelling and fun story, and an actual progression to the campaign missions that feels like it was a thing made by a human being on purpose.
I just love shooting these guns on these planets with this setting and lore, and fuck it, I don’t care about the huge problems the game still has many of. I may not be playing it every night anymore, but man, whenever they put something new in this thing I’ll be first in line to jump back in. Eyes up, Guardian.
8. Splatoon
Splatoon is just pure joy, fun and attitude wrapped up in the only competitive multiplayer game that doesn’t make me angry at myself. It appeals to the part of me that wants multiplayer goals that aren’t just murdering each other; even when I’m severely behind, throwing a bunch of paint everywhere feels right and good and constructive. Look, I put a bunch of green crap on the floor here! I’M HELPING!
Then, as if that weren’t enough, the whole game is wrapped up in this confident attitude of style and “freshness” that makes me feel like even if I totally shit the bed in the game, as long as I’m wearing these fly sunglasses and this rad ass jacket, it doesn’t matter how much of a noobsuck I am. It also doesn’t hurt that no one online can chat at me in the process. Stay fresh, fuckers.
7. Bloodborne
The game that made me finally buckle and get a PS4. I’m a huge fan of Souls games, but when this thing got announced I admit I wasn’t super into the concept. Victorian werewolf horror isn’t really my bag, but I’m such a huge sucker for the gameplay in these things that they could make it about a sphere fighting large multicolored cubes with a bat and I’d still probably put 100 hours into it.
Fortunately (and without giving too much away) Bloodborne’s story proves to be more than the first glance reveals, and winds up being one of my favorite sets of lore in the entire series. Couple that with a really clever reinvention of the Souls gameplay loop by removing the emphasis on absorbing blows and instead focusing on avoidance and aggression, and you’ve got something that embodies all the fun of those games while still being fresh and unique.
It definitely has its issues relative to the rest of the series (build diversity is really backloaded and lacking, and the overall itemization in the game is far less interesting) but fuck it, it’s a Souls game. I’ll be a huge fan no matter what, because the game makes you feel like a god when you manage to bash your head through the worst challenges (looking at you, Ludwig, the Accursed.)
6. Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin
Alright, I cheated a little. Dark Souls II is my favorite game in the Souls series (real popular opinion, there) and while it came out in 2014, this rerelease/repackaging changed and added enough that I’m counting it here.
I could write an awful goddamn lot about Dark Souls II here, but suffice to say that the incredible depth, diversity, and heart of the world and gameplay keeps me constantly coming back to this one in a way that the other games in the series can’t match. It takes the bleakness of Dark Souls and adds a hint of hope and sunrise that makes it feel much more like a game where your perseverance can actually matter and lead to something good in the future, even if you’re pushing that boulder up the hill a hundred thousand times to get there.
And Scholar? Well, it throws in all three DLC segments (probably the best part of the game, to be honest) and also drops in some much needed context to the story along the way. In addition, the revised enemy placements fill the game’s encounter design with a sense of place, giving areas in the game more history through the way in which they’re represented by the types of creatures and how they behave.
I’m never going to stop playing this thing. It dragged me kicking and screaming out of depression last year, and the rerelease this year just reinforced me. I fell in love with Dark Souls and Demon's Souls, but it took Dark Souls II to make a lifer out of me.
Listen. This thing was kind of a shitshow on PC, and even when viewed in its best light, it’s kind of heavily derivative of Arkham City. But the thing you have to know is: I played it on PS4 and I didn’t play Arkham City. Which means I’m right there in the narrow field of people this thing is probably ideal for, and boy did I enjoy the hell out of it from start to finish.
The other thing you should know about me is that I sort of love really silly vehicles in games. I liked the Mako in Mass Effect, and I love puttering around on my Sparrow in Destiny. Yeah, the Batmobile in this was kind of tank-esque, but let’s be honest, the Batmobile is always decked out in a billion guns and looks like it handles like an Abrams.
I don’t have a ton to say past that. The game looked incredible and the story was good enough and looked at some interesting aspects of the Batman character in a scenario near the end of his career. I might be the only one who liked the whole package here, but hey, variety is the spice of life.
The fact that I started playing this at all is ENTIRELY Austin Walker’s fault, and I’ll never be able to repay him for it. Klei Entertainment’s turn-based stealth rogue-lite is an absolute master class in decision making gameplay. Every single turn, you’re given all the information you need and are tasked with making a judgment call about how you want to use it in accordance with the risks in front of you. When you screw up, the consequences are often extremely quick and extremely severe, and you’re often able to tell exactly where you screwed the pooch.
In a lot of ways, it shares a philosophy with Klei’s stealth action title Mark of the Ninja. Both games understand that the expression of information is the absolute key of a stealth game: the player needs to know what they’re avoiding in order to make a choice of how to avoid (or eliminate) it. Both Mark of the Ninja and Invisible Inc go out of their way to make sure you know everything you need to in order to realize just how screwed you are.
But this time around, it’s a slow, methodical thing instead of fast paced action, and it’s wrapped up in a really slick aesthetic with a perfect mix of noir and cyberpunk that makes you feel cool as hell even when you’re totally blowing it and getting everyone killed. I’m constantly finding myself considering putting off other games to play more of this one, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt represents a massive leap in scope from its predecessor. But more than that, it absolutely perfectly encapsulates the aspects of the The Witcher series that I’ve always loved the most: a sense of place in the world, and a feeling like every quest is its own poignant story.
Playing The Witcher 3 felt like being told a bedtime story, but the kind of bedtime story that made you think, the kind of fable with a little bit of pepper and darkness behind it that got your mind working at a speed something wholly pleasant couldn’t. It felt like I was sitting down and asking CD Projekt RED to tell me another story about Geralt of Rivia, and no matter what kind of content I was doing, I always left the game feeling like I’d done something meaningful.
I actually literally had to stop playing the game because my open world prioritization mechanism broke down when I realized all of the content was equally great. That’s not an easy thing to, and the fact that CD Projekt RED accomplished it in a game of this kind of scale is mind blowing to me.
2. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
I’ve always been a hell of a Metal Gear fan. The series has always had this perfect mix of character and finesse that has entranced me since the very beginning, peaking with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater back on the PS2.
This is the part where you’d expect me to say “And MGSV is no different.” But man, it’s incredibly different, and that’s probably what makes it stand out so firmly in my mind. Every Metal Gear game is fun to play. They’re always a great blend of structure and freedom that lets you approach things from any angle. But MGSV feels like the first game in the series that absolutely prioritized the moment to moment joy of the game above ALL else (including, well, the cohesiveness of the story. Uh, whoops?).
Every other Metal Gear has been a singular experience that I rode through from end to end as a joyride and then put down with a smile on my face and a fondness in my heart. MGSV? I’m still playing that shit every night. I’m about 60 hours in and I’m still nowhere close to the end of the story. And I don’t even care! I gotta tie some balloons to some people and go hunt a bear. Metal Gear Solid V breathed life into that series in a way I never expected, and for that, it’s going to be something I keep revisiting for a long time to come.
1. Undertale
“Oh Christ, the Undertales got another one,” you say. It’s cool, it’s cool, I’m not going to sit here and evangelize to you why Undertale will pay off your student loan, reunite you with your lost loved ones and finally make you Diamond in League of Legends.
Instead, I’ll say this: Undertale was like a hug to me. It’s a game that zooms way way in on things like friendship, hope, love, and just being an optimistic little fucker in the face of absolutely insurmountable obstacles. It’s everything I used to be and try my best to be now. And sure, it’s got some pretty clever writing, a fantastic soundtrack, and a pretty clever little twist on JRPG battle structure along the way.
But really, Undertale got in my heart with its warmth and stayed there, and I can’t say that about a whole hell of a lot of games. I’m still thinking about it every day, the way I think about friends I used to know or a place I remember fondly from my childhood. Not playing Undertale anymore is still playing Undertale. That’s not something that’s going to come around very often for me.