This year was a mixed bag for me. While I played a number of good games that I really enjoyed, no single game released stood shoulders above the rest. The reason for that may or may not be Fortnite, which I continued to play on a weekly basis and remain thoroughly enthralled by.
Regrets and Honorable Mentions:
The downloadable demo pretty much sold me instantly. CrossCode felt like a love letter to SNES games, which is the generation that caused me to fall in love with video games. End-to-end this game is pretty much perfection. Graphics, music, sound, story, characters, inventory, progression, etc etc. The only time I was ever unhappy with the game is when I was too dumb to figure out a puzzle.
Worth noting, because I do it for a living, the game was written entirely in JavaScript, which is incredibly inspiring.
Celeste really surprised me. Despite it's simplicity--a platformer where you can air dash--it felt incredibly refreshing and original. Something about the art style, sound design, and impressive level design set it apart from anything else in the genre.
A Way Out is the sophomore game to one of the most emotional games I've ever experienced, and was itself pitched with some bold promises. In the end, my experience aligned pretty well with my expectations. The game was mechanically fun the play, the story was interesting from the start, paced well, and had some great twists turns and they somehow managed to include player agency in a heavily story-focused game. Given that you can't play the game alone, I really think one's own experience with the game is heavily dependent upon who they play it with. In this case, I played it with my brother, 3000 miles away, who I haven't played games with since the earlier 90s. We didn't take it too seriously and I still managed to feel a range of emotions.
From my Steam review:
I like puzzle games alright. They're fun. They can make you feel really smart.
Every once in a while though, a puzzle game comes along with a refreshing new idea and offers just the right mood, atmosphere, and difficulty curve, and it presents itself in such a way that you play through it in one sitting and it leaves you with a great big beaming smile and you realize you just absolutely love video games and wrote a run on sentence about them because you're just so in awe of what you just experienced.
This is one of those puzzle games.
Detroit: Become Human landed somewhere in between Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls for me (Heavy Rain being #1 on the list). The gameplay itself is exactly what you'd expect, bouncing between different narratives while providing a light bit of action and a lot of choice. If you try to pick the story apart, you probably won't have a good time, but if you just go along for the ride, it'll definitely make you feel things. Looking forward to more from Quantic Dream.
I backed this on Indiegogo on April 23rd, 2013 and finally got to play it 5 years later. Ghost of a Tale was an absolute labor of love -- the narrative, the lore, the characters, the dialog, the environments, and the exploration were all very well realized. The game takes place in a handful of interconnected areas and one my favorite things was learning how to navigate those areas and unlocking shortcuts between them. The pace really quickens towards the end when you have a total understanding of the mechanics and the world. It was very Dark Souls-y and all very satisfying.
This was probably my most enjoyable Vita game this year. The simple mechanics (jump, dash, attack) and game loop (exploring a world where you can make any challenging section easier by leveling your character, weapons, familiars) made for a really enjoyable experience.
