GOTY 2016
I know what you're thinking: is he going to rate the games from 2016? That's so cruel! He's going to do it anyway.
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I love the setting of this game. The wilderness feels lonely, invigorating and kind of dangerous. The story works very well with the wilderness--as a man coping with loss you feel emotionally vulnerable as well. I like the tension that the mystery creates, even though I wasn't sold on how the story wraps up.
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Hyper Light Drifter was a really fun world to explore--the physical area, the symbols and all of the secrets tucked away. The feeling of mystery and exploration actually puts it closer to a classic Metroid game for me personally.
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A more enjoyable, cinematic version of LIMBO. INSIDE has a weirder atmosphere with better puzzles. It also has a wonderfully bizarre and dark endgame.
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Quadrilateral Cowboy offers unique hacking and traversal puzzles in a beautiful, weird and detailed world.
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This game hits all of the notes that I loved about the Harvest Moon games when I was a teenager. It improves upon the standard formula with some neat little character moments between the villagers (who are relatively more complex than Harvest Moon characters). It also provides you with a very concrete goal--restore the community center. This goal has you engaging with all of the game's systems in a way that keeps things varied and interesting. At some point though, you'll have done everything you can in one season and then you're just waiting for the seasons to change. This feeling of having nothing really to do in a season is definitely something I remember from Harvest Moon. When the sense of adventure and working towards something stops, it stops hard and the simulated work feels like real work.
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I have so many thoughts about this game. I love that it subverted standard science fiction tropes and didn't end with a malevolent AI or a cliched self-interested villain. All of the characters were flawed and trying their best in this terrible scenario (including the AI!). I loved the last third of the game and talking with each of the four main characters about their ultimate demise and how they felt about it. It was a really novel setup and story. As an adventure game, it has a lot of issues--you're in the same environments over and over again and the pacing of the game eventually becomes very predictable. It was a tad too long compared to something like Tacoma, which is shorter and very well paced. I liked the little cinematic touches but by the 100th time you see them it just feels like it's dragging down the momentum and pace of the story. I was immediately hooked by the environment and setting and I still love that even with all of the slowness. I also loved the themes. In the end, what mattered was people's happiness and doing their best and it felt wonderfully human.
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I love the hard cuts and how this story is told without words. There's a lot going on with symbolism and non-linear storytelling. It has some great Twin Peaks vibes. The quick cuts keep you interested through the whole thing. I generally have a hard time with stories that seem like they're trying to be cryptic or obtuse but this one worked pretty well for me. I think that's because it went so quickly and it delivered all of it's weirdness with a steady, astute hand.
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This game is beautiful on multiple levels. The sheer amount of life moving and interacting with each other and the world is amazing. The world design is also meticulous and beautiful. The movement of the animals is natural in a way that is just fascinating to watch. The game itself is an exploration game with a very sparse story. It feels great to move (swim) through this world. I was fine with the limited interaction with the world as it let the beauty of the world shine on its own. I was left thinking about the beauty of the ocean. Also, there's a part where you and a Great White Shark fuck up some kind of ancient machine.
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The paranormal setting is spooky and unsettling and I was invested in the story through the whole 4 hours. I like the relationship building through dialogue choices but the characters weren't that memorable and the dialogue system has some annoying quirks.
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This game has so much style. I love it and I love the world that it builds. There's also something very satisfying about flying around as a head and...landing in stuff. By the end of the game I loved the core mechanic of sucking, landing and shooting. There are some additional abilities that give you just enough options for combat (making drones, ramming into stuff as the head!).
Something doesn't quite gel right with the story though. There's so much promise in the world and they touch on some interesting themes about consciousness and happiness but the main plot points just kind of fizzle.
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This game does a lot with a little. There's just enough bits of story throughout the small, linear levels to keep you pushing on to the next town. I love the abstract illustrations--they keep things mysterious enough to be interesting and very appealing. There are some odd design decisions here like hiding the dialog from you while you're doing train upkeep (maybe this was put in to encourage multiple playthroughs? I am motivated by story but not enough to do all of the very non-story parts again). Because of this and some script problems I felt the world was obscured for no reason, which makes me mad.
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Another neat world in a WadjetEye game but this one just doesn't feel fleshed out like Primordia or Technobabylon. There are some cool elements like death cults and plots to overthrow the government but everything ends up feeling kind of small.
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Asemblance has some interesting ideas about memory and some neat visuals but it didn't tell enough of a story for me. I'm fine with a story being cryptic but I felt like I was very much grasping at straws about everything in the story the whole time. The "VR" nature of the story and visuals was neat and there are a couple creepy moments.
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This game adds nothing to the charm of the first. In fact, it makes me wonder if the first game was this difficult to control.
Grow Up gives you much more mobility more quickly but climbing this little open world isn't as satisfying as the focused climb in Grow Home.
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