GOTY 2017
I probably won't get to many 2017 games but for the sake of consistency I will rank them.
List items
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I love everything about the story and art of this game--the world, the writing, the characters, the environments and the little animation touches. This game just sets up one crazy moment after another. From waking up in a wheelchair to faking a movie audition on Venus it's all wonderfully weird and fascinating. The small moments are also beautiful and funny, usually just between a few people on your submarine. All of it works and the shooting is just there to kind of build and release tension between these other moments. It functions pretty well and I like the environments more in this game than The New Order. The heavy weapons also introduce a fun new elements to combat.
I can't wait to see where they go from here!
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Skews hard towards the "Metroid" of "Metroidvania" in a way that I really enjoyed. Very sparse narrative and little direction. The environments and art are absolutely gorgeous and the soundtrack is perfect. It elicits the feelings of wandering, exploration and loneliness. The combat was fun and challenging and it has a kind of Paper Mario badge system I like.
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Cuphead is more than just a boss rush mode for a really hard platformer. Obviously it's beautiful, but I really like the way that beauty works with the gameplay. Everything is so visually distinctive that it's easy to tell things apart and anticipate movements when you pick on visual cues. Cuphead has a great sense of humor as bosses get wacky and strange very quickly. I loved getting the patterns down to the point where fighting bosses was second nature. It's so fun to feel how much better you're getting at the game, on that note the third island was actually the easiest because I was so familiar with the controls and mechanics. Cuphead has those moments of pure joy at mastering mechanics and waves of relief that come after completing a boss!
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I liked this game quite a lot! The first game left me wanting a little more in terms of loadouts and things to do. Steamworld Dig 2 nails a basic cycle of dig, return to town, buy things and go back to digging. It's weird how different digging feels as a means of exploring compared to walking though corridors in most 2D platformers but for whatever reason it feels like you're making distinct progress. There's also something very satisfying about planning out a path to get ore or attack an enemy. The small bit of story and character development are fine. The real standout to me is the music, which has a kind of upbeat ambient feel to it that reminds me of Blockhead. The game also has a real sense of danger at times, something definitely lacking in the first Steamworld Dig--specifically in the "Vectron" area where spirits can animate unstoppable menacing robots.
This game was a fun, tight gameplay loop with great atmosphere.
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This is a really neat piece of interactive fiction. Like good sci-fi, it uses futuristic ideas to talk about current issues of class and racism. It's all done really well with tight dialogue that's funny and weird. The world feels wonderfully fleshed out, especially since you never really even see it beyond the designs of the robots, the train and the conversations you have with them.
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The house is neat and interconnected in a really cool way. I liked slowly piecing together the story of an incredibly cursed and unlucky family. The way they present incredible dark and horrific moments in a straightforward manner gives them even more weight than a standard video game or movie where the music swells or camera pivots to emphasize a moment. The small vignettes are great and so tonally different that each one is a refreshing break from walking around and exploring. I'm still thinking about the major thematic point of the game--that despite all of the misfortune in their family the Finch's lives were beautiful and poignant and that's enough. I agree with this sentiment, but it's a really weird to get an intriguing back story about this cursed family only to have the rug yanked out when it comes to a reason for why this is all happening. I guess I expect some kind of an explanation when a game uses supernatural elements as part of its storytelling. In the end the experience was weird, wonderful and poignant.
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I really like the idea behind Kingsway--an operating system that functions as an RPG. This design choice allows for some great moments as enemies can manipulate your windows, attack with pop-ups and spread out over many windows. The loot and progression of the game are also well designed and feel classic and engrossing. The rogue like loop of the game also worked very well--I learned something from each run that I could use to make my next run better. I think they could have done more with the OS design and the cheeky presentation but it was still an enjoyable little RPG.
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I wasn't sure what to expect with this game. I really liked the story in Gone Home and the environmental storytelling drew me in immediately. Tacoma still has some of that but they also take a different tack with the AR logs that you can move through dynamically. That idea is really cool but it doesn't really have the same weight as piecing through stuff in Gone Home. It is a really neat effect to see these oddly translucent figures move back and forth as you rewind and replay the logs. I do like that they mostly just hint at the real crux of the story and spend most of the time explaining the people's lives and the world they're living in. The world is oddly bureaucratic with brands that have effectively built up into pseudo government institutions. The drama in the crew member's lives is coupled to this realistic future in a way that feels like classic science fiction.
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Everything is a playground with philosophy built in. To that end, I think it works as a companion piece to the idea of interconnectedness and abstract thought. There are some beautiful moments as you get groups of objects together and watch them dance or move through environments.
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A relaxing puzzle game. It's refreshing to play a game that's so reliant on an understanding of geometry and math. Some of the puzzles are frustrating in that it's not exactly clear what the win condition is. Most of this game is just a serene joy with a relaxing soundtrack and different theming (I don't know much about the architectural history of the middle east!)
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A short adventure game with some pretty lo-fi art and a weird, compelling story. It didn't outstay its welcome.
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