We begin in our usual way, with a diatribe on kayfabe and the inherent beauty thereof.

The Shapeshifting Detective

Kayfabe is a beautiful thing, my friends. It’s a constant, calculated work by a cooperative of likeminded individuals hell-bent on convincing the world that it’s a shoot, brother. It’s a shared reality within another reality that thinks its invisible but is most definitely not. What fascinate me most are the cracks in kayfabe where reality shines both in and out. In one of those cracks, there’s a mass grave of WCW storylines where kayfabe tries desperately to reach out into reality. It’s the same place Jeff Jarrett built that six-sided ring on top of. In other cracks, reality reaches out to kayfabe.

When people are in desperate need of hope via fantastical, spontaneous escape, kayfabe reaches back. Sometimes it’s wrestling, sometimes it’s a good record, sometimes it’s a video game, but it’s always something you can’t quite figure out. There’s some secret to be found or someone’s in on it or you’re getting worked, bro. Dusty Rhodes happens. Daniel Bryan happens. Becky Lynch happens. And reality just kinda forgets that kayfabe is kayfabe for a minute and suddenly everyone is having the time of their lives. Maybe reality has been having a rough go of it lately, reality needed a day off work with their best friend and reality kinda just needed to get fucked up on a couch for awhile and goof on some shitty looking FMV game.

And there she was: The Shapeshifting Detective. I thought I knew what I was getting into. I thought it would be a corny-ass, cheaply developed cashgrab for some niche, foreign market that I could make fun of for three hours. Maybe it was and maybe I did. But for a while there, I wondered to myself “are these people for fucking real?” They were not of course, but that’s why I loved it. For a little while that crack in kayfabe was a keyhole instead of a wide, blinding tear. I waffled between “get a load of this ham fisted, up its own ass trash” and “this post-modern, meta-deconstruction of modern video game narrative is good, actually” multiple times. I didn’t know the secret yet. But as soon as I knew they were in on the joke, it didn’t matter anymore. We drank what we had, got our riffs in, smashed that screenshot button and went on our merry way.

Even if it was just some shitty/amazing FMV game, it felt good as hell to believe it was something more, some grand human ambition that damn near fell flat on its face but managed to bring itself back from the brink in its twilight moments. It was enough for me to just believe for a while, or to believe I was getting fooled at least. Maybe you’re afraid to believe. Maybe you don’t think anyone will join you. Maybe you think you sound like an idiot. Maybe you think nobody cares. Yeah, maybe. But I think you should get jacked up for the shit you like, even if it’s kayfabed. Dig for those secrets. Or maybe let yourself be fooled by them for a while. You should celebrate the silly bullshit you love with the friends you love. Get lost for a while. Take care of yourself. Laugh more. Be good. Play more video games. Especially The Shapeshifting Detective, which is terrifically silly bullshit.

Honorable Mentions

Tetris Effect

I challenge you to find a better pairing than Tetris and Tetsuya Mizuguchi. In addition to being perhaps the most recognizable and successful video games of all time, Tetris is a monument to simplicity and accessibility. It has endured for three decades under a myriad of incarnations but has remained the puzzle game that all other puzzle games are measured by. Who better than to take the most universally beloved puzzle game of all time and fuck its shit up with synesthesia and psychedelia than Tetsuya Mizuguchi? This game got people absolutely jacked to play Tetris in 2018. Tetris! In 2018! What a wonderful thing!

There is a joyous, undeniable spirit behind this game. It wants nothing more than to make you feel good. It wants to wrap you in a blanket and fill you with peace and love. It wants you to know that you’re not alone, that we’re in this together. It has turned me into some new age hippie asshole that I grew up spitting on. It wants you to know that through the universal language of blocks falling and lines clearing, we are all one. At the end of the day of course, this is still Tetris. I wanted more out of the VR component and some multiplayer would be nice, but a really great Tetris game on a bad day is still better than most games on their best day.

Dragon Ball Fighterz

I can’t recall a game that swept me off my feet as swiftly as Dragon Ball FighterZ. I fell in love with it after my very first fight. It is hands down one of the prettiest games I’ve ever seen. To say it looks like the anime would be doing it a disservice, because it looks so much better. As a no good bum ass fucking scrub fighting game player, this game feels pretty damn accessible. I have as much fun playing it as I did watching it at EVO this year, where god-tier world beater SonicFox took home the title. There was a time where I thought this game would be my favorite game of the year. Some other stuff came along, but this game’s moment in the sun felt pretty huge.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

While I doubt my love affair with the long running franchise will be quite as torrid this go round, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has to be the finest entry thus far simply by virtue of being the MOST Smash Bros. This is a finely tuned and fully honed Nintendo Product. It is packed with a staggering amount of musical arrangements, a fully loaded roster, and a king’s ransom of Nintendo history. It is perhaps the one game that every video game fan I roll with will roll with. This is most likely the last Smash Bros. I will ever really need. It wins no points for innovation, but goddamn is it a blast to play.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

It’s en vogue for indie developers to play with clay the Metroid-vania template offers them, but so few bother to tap into the roots of the suffix in that hackneyed term. Considering Metroid (or more specifically Super Metroid) does the heavy lifting in that mashed up term for the subgenre, most Castlevania games are described as “like Metroid.” It’s true at this point, because “most Castlevania games” means every Castlevania game since 1997’s Symphony of the Night. All of this makes it easy to forget that Castlevania is rooted in pretty straightforward platformers that are ruthlessly archaic by today’s standards. While there was no shortage of 8/16-bit 2-D platformer homages in the indie game explosion of the 21^st century, most developers kind of skipped over the Castlevania tributes because… well, the Castlevania games mostly feel like shit these days.

Enter Bloodstained. In plotting his return to the subgenre he co-authored (the yet to be released fully-fledged Metroidvania Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night), former SOTN director Koji Igarashi and Inti Creates decided to take a stab at those pre-Metroidvania ‘Vania games with a prequel titled Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, a wholesale ape job of the Castlevania I-IV formula with enough refinements to make the game feel (mostly) modern, (almost too) faithful, and pretty damn fun to play.

The mixture of 8-bit and 16-bit art bugs me and the way deaths/game overs are handled in this game is annoying as all hell, but the game feels better than any pre-SOTN Castlevania game ever did. For a $10 prequel that basically doubles as promotion for the main course that’s (hopefully) just around the corner, you could do a lot worse and not much better.

Celeste

I didn’t expect a tough as nails, speedrunner ready platformer to be the game I went to for a touching, relatable, authentic take on depression, but 2018 was a goddamn ride, wasn’t it?

Celeste is a brave game. It tells a story most games with quintuple its budget won’t dare to with mechanics as old as the platforming genre itself. It mixes pretty standard platforming gameplay with pretty simple but effective storytelling and lets both of those things evolve very naturally throughout the course of the game. You rarely see platformers try to pull off this kind of storytelling and you rarely see platformers this tightly tuned. It is of two minds yet so in sync. It’s design principles and narrative mesh in a way that pixel art platformers never do. It is without a doubt an indie classic.

Dead Cells

This game is so moldable. It feels like there are infinite ways each run can play out and no matter how it ends you can always adjust your play style to your liking.

A bad loadout never feels like a death sentence. Even if you lean on brutality early on, there’s ways to make up for poor defense or less than desirable secondary skills. If you want to speed run it, you can do that without losing out on rewards. If you want to take it explore every crevasse, feel free. If you want to kill everything or nothing, that’s fine too. You can get permanent upgrades to find more levels, or run straight for the castle and fuck shit up.

Unfortunately, Dead Cells stumbles in the home stretch. Each failed run feels more and more repetitive, especially when any permanent progress starts to plateau. As the game wears on and the combat doesn’t strike as hard as it did at first blush, I stopped wanting to spend time in that world. All of the art has a clean and crisp edge to it, but enemy design and environments feel uninspired. Attempts at world building fall flat with such a minimalist script. Some of that stuff was cute (primarily in weapon descriptions), but when the combat gets old, the mysteries behind all those doors were not mysterious enough to keep my interest piqued.

It’s just… the combat feels so good, you know? This game does next to nothing for me in the style department and feels pretty off balance progression-wise, but the fights just feel incerdible. There’s something about the way those weapon/skill combos feed off of each other like the cast of Cheers, in perfect harmony for maximum violence. I don’t know if there’s anything else I particularly like about Dead Cells. Maybe it’s all just stuff I put up with between brawls. Perhaps the same could be said of all video games. What is a video game but a miserable little pile of secrets? Enough talk, have at you, yada yada yada…scene.

Donut County

2018’s Soundtrack of the Year right here. Sharp writing carries this one through its two-hour runtime. Though slight in the gameplay department, I think there’s a solid foundation here for a more puzzle-based sequel or an arcade-y run-based spin-off. All things considered, Donut County was a fun little place to spend time. Points for Trashopedia, too.

Minit

Minit skates by on concept alone. Imagine if the item swap chain quest from Link’s Awakening was extrapolated into a full game but broken down into 60-second chunks. It’s an exciting and novel concept (at least in this short form) and is executed damn well here. I got my fill of Minit exactly as it met its end, but I’ll be excited to see this concept evolve if more indie developers decide to fuck with it.

The Messenger

I think it says a lot about how weird this 2-D action platformer/Metroidvania gets that for a while there I talked myself into thinking that it was maybe a secret Kojima project used to stealth promote Death Stranding. Or maybe it says that I’m a dipshit. But let me lay this out for you anyway:

-The story is about a messenger or deliveryman who has taken on various video game character archetypes over time. Ninjas, tomb raiders, soldiers, cowboys, things of that nature. The guy in Death Stranding is like a mail man for babies or something, isn’t he?

-The final stretch of this game feels like a flat out troll. The last level is so punishing and goes on for so long that it feels downright mean. Sounds like someone I know.-The story is ridiculous to the point of hysterical laughter. It’s as if they brought in the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future whenever it was time for a cutscene. Rambling, incoherent nonsense plot? SURE SOUNDS FAMILIAR. This is an 8/16-bit platformer with a goddamn 13 (13!) minute cutscene. Imagine shoving a 13 minute cutscene that goes absolutely nowhere into the middle of Ninja Gaiden in 1988.

-It’s very preoccupied with death and rebirth, like the baby mail man from Death Stranding.

-At some point a dude in tactical gear and night vision goggles pops by, says hey, then dips. Was it Solid Snake? You can’t rule that out.

-There’s a shopkeeper that is filled to the brim with what are basically codec calls. You know who else put really long conversations in their games?

Basically Hideo Kojima shadow developed this 2-D platformer. Now if you have a spare moment, I’d like to talk to you about how the Rosanne reboot and its subsequent cancellation was a false flag operation perpetrated by the Obamas.

KORG Gadget

“It’s Drum Loop Meditation: the Video Game! Smoke weed in bed and pretend you’re the drum machine from Big Black! Tickle the digital ivories with your limited knowledge of music but penchant for mindlessly pushing buttons endlessly! Become a Youtube chillwave sensation in your own desperate, slowly deteriorating mind!” Well, whattaya think? Wanna play Korg Gadget?

Ending of the Year

The Hex

I was ready to abandon The Hex at a few different points throughout its brief six-hour runtime. For as many great comedy bits it has and how much fun it has playing with video game tropes, playing this game can feel like a real drag. The “hub world” is not fun to move around in, the puzzles can be pretty frustrating, and the various gameplay vignettes it breaks up into go on for far too long. Even my favorite part of the game, its grand Stanley Parable riff of a finale, sticks its head a little too far up its own ass. But then it hits the turn and it all snaps into place. Even if I can’t really admire this game’s execution, its ambition is admirable.

Best Writing

Subsurface Circular

I’m very glad this game has zero voice acting because the only voice I can hear in my head for the main character is Humphrey Bogart, specifically his performance in The Big Sleep. You sit in a train car as fellow Teks (labor robots) come and go and every conversation you have with them is an interrogation. You can be a smartass, a know-it-all, a goodie two-shoes, or a bit of each. What never changes is how sharp and snappy the dialogue is. Each passenger on the Subsurface Circular is so well defined and would fit so perfectly into framework of a noir film and each response to these characters help you define your lead character in your head. And wouldn’t you know I really wanted mine to sound like Phillip Marlowe on the brink of madness.

While the game is played entirely in dialogue trees, the tricks you need to finesse your way towards the truth are spelled out so cleverly through a sad, hilarious honest script. My character always had the response/answer that felt right. I had full pictures of what these other Teks’ lives were like and who their Bogey flick analog would be. There’s a bite to this game’s script that is damn near unheard of in modern games or films. The plot is fine and mostly inconsequential when compared to the straight fire the characters are spitting throughout, and that’s kind of the most fitting thing about it. Old noir films were never about the plot. They were about Bogey and Bacall flirting hard enough to make a nun squirt and not giving a fuck about the butler that accidently drove off the pier. This game gets that.

The Main Event

10) The Shapeshifting Detective

09) Dead Cells

08) Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

07) Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

06) Tetris Effect

05) Celeste

04) Dragon Ball FighterZ

03) The Messenger

Runner-up

Forza Horizon 4

I’m not good at this game. It doesn’t drive like Burnout: Paradise. Despite this glaring flaw, I cannot stop playing it. What it lacks in handling it makes up for in spirit. Horsepower? No. Spirit. Spirit.

There is a hefty dose of driving game history in Forza Horizon 4. It feels like the culmination of so many racing game dreams realized. Not only does this feel like what the Forza series has been working towards for a long time, but also what Burnout Paradise and Test Drive Unlimited were working towards. There’s even some Out Run here, too.

There’s a set of challenges in this game inspired by all the driving games that helped shape Forza Horizon 4. You drive cars either directly from or inspired by driving games of yesteryear while the narrator namedrops the game and gives you a quick rundown of each one. The way the narrator gushes about Out Run and others makes it feel like they just let 10 members of the development team geek out over their favorite driving games and the various cars therein. As a huge sucker for developers lovingly rambling about the games they love, this was far and away my favorite part of Forza Horizon 4. While it might feel like they’re just trying to catch a nostalgic rub from old games in order to get a cheap pop, the whole sequence works because this game truly lives up to those games’ legacies. This grand experiment where a bunch of cars decked out in anime character decals share a massive and constantly evolving open world somehow worked out. It feels like they made a driving game for everyone without sacrificing the Forza identity. It feels like the best driving game since Burnout Paradise. Fucking finally.

DOOM of the year 2018

Hitman 2

There isn’t a whole lot to say about Hitman 2 that hasn’t been said about 2016’s precursor Hitman. The maps are all brand new, there are tweaks here and there, and it looks nicer. It’s mostly what you would expect from a standard game sequel and not a whole lot more. But this big stupid Rube Goldberg machine that is the Hitman franchise is such a reliable but exciting foundation. As long as the jokes stay funny and the levels stay fresh, it feels like IO Interactive could do this forever. For a while there, it felt like they might not. After Square Enix dropped them, Agent 47 was in limbo. I’m glad IO got their boy back. To see them top their franchise best again after the shit they went through with Square Enix (publishers of The fucking Quiet Man) just makes my heart sing a beautiful song about missing my dead mother’s secret recipe for marinara sauce.

Hitman 2 is a butt ass naked video game. It hides nothing from you. Everything you could possibly need is laid out before you so that you can be the absolute best assassin you can be. You can pretty much watch the game’s gears turn while in Hitman vision. If you know how to hold a controller and have the patience, you could go ice-cold silent assassin from the jump. Even the overarching narrative’s barely-there layer of pretense is relegated to the illustrated cutscenes and stays out of the gameplay. Hitman 2 shows you exactly how it works and then dares you to fuck with it. And boy oh boy when you fuck with it does it feel so good.

As far as locations go, I didn’t think IO could top the impeccable design of their Sapienza map from the 2016 game. It was gorgeous, sprawling, and brimming with secrets. It balanced out its space so elegantly, seamlessly blending its more intimate areas with wide-open vistas. As huge as that map felt while exploring each main area throughout the city, those areas always felt so tightly connected. And then after they laid out this masterclass in level design, they threw all of their best jokes on top of it, including composing a goddamn 80s synth-rock ballad about a man that misses his dead mother’s secret recipe for marinara sauce. I’m telling you, that whole level is a goddamn masterpiece. And they topped it! Twice!

The one-two punch of Hitman 2’s final two levels feels like IO’s magnum opus. From the pitch black humor of their suburban Vermont map to the showstopping finale at the John Wick: Chapter 2 island castle, the end of this game feels like the Hitman machine running at maximum power. It is the funniest, sharpest, most panic inducing work IO has done since the 2016 soft reboot. Sure, that’s only two full games, but this team packs so much content into each map that each one of these games feels massive.

I hope this game sells better than the first one. I hope these developers make a shitload of money for their work. I hope all their dreams come true. I hope they get to make Hitman games as long as they want to. I hope they keep making their Elusive Targets funny as hell. I hope everybody plays Hitman 2, because BOW DOWN ALL HAIL 2018’S DOOM OF THE YEAR Hitman 2.