I could preface this list with a few short words about the overall gaming scene this year. I /could/ do that, but to be honest, much of this year's lists involved me looking up release dates to test whether something actually had been released this year, so I probably don't recall the overall scene all that well.
In any case, here's my top 10 of the year.
Analogue's gameplay can pretty much be deconstructed to three points. Read a letter, ask a companion what they thought about that letter, and then tell /them/ what you thought about their thoughts on the letter.
If you were to tell people that something that simple could be the best experience you had on your computer, you'd probably get laughed at. But it quite honestly was. Christine Love did a really masterful job of world-building with the Mugunghwa and its two residents, and the otherwise minimalist aesthetic made you as a player focus more and more on the words you read and the characters you interacted with.
For the record, *Mute was obviously the best; but getting to the conclusions of both character arcs, finding the stories both had held onto for countless years waiting for someone to find them and hear them and just why that was so important stuck in the heart.
I'm interested to see where Love and Analogue goes from here.
The most interesting aspect to Journey for me was that ultimately, you could speak without speaking. I, in general, detest breaking out a headset in order to communicate online and have developed a long tradition of attempting to use non-verbal communication in pretty much every game available. In Journey, tones are the only means of communication, and all multiplayer is randomly assigned.
Unlike a lot of people who put Journey on their lists, I had no One Player who made the game. Instead, I had many other players along for the ride, bowing out when they decided to. This actually was an interesting experience in itself, as each time I was able to introduce myself, communicate my path and other players were able to follow me. Spread over the whole game, this would happen maybe a half-dozen times or more, but each time it worked and felt like understanding passed between us.
Obviously, there's artistic merit, musical qualities to the game, but the fact that I was able to hold conversations without, y'know, /words/ made Journey an experience to have.
Sleeping Dogs had some of the most surprising DLC releases of this year. Their Halloween release let me fighting Chinese hopping vampires, the Zodiac Tournament let me reenact some of the better plot ideas to come out of the Shaw Brothers and Bruce Lee. But it was ultimately the main game that hooked me, letting me play out the undercover cop in the Triads story Hong Kong films have been playing with for ages.
I took notice of Sleeping Dogs in the last days of its past as True Crime. I mean that literally, in that I downloaded a trailer for it two days before Activision released their announcement that they were cutting it. When I heard Square-Enix picked up the pieces and intended to release it themselves, I was enthusiastic.
When I got the game, and discovered just what a fun ride it wound up, combining open-world crime game with Arkham-esque fighting system, I became consumed. I still may have cars and medals to collect to fully complete Sleeping Dogs, but it ate plenty of time and proved to me at least that there could still be names in open-world crime besides Rockstar and Volition.
The Walking Dead is both a title and how I often felt after each episode's conclusion, waiting for the next release so I could discover what fresh hell Lee had stumbled into. While Telltale still fell into the occasional pitfall over control issues, each episode created a place where tension and discomfort could live deep in your chest, as you never knew who was next on the block.
And somehow, they got you to come back month after month.
Borderlands 2 did a terrible thing. In between its Diablo-esque loot system, it also decided to push on my virtual paper-doll buttons, secreting away variant heads and skins amongst all these guns and shields and relics and mods.
God damn them, I just want to find head drops from bosses. It's dragged me through roughly 120 hours of gameplay, just looking for that next new head for a Siren, that next new skin for a Mechromancer. Guns are merely an afterthought, the means by which I get these other sorts of drops.
I just want to be a pretty princess, is that wrong?
Klei managed to achieve what pretty much every other developer and publisher ever involved in a stealth-action game failed at. Making stealth fun and achievable. From a return to two dimensions making it much simpler to simply see the stealthiest route, to clearly demarcating the various triggers and sight lines of the enemies so you crossed them only when you intend.
I hope to see them work at this again, because I sincerely think they're the only ones to show they've gotten it.
Let's get this out of the way. There is in fact a game in Asura's Wrath. It's not especially strong on its own, but when combined with the absolutely amazing aesthetics of the world built, and the fantastic cutscenes, it hammers itself into a person's brain, telling you that you might not ever see something as crazy as this.
What I think I liked most about Asura's Wrath however, was the commitment made to aping the appearance of a shonen anime. From eyecatches at the halfway point, to the end-of-episode previews, the whole thing felt like someone said, "hell, why limit ourselves to just television".
I saved the cosmos at 50% Galactic Readiness, that's all I'm saying.
The final steps of Amanda Shepard, my character for three long games of BioWare's sci-fi epic, could be considered a stumble. At the time, I just kind of accepted everything that happened, because, well, this is simply how games end nowadays. The Christ-like sacrifice is the regular thing to pin at the end of a video game story, and ME3 simply followed course.
But everything before that was incredible. Uping the ante from ME2, I shouted down the geth/quarian conflict, solved the krogan genophage, met the last Prothean, shot Martin Sheen in the face.
Really, that last part was so satisfying.
Arc Systems has always been one of those entities in the gaming world who I felt insurmountable. That is to say, I was never going to get one of their games and be /good/ at it, because there were always going to be people who'd practiced and practiced for ages to batter people like me into the dirt.
That still held true, but what Persona 4 Arena did was trade on its good name, and trade /well/. The story mode developed each character with care, creating a neat after-story for Persona 4 characters, Persona 3 characters and provide an affecting story for the covergirl Labrys.
Ultimately, Arena felt, in those early days at least, like a great stepping off point for people interested in fighting games, but who find it hard to compete in the more serious... well, "arenas", the fighting game community has built.
The general take on Fez is that half the game is about decrypting it. Me, I never had much of a mind for cryptography, so I did what I usually do when up against a wall in gaming.
I cheated. A lot. But still, the community that built up around Fez as everyone tried picking it apart even made cheating a task, as I had to deconstruct "what am I looking to cheat at" into the common phraseology developing about Fez.
I'm still missing two of the clock tower cubes, I may never have helped solve the monolith, but goddamn did I have a fun time watching people solve mystery after mystery about this game.
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