GOTY 2011
Honorable Mentions: Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, Shadows of the Damned, Alice: Madness Returns, Gemini Rue, Trine 2, and Catherine.
List items
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While L.A. Noire embraced the adventure game genre's tricks and encumbrances and created a blockbuster with them, Ghost Trick moved the adventure genre forward with a clever mix of graphic styles and organic puzzles that made each pre-determined solution feel personal. The batshit story is Shu Takumi's trademark, but it's his most approachable arc yet. I often consider time spent thinking out an adventure game's puzzles time wasted, but every minute of experimentation in Ghost Trick felt gratifying.
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Cave Johnson's descent into his own brand of lunacy outshines much of the stuff within the modern test chambers, but with hints of story littered everywhere for those with the obsessiveness to look, Portal 2 is an exemplar of how video games can deliver narrative within stories all throughout its campaign. The disconnect between narrative and gameplay still left me a bit cold, but the new tools are up to par with creating fresh head-scratchers that are fun to work within.
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Putting aside much of the warranted praise for Bastion, a specific moment in Bastion floored me: it wasn't a specific story beat as much as a how your choice in ending justified the existence of a game contrivance (New Game+) that's usually set aside without much narrative backing. For all of its narration, that simple hook was Bastion's most subtle stroke of genius.
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I'm not yet at Operating Thetan VIII in the Dark Souls cult, but my time with Dark Souls was still time well-spent. Even if I never committed enough hours to see the whole thing through, enough boss encounters and exploration convinced me that this was more than a fix for gluttons of punishment. Tales of its difficulty are somewhat exaggerated, but its Metroidvania map layout combined with a tactile combat system made sure that I spent more hours with Dark Souls than I should've.
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Forget the talk of one-to-one sword-fighting; revamped rules of engagement with dungeons are Skyward's Sword biggest triumph. Rather than several floors of back-and-forth dungeon crawling, sprawling outside areas mix with streamlined inside floors to spread out puzzling and fighting your way to each Heart Container. It plays better, is designed more smoothly, and Tadtones notwithstanding, has some of the best setpiece design the series has ever seen.
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Insular and noncommittal in teaching new players as fighting games may be, it's understated just how much simple fun can be had with the genre as long as you doesn't assume tournament-ready skill is required to enjoy yourself. The dozens of hours of competitive MVC3 play I've seen demotivate me from thinking I'll ever be anything other than a scrub, but the joy of finally landing a combo and extending it with an off-the-ground maneuver still puts stupid grin on my face.
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Where Epic Yarn and Return to Dreamland present Kirby's standard platforming formula under a new guise, Mass Attack takes the bold step of making the basic interactions with Kirby as fresh as the design of the rest of the game. Mass Attack is a fitting end-of-life title for the DS -- it incorporates almost every piece of the machine in ways that make it seem impossible on any other device, smartphones included. And it uses its gimmick to create some outstanding levels instead of just offer a different way to walk through the same platforming tropes we've seen time and again.
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A late entry, but Pushmo nonetheless delivers a novel puzzle-solving experience. Alternating between abstract challenges and Picross-inspired picture-puzzles, Pushmo shows restraint in limiting your interactions in the world to pushing, pulling, jumping, and interacting with switches and ladders. With this limited ruleset, Intelligent Systems craft plenty of creative and devious puzzles while still assuring that if you remember the fundamentals, you had answer you were banging your head against the wall for the entire time.
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Arkham City's key improvements over Asylum are two-fold; its bosses and its side-stories. City mostly ditches the bull-like brutes in favor of more methodical fights (Mr. Freeze comes to mind), and makes sure that every side activity in the game is worthwhile or provides an interesting narrative hook. Various other refinements also make sure that Asylum looks quaint by comparison only two years later.
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Time-wasters threaten to or have already smothered the iOS store, but Groove Coaster is, in my mind, the most repayable one of 'em all. Though it lacks the substance of Sword and Sworcery or the cleverness of Cut the Rope, Groove Coaster outshines most of them in delivering a game that fits the mobile phone platform; it's simple enough to see you through bus rides, but engaging and listenable enough to last you hours at a time. Groove Coaster is a simplified version of Rez that outdoes Child of Eden as that game's successor.
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