This year there were enough games I enjoyed playing that I felt compelled to create some sort of list, ten in length ranking them and jotting down my feelings on them. In fact, enough games that ten wasn't quite enough. My condolences to the game that failed to make the cut. This is in stark contrast to last year, a year where I probably would have struggled to fill out such a list.

2015 Game of The Year

1 - Splatoon

Who would have guessed Nintendo would manage to make a fantastic online multiplayer 3rd person shooter for the Wii U using tilt controls. Many years ago I played tons and tons of Team Fortress 2, dedicating untold hours into it. I found Splatoon to capture much of the same fun of team based competitive battles.

One of the starkest differences to Team Fortress 2 is the round time: Team Fortress 2 rounds can last 5-30 minutes, while Splatoon matches are 3 minutes. If you have 15 minutes to spare, it's very easy to fill that time with a few rounds of Splatoon without feeling rushed.

Keeping the game fresh, there have been continuing additions of maps, gameplay modes, and weapons that have me coming back, or wanting to come back when I haven't had the time to.

Considering I got a Wii U for this game alone, and potentially for Zelda Wii U next year, this is probably my most expensive game this year and I don't feel like it was a bad decision.

2 - Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

An asynchronous game where one person is looking at a screen with a rectangular bomb made out of several square modules, each one needing to be completed in order to successfully diffuse the bomb. The person with the bomb is assisted by bomb diffuser experts who search through a (preferably printed) pdf manual. The person with the bomb (who can not see the manual) must explain the physical characteristics of the bomb to those with the manual (who can't see the bomb), who then determine what the modules are and guide them through diffusing the module. The game's normal progression starts off with calm and easy bombs, and ramps up to teeth grindingly hard bombs requiring the deciphering of morse code, hellish venn diagrams, the navigation of mazes, and tricky questions such as "Disperse gas? yes / no" and "Explode bomb? yes / no".

This is a game with a wide range of difficulty that you can tune to your desire that is a blast to play with friends over Skype, ideally far away from the room with a bomb.

3 - Rocket League

Two teams of cars with rocket boost, two nets, and a ball. You know, that sport, soccer. Rocket League is probably (not so) secretly the best soccer game, I can't really say, never having played any soccer games. At its core, the rules are simple and every match is the same. The thing that will win you the game is your team's performance being better than the other team's, instead of some dice roll giving you a good number. I've enjoyed seeing my own skill progress from "Go as fast as you can at the ball at all times" to a more conservative style, watching where the ball is going to go and anticipating opponent and teammate movements. The recent addition of mutators to change variables of the game (gravity, ball size/bounce/weight, etc) gives a fresh experience when things start to become stale, and the appearance customization of your car allows you a slight form of expression and personalization.

4 - Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist

If you purely judge games by how long you've played them, then this one, at 20 minutes, shouldn't even be on the list. If you judge games by how much they cost per unit of time, then at zero dollars, this one should be game of the year.

The developer Crows Crows Crows consists of the director of The Stanley Parable, and Dr. Langeskov is similar in quite a few ways. Humor is something games try and often times fail, while in Dr. Langeskov the humor is well timed and hits often. The game offers a perspective of a game being played that I had not seen before.

This is a very strong first game for Crows Crows Crows and I look forward to immediately playing whatever they next release in the future. I questioned whether a such a short game should have a spot on a Game of The Year list, and I think this one has earned it by being exceptionally dense and enjoyable with few faults. If you want to check this game out, I suggest watching the trailer for the game and then playing the game.

5 - Kerbal Space Program

I did it. I got to Mun, and Minmus (the two moons of Kerbin), and in theory a probe sent to Duna (Kerbin's earth analog of Mars). These are not the most impressive accomplishments for players of Kerbal Space Program, but for me a feat still worthy of celebration.

By no means a perfect game, this is a game that borrows from The Elder Scrolls series of there being a mod for anything. The solar system, planets and the distances between them are smaller than our own (there is a mod if you'd prefer our solar system).

My biggest problem is that the game doesn't reveal to you an important (if not the most important) stat: ∆v, delta v, change in velocity, the amount of acceleration your craft can possibly do. If you want to create a craft that can go somewhere, you'll want to know two things: How much ∆v you'll need to get there, available from online resources such as solar system maps, and how much ∆v your craft has when you're building it. Of course, there is a mod to get that number, and much more. You can also get mods to put some (or a lot) of polish on the admittedly acceptable graphics.

At the end of the day, there is no worse feeling than getting your Kerbal to Mun, start your decent to the surface, then as you enter the shadow of the moon you realize your solar panels don't work without sun and you left your batteries back home. This leads to your craft being incapable of control, and cratering into the moon.

On the flip side, there is no better feeling than everything working. A clean take off, a good intercept with Mun, a safe landing and subsequent take off, a return journey back to Kerbin with fuel to spare, a successful reenter and splashdown. All with some science gathering along the way to unlock some cool new parts to make fancier, better, and more dangerous rockets. It's also fun to take a break, install some mods, and make a jet airplane shining rainbow disco lights everywhere.

6 - Her Story

This is probably the first game in a long while where I seriously took notes. Her Story is a game where you are presented with clips of archival footage of the police interviewing a woman. You can only view five clips at a time using search terms, the game starting you off with the search term "murder". The clips end up being delivered in an unpredictable order, some from early on on the story, some from late in the story.

Later clips can either reveal a lot immediately, or reveal a lot only with appropriate context you may be missing. After several search terms I found myself taking notes on what this woman was saying, when she was saying it, etc. All this in a search for the truth, what is going on? Eventually, I arrived at my understanding of the truth, and I was satisfied with that. I was also satisfied with the great guitar song cover in the game.

7 - The Talos Principle

I love puzzle games. Unfortunately for me I'm pretty decent at them, and lots of puzzle games maintain the same level of difficulty for too long. Usually by the time a puzzle game layers on more difficulty I have already played too much of the same, grow tired of it, and stop playing.

For me, The Talos Principle had a great spread of difficulty, starting off easy (but not dead easy) when introducing a new mechanic, ramping up to optional rule breaking levels. This is the first puzzle game in awhile where I had to take a break from a puzzle and come back to it, without feeling like I missed something simple. As new mechanics got added, they begin to interact in ways that are enjoyable to discover and utilize, and these combinations keep you on your toes.

Some might complain that this game came out in December 2014. I don't feel too bad for making an exception in a Game of The Year list for a game that came out in December of last year. I enjoyed this game immensely and I hope I will take the time to do the expansion puzzles sometime soon.

8 - The Magic Circle

The Magic Circle allows you to follow the fictional development of the long delayed and long anticipated sequel game "The Magic Circle" by a (fictional) famous developer with an ego to match. Early on in the game you gain the power to hack objects, allowing you to remove or add properties to entities in the game. Remove the ability "melee attack" from an enemy, give it to a rock, make that rock your friend. Saying much beyond that spoils puzzles. The game doesn't go as far as Double Fine's Hack 'n' Slash with the mechanic, though it does go far enough to create interesting and somewhat tricky puzzles that give you that "a ha!" moment.

Later on in the game, after much of the drama around the development and public reception of "The Magic Circle" unfolds, the game throws you a complete curveball, which I will spoiler block below as it spoils the end, and majority, of the game.

I found this additional mechanic in the game surprising, and exceptionally enjoyable. It is one of the more unique things I have seen in a game and it added nicely to the narrative.

9 - Sunless Sea

Set in the Unterzee, and underground sea in which you captain a ship hailing from the port of Fallen London, the city of London which has fallen through the earth into the Unterzee. I found this game to be mechanically lacking/questionable, the rogue-like quality giving death a meaning but ultimately harming the game. Death harms the game, you lose progress in the stories you've started unravelling and have to trudge through the early getting started parts before you can really enjoy the world.

Death being very punishing, however, is also a boon to the game, it makes dying a thing to be scared of. As you are out to sea, away from your home city of Fallen London, as your ship takes damage, as you delve into darkness away from lights, you gain terror. Terror will drive you mad, creating fabrications of the mind, or cause your crew to abandon you. With death being punishing, terror creates a very real nervousness and a very real relief when you return to your home, where you can rest and remove much of your terror. It also creates a very real desire to get a heir in the game, who can inherit your wealth upon your passing. If you are cautious enough you will be able to avoid death, though it will be a constant threat that drives many of your decisions and instills perspective on how dangerous the world of the Unterzee is.

Where this game shines is the dearth of story, and atmosphere in spades. Every location you visit is scored with wonderful music setting the mood, port reports giving flavor text introducing you to an area. Most locations feel as if they have existed for a long time, have relations with other areas, and some locations purposefully keep themselves fenced off from the world.

I enjoyed exploring each location, with each trip giving me a deeper look into a place's story and its deeper ties to the world. This completely underground world creates a unique perspective on sunlight as valued contraband, that can be whimsically contained inside of a mirror-catch box. It also makes visits to the surface feel alien, risky, and it is fascinating to see how the outside world connects to the Unterzee.

In writing this, I have rekindled my interest in this game, wanting to go back and see what changes and additions they have made. There seems to be DLC planned for the game, adding underwater travel and locations, as if life on an underground sea wasn't dark enough. Hopefully I'll take the time to look at it next year. I'd like to see what Failbetter Games does next, either expanding on their already created universe, or creating a new one.

10 - Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

I never played Final Fantasy XI. I never played Final Fantasy XIV (1.0). What I had heard about the original version of it was grim, and I knew to stay way. When Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (2.0) was released, I heard good things, enjoyed the open beta, and played for about 15 levels before for some reason stopping, probably time. I had almost completely forgotten about it until earlier this year when the expansion, Heavensward (3.0) was released.

Hearing good things about the expansion I eventually gave in, bought it and paid the subscription fee to play once more. I ended up abandoning my original character and started fresh, experiencing the entirety of the main story quests. I quite enjoyed the story, and the cutscenes, of both A Realm Reborn, its patches, and Heavensward. I found many of the some story quests to be somewhat lacking in design as some of them were entirely "talk to this npc, travel somewhere else, talk to another npc".

I've enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy XIV so far and hope to keep enjoying the content that they continue to add in patches.

Failing to Make The Cut

Unsurprisingly, sometimes the number 10 is not enough to contain the games one has played and enjoyed. Featured below are two of such games, including some thoughts on them.

Just Cause 3

This is the first Just Cause game I've played, and I've been enjoying my time with it. I haven't really touched the main story, getting just far enough in it to unlock fast travel. My play sessions are usually me listening to a podcast while I cruise around blowing things up, or doing challenges to unlock mods for my toys. The worst part with the challenges so far was starting the boat and car time trials: You don't start with nitrous, but the only way to get good times is with nitrous, and to get gears to unlock nitrous, you either need to get good times or to do a bunch of different challenges.

While not the most sophisticated of games, it's definitely fun to pick up for an hour or two here or there.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Before 2014 I didn't even know what a Metal Gear Solid game was. I never played any of them. I had never seen one be played. At most all I saw as a trailer for Metal Gear Solid 4. I guess I thought it was a mech game, for some reason.

Then Dan Rycket happened.

Watching the entirety of the Metal Gear Scanlon series as they came out made me understand what Metal Gear Solid was (such as: not a mech game), an ambitious stealth game where your actions ripple out to how the AI responded. Accidentally triggering a hand drier in the bathroom while hiding, causing a guard to investigate the noise. They were also, by todays standards, hard to control, requiring insane feats of finger dexterity to do seemingly simple actions.

They were also a strange story that grew stranger and more insane with each new game, with whatever seemed cool at the time being thrown in and then retconned in later games to have some sort of reason of existing in the world.

After seeing Metal Gear Solids 1-4 through Metal Gear Scanlon, and hearing that Metal Gear Solid V was probably the best controlling game in the series, I decided to play it myself. It started off as I expected, a crazy prologue with unpredictable things such as a burning man, a flying kid, and fire whales. I found the entirety of the Chapter 1 story enjoyable. The final boss fight was grueling but fun, as it let me pull out my big guns. Each mission contained a good amount of story, bringing you to a new place where your actions are driving the story forward.

Then Chapter 2 started, the intro cutscene was interesting though weird. The missions stopped being in new locations, they went to previous locations, and you did more trivial things that didn't drive the story forward. When repeat missions started showing up, and I ran out of new missions, I called it quits. I looked up and watched all the future cutscenes on youtube, including the bonus content storyboard for mission 51. I feel Metal Gear Solid V would be a stronger game if Chapter 2 was seriously condensed, or even cut. It felt incomplete and out of place after the strong showing of Chapter 1.

And then there is the play time. Steam claims I played for 101 hours, though who knows what the actual number is. Research, base construction, and dispatch missions all have timers, upwards of hours, that tick down only while the game is running. So, I'd leave the game running while I went to do something else so I could have cool stuff when I returned.

This feels like a game whose development cycle was cut short and a deliverable product had to be rushed out the door. I would love to see what this game would have looked like if it was allowed to finish development naturally. I also would love to see what Kojima would do in a sequel game to close the final holes in the story timeline between Metal Gear Solid V and Metal Gear Solid 1. In the end, I definitely don't regret my time spent with this game.

Unfinished of The Year

I played a super cool game that isn't finished and released yet, and I want to give it some recognition.

Superhot (kickstarter beta)

It's so good. So very good. If this was released this year I'd have to push Final Fantasy XIV out of my top ten and put this in really high up there. Fortunately for Final Fantasy, it isn't released, and instead it's just a Kickstarter beta made available this past summer.

Much like Hotline Miami, at first it appears to be a simple game of murdering everyone, but as you play it more it reveals itself to be more of a puzzle game where you have to figure out the best route to murder everyone in a room, while staying alive.

It's exceptionally satisfying to get up to a guy, try to fire your empty fun, throw the gun at the guy stunning him, grab his gun, and shoot him with his own gun. The levels became pretty difficult, and the endless mode provides a repeatable challenge (with modifiers!). There is also a story that promises to be interesting. I am excited to see this game come out sometime next year.

2015's 2013 Game of The Year

Also known as "I want to mention Gone Home."

Gone Home

With Tacoma and Firewatch, two games that seem to be story centered adventure games, coming out next year, I figured I'd check out Gone Home and see what it was all about.

I found Gone Home to be an enjoyable and relaxing way to experience a story, searching through the house for the next piece of audio while seeing pictures of the characters and the locations of the house.

I guess I don't have much to say beyond I liked this game and want to see more games like it.

Old Game of The Year

Not every game I played this year that I liked came out this year, in fact, some of them came out quite awhile ago!

Katamari Damacy

I adore this game. I adored this game the first time I played it. I adored it this time. The music is great. The graphics hold up very well, the only issue being object fade in being pretty close to the camera. It's got a wonderful quirky style to it that outshines its successors.

You play as the Prince of The Cosmos. The King of The Cosmos wiped away all the stars, and sends the Prince down to Earth to roll up new stars using a Katamari, a ball that sticks to things picking them up. In the early levels you start up very small, rolling up candies and coins to become bigger so you can roll up larger objects such as mice who will try to flee from you. In later levels you start off larger and you are given more time, you start off in the level using things such as books as bridges to get to things to pick up, and as you become big enough you roll up the objects you previously used as bridges. There are also levels where you start larger, capable of rolling up people and bushes.

You can extrapolate from here what the final level is like. You start off just as you did in the first level, small, and rolling up small objects like coins, working your way up to books, then bushes, then people, then trees, then houses. Then actual bridges and tall buildings. Landmarks such as the pyramids. Landmasses themselves and volcanoes. Then clouds. And finally, the countries.

Katamari starts off with simply rolling things up, and you realize the ultimate goal would be to roll everything up, and the game goes there, and it's great.

Gitaroo Man

I loved this game. On the April 10th 2015 Unprofessional Fridays they played some Gitaroo Man, and I knew I had to play it, somehow I never heard of it before. My last rhythm game was the entirety of Elite Beat Agents on all difficulties.

I ended up playing Gitaroo Man through PCSX2, on a LCD screen. I sadly don't have a PS2 hooked up to a CRT screen. The emulation plus the screen may have led to me having more difficulty with this game than I otherwise would.

You play as U-1, the last Gitaroo Man, who has to return to the planet Gitaroo to free everyone from the bad guy, a visual doppelgänger of your crush's boyfriend. You are, of course, assisted by your talking dog Pumba who throws you your Gitaroo (a guitar). You then do battle with enemies who have different Gitaroos (such as a trumpet).

You start off battle charging up: lines appear on the screen and head towards the center, you have to point your left joystick in the direction of the line, doing well in the first phase fills your health bar up to full. Then you enter a defense phase, PS2 buttons (cross, circle, triangle, square) buttons fly in from their respective sides to the center of the screen, you hit those buttons as the reach the middle to dodge attacks, if you fail to dodge you take damage. Then you switch to offense, which is the same as the first phase except instead of gaining health you do damage. Do well enough, and you win! It's that easy.

The game has a decent ramp up in difficulty, with a fun dodge-only song and a light/calm song in the middle level. Followed by the brutal Sanbone Trio. Those jerks took me days to beat.

Over all, it's a great rhythm game with a great soundtrack. I'd love to play it on a CRT some day to see how the difficulty compares.

Games I Didn't Get To

Either due to time or other reasons, there are games I wanted to play this year that I didn't get to. Maybe next year will be their time, or maybe never.

The Witcher 3

I wanted to play this, and I still do! The daunting commitment of 60 hours of gameplay makes it hard to pick up. Additionally, following the release CD Projekt RED kept patching in improvements, encouraging me to hold off for that next patch, and then there was always another patch. Hopefully I'll get to it next year.

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

I looked very much forward to this game and loved the first Hotline Miami, but reviews saying it was more ranged weapon oriented than the first game put me off. The levels I loved most in the original game were the close quarters melee weapon levels. I might pick this up next year. Not really sure.

Life is Strange

Watching GBeast play through this made me want to play, and after they finished Episode 3 I picked it up. I'd like to play through this before I continue watching them play through.

Cradle

The quicklook of this game had me interested in the world, and hearing good things from the Giant Beastcast makes me want to see it through. I just wasn't able to take the time to play it this year.

Looking Forward: Future Games

It turns out there will continue to be new games, and there are quite a few I'm looking forward to! Long live Video Games. In no particular order, I'm pretty equally excited for these. Some of these games might even be released next year!

Zelda Wii U

Superhot.

The Witness

Firewatch

Final Fantasy XV

Persona 5

Tacoma