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Wagrid

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Top 10 Games 2018

Video games: they aren't just Pac-Man anymore!

I'm not gonna try some kind of lengthy 'year in review' style preamble here, because God, the less time spent thinking about this one the better. The games, at least, were good. Actually for me they were pretty great; I feel like the general opinion that this was a 'good but not great' kinda year, but I honestly can't think of the last time my specific tastes were so catered to.

Honourable mention goes to Into the Breach, which is in all respects a fantastic game, but just didn't get its hooks into me the way it did with some people. I think that's probably down to the fact that I'll always prefer a traditional structured single player campaign to a run based game, and that's probably why BattleTech ends up on this list and Into the Breach doesn't.

Anyway, on with the show, I guess!

List items

  • There was absolutely no way anything else was ever, ever going to be in this spot. Deadfire is a criminally overlooked masterpiece. Every part of it oozes intrigue and theme and clever design. It's a game that I haven't stopped thinking about since; it's a game that I've spent a month wondering how I'm gonna sum up here, because it's a game with so, so many interlocking themes, and systems and subplots and art that all bear talking about at length. It's the kind of game that deserves less of a review or retrospective and more of a dissertation.

    There's a lot I could say here. The art style is just the best, the OST is solid as is the combat (those last too less than the first game). But the real meat here is the writing and narrative design.

    Deadfire's great strength is one that it shares with the previous game; the NPCs and the story react to your character in a way that is just vastly more complex, ambitious and satisfying than any other RPG series I can name. A playthrough with a stoic, rational character feels fundamentally different from playing one that's sharp tongued and passionate. Every dialogue tree feels like a pleasant surprise and its just a wonderful feeling moment to moment.

    There's also a pretty remarkable attention to detail at play. There are multiple versions of the (extremely good) sea shanties based on the composition of your ship's crew, to reflect the mix of men and women you have aboard ship.

    The themes it explores are all well chosen and well realised. As a series, Pillars is a reflection on history and explores the way that complicated pasts shape and burden individuals and societies. Deadfire's particular spin on this is by exploring European colonialism and it does so in a clever way by representing different eras of colonial expansion without allowing the crimes of one to excuse the depredations of another. It also allows an enormous amount of agency and nuance to the Huana, the game's indigenous culture and thereby represents a pretty dramatic step up from a lot of the worst parts of Fallout: New Vegas (boy, Honest Hearts sure wouldn't fly today).

    Also, the first and third DLCs are probably the best things Obsidian have ever made as a studio. Honestly, I could be here all day. I love this game to death.

  • HWBM is simultaneously this year's most important game and one of the most playful.

    There's a sharpness to HWBM's character writing that is just second to none. All three protagonists, in particular, are just incredibly well realised. All of them are allowed the full range of human messiness, to be angry, funny, horny, self-righteous and principled. They demand space for themselves to live and grow and flourish.

    And that's ultimately what the game is about I think. It's about demanding that space, and it's about kicking and screaming and fighting as hard as possible when its taken away. It's a game about how if you just kick back hard enough maybe you can make any ending the good ending.

    But, all that said, it's a game that never feels oppressive, even as the characters dodge and weave around forces that try to oppress them. There's a joy and a playfulness that runs through every part of the game. The way the cast bounces of each other is delightful and the way new dynamics and relationships reveal themselves with each playthrough is a treat. No matter what, the characters never lose sight of the joy of fighting and fucking in giant robots.

    And it's a game that lets its characters win, because heaven is there's and they can either bring it back with them or leave with it but either way there's nothing that can be done to take it from them.

  • I kind of don't get why people liked God of War so much. On, a certain level, yeah, it's a super pretty, super well designed take on traditional 3D Zelda concepts. But people like the story a bunch, and that I don't get. I don't get it because I kind of agree with the common critique that this is yet another in a long line of dad-ass AAA games for dads that we've all seen a million times.

    I know why *I* liked the story; because I adore fantasy bullshit. A story about how a dad just can't hug his kid? Dull. Oh but they're gods and that colours every interaction? Hell yeah, sign me up.

    And, I think, God of War's specific type of fantasy bullshit is a lot of what I was into. The art was an enormous part of this and on top of the main story the way the game played with norse mythology was an enormous amount of fun.

  • I lost one, *one* pilot the whole campaign fuck y'all I am Alexander the motherfucking Great in a fucking Atlas mech.

    BattleTech is the best of this particular type of strategy game by a country mile. It's a game about simultaneously being Char Aznable, Bright Noa and an accountant. I adore it. With the exception of Deadfire, BattleTech is easily the game on this list that has the longest legs, and I'll probably roll into a new campaign every couple of years until the end of time/there is a sequel.

    Honestly, I always said that what XCOM needed to really crack greatness for me was extra writing and depth in its strategy layer. BattleTech has that *and* (I cannot stress this enough) really enormous gloriously stompy mechs.

    I'll always love just how relentlessly on my bullshit the game let me be. I named my mercenary company 'Chanson du Soleil' (or de, I forget, definitely the one that was grammatically correct, I looked it up) and give my mechs names like 'Duchy', 'Principality' and (I shit you not) 'Restitutor Orbis'. BattleTech is hella good.

  • It's hard to find some deep statement to make about Dragon Quest XI, because I'm not sure there is one (and if there is I don't have it). It's just a game that's enormously comforting to play. The party members are all really charming and they were a good cast to just hang around with for 80 odd hours. The writing in general just oozes charm - the main story is yeah, whatever, but most of the NPCs left me with a big smile on my face.

    Dragon Quest XI is like home cooking. Yeah, it isn't fine dining, but it's tasty, filling and hopefully the company is good.

  • I don't love run-based games but I did end up loving Dead Cells. It's easily the most into a rogue-whatever I've ever been. It's for sure the only one of them I've ever liked enough to beat.

    I think it all comes down to the game's aesthetic. The art, the music and the animation all just ooze style. On top of just playing incredibly well a big part of the reason I kept going with it is because I just loved seeing what was next. Every level had some hook, some visual flair that made it worth seeing and subsequently mastering.

  • Ashen is the game that convinces me, more than any other, that using terms like 'Souls clone' has become reductive and disrespectful in the same way that we all realised 'GTA clone' was years ago.

    Because, yeah, Ashen is a lot like Dark Souls. A lot of its strengths are also Dark Souls' strengths (right down to some phenomenal atmosphere) but the stuff that makes it so unique and compelling is where it strikes a marked difference from the stuff that inspired it.

    The Soulsborne games are all some flavour of apocalyptic. Bloodborne is an apocalypse in progress; it is the night where the tide turns, when it becomes, definitively, too late for Yarnham. In Demon's Souls the apocalypse is a generation or more passed and is already slipping into memory; hope of seeing it through is slipping away. In Dark Souls, the apocalypse has been and gone, it is centuries past; all that's left is a slow, slow slide from grandeur into decay.

    But that's not what animates Ashen, that isn't it's (heh) soul. Ashen is a game about what comes after. It's post-post-apocalypse. It's about building something new.

    In FROM's games, comfort is tenuous, fleeting and built on shaky foundations. Murderers infiltrate your home, the music turns sinister and the dark presses in. That's not Ashen. In Ashen home grows, and fills and flourishes. Ashen is a game about beating back the dark with hammer and nails and acoustics guitars and community.

    I think, that there might be hope beyond destruction and decay, is perhaps a message worth hearing.

  • It's kind of hard to talk about The Missing without just spoiling the whole thing. And even if I did want to just go ahead and spoil the whole thing here I'm not convinced that I'm the right person to really dive into it at all.

    The Missing tells a story full of hope and love and has a genuinely important message. You should play it. Yeah, it's a clunky puzzle platformer with interesting but not great mechanics, but the way it all comes together to form a coherent statement around its story and message is marvellous, and something any number of vastly higher budgeted, more mechanically sophisticated games could learn from.

  • Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can. Can he make a fairly standard open-world game with bland narrative design incredibly compelling with an all-time great traversal mechanic and a really top notch script? Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man!

    OK, yeah, that one really got away from me. I'm not the kind of guy that things the primary purpose of a video game is to be 'fun'; there are a million valid artistic reasons to ignore the imperative to be fun. That said, I think Spider-Man's swinging mechanic might be the most pure fun I've ever had in a game? The sense of freedom, of motion, of energy is just utterly joyous. At first it all felt a little overwhelming, but by the end of the game I feel like I'd developed my own best practices for moving about the city. Whether those best practices actually were optimal is moot; I can't think of another game where the traversal allowed me the space to develop my own style of moving around the world and that's a special thing.

  • Celeste is, and I am not fucking kidding here, the first 2D platformer I have ever enjoyed enough to finish.

    No, really. Seriously. This isn't even a case of not having played the 'right' platformers either - I can't tell you how many times I played Mario 3 and Super Mario World, got a few levels in, and just didn't give enough of a shit about what I was doing to keep going. Whatever part of my brain that gives me the satisfaction of overcoming a tough challenge (a part that works just fine when it comes to other games) just doesn't fire with 2D platformers. So what is it about Celeste?

    It's a lot of things! I like the game's style, and I like it's story a lot (climbing a mountain as a way to prove something to yourself re: anxiety is, as it happens, extremely relatable). The narrative gave me enough of a reason to keep going that I came to admire the level design - I still wouldn't say I felt particularly triumphant ever beating a tough section, but I did come to appreciate when the design was clever, and that in itself became compelling.

    Of course, then there's assist mode. Assist mode is wonderful. What I particularly appreciated about it was the ability to determine how much of an assist I wanted; in instances where I had the jumps down but was dying to some projectile I could just turn invincibility on. Or if I just didn't quite have the chops for a particular section I'd give myself an extra boost. Making this assistance incremental was huge in stopping the game from ever being boring in the way a lot of games become once, say, Cheat Engine gets involved.

    The bush I'm beating around here is the OST. The soundtrack is, unambiguously, a work of genius and Celeste is probably the closest I've ever come to playing a video game musical. Yes, the story and the level design are good and important (in the same way as, say, set design and costume in a musical) and I'd never take anything away from them, but the music is the emotional core of the game, the driving force behind it. It's simultaneously one of the best game OSTs ever to listen to out of context and enhanced by being experienced in the context of the game it was written for (in the same way that buying a CD can't really compare with a night at the opera). This is all to say that 'Confronting Myself' maybe slaps harder than any other video game track.
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