Favorite Games of 2013
I wasn't able to play everything I wanted to this year. I'm sure if I'd given the time to Papers, Please, Kentucky Route Zero, Cart Life, Gunpoint, The Swapper, The Last of Us, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Saints Row IV and Super Mario 3D World, those could've very likely ended up somewhere on this list. (I have a really good feeling The Last of Us will be retroactively added once I get to it. PS3-exclusives tend to fall by the wayside.)
If I'd given more attention to Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto V, Antichamber, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, those could also very well have ended up here. I also loved Mario & Luigi: Dream Team and thought The Stanley Parable was really clever, but didn't feel they were quite "best of's". With that said, I still really like my list this year.
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While I still am perfectly capable and happy to obsess over games that showcase cool mechanics, I'm usually most enthralled with games that mix interesting gameplay with a great narrative. Gone Home does this wonderfully and unlike most video games today.
Despite being in first-person, Gone Home is purely an adventure game. There are no guns and no discrete puzzles of which to speak. In fact, the experience is a puzzle with pieces scattered throughout the house in which the entirety of the game takes place. It is up to the player to find and put them together. Gone Home is ultimately a great mystery narrative with questions that constantly spring up that can only be answered if the player is willing to explore. The thorough player will constantly question the connotations of what he finds, such as the reason for a girl's frightened messages left on the family's answering machine or the reason for the bright red light emanating from the attic.
Ultimately, all these questions are answered, and the magic trick that Gone Home pulls off deftly is convincing you that something terrible has gone wrong in the house. In the beginning, I was convinced the house was haunted, and I prepared myself for jump scares for several minutes. Until I realized the story Gone Home tells is much more grounded and far more relatable than almost every other video game story. Considering so many games insist on dealing in the supernatural, it's exciting that Gone Home subverts that trope by making you think there's a larger force at work when instead there are simply the dynamics of family, friends, and lovers in play; yet, the narrative is much stronger for this deception.
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Simultaneously beautiful, violent, thought-provoking, and repetitive, Bioshock Infinite made a huge impact on me. It's the equivalent of a Christopher Nolan blockbuster; its combination of big ideas and mostly well-paced action left my head spinning when it was all over.
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Google "elegant game design" and you should see Starseed Pilgrim as the first result. Jonathan Blow's championing of the game could have made me ignore it, since Blow can be a bit flowery with his praise, but his incessant mentions of Starseed Pilgrim kept piquing my curiosity. I was so thankful I was able to look past potential pomposity and give this seemingly simple game a try.
Mostly a puzzle game, Starseed uses a random dispersal of seeds that grow different types of blocks based on the seed color to create its ever-changing puzzle environment, with some basic platforming thrown in to get your character to his goal. That formula blossoms into a gameplay loop that is a wonder to discover and a joy to play with after its secrets becomes apparent.
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2013 was a fantastic year for strongly emotional stories (see #1 and #2 above), but Brothers may have been the hardest to handle. It has one of the most impressive interactive acts in recent memory. Experience this.
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I played more mobile games in 2013 than any year before it, and Badland was my favorite. It's odd to realize that the most viscerally exciting game I played this year was a single-touch game that I played on a 4.7-inch screen.
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There's a lot of evidence that 2013 was the year of the roguelike. Rogue Legacy was probably the best to debut in 2013.
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An honorable mention goes to Spelunky. This got retroactively included on my Favorite of 2012 list, since I got way obsessed with 2012's Xbox version in 2013. Furthermore, the PC version came out in 2013, which I'm still playing everyday.
