The decade-that-was, presented to you in a rough chronological order, '10 to '20.
This ain't an exhaustive, definitive, or even remotely objective list. I missed a ton. My backlog is still ridiculous. Additions and possible subtractions are certain.
Possibly the best game of 2010, the '10s as a whole, and certainly within its own franchise, was also one of the first out the gate way back in January (February?) of 2010.
ME2 is Mass Effect having its Wrath of Khan moment, the standard-setter, that one big high the rest of the series kept chasing but never quite recaptured. It's also possibly the last time a "dark middle chapter" has been pulled off successfully without any major caveats.
It's wild to me, even given Andromeda's quagmire, that it took over a decade to finally receive a remaster.
My favourite of the Fallout games, at least from a worldbuilding standpoint, but perhaps not its pure gameplay - I enjoy Fallout 4 a ton based largely on the critical engine improvements it made over Fallout 3 and NV, as Skyrim did compared to Oblivion, even if some of the finer details of NV's systems got lost somewhere in the upgrade.
But like Sam Jackson once said: personality goes a long way. Fallout New Vegas has a broken face covered in warts that looks rather older than its actual age, but ten years later I still think about my conversations with it constantly.
Aside: despite issues elsewhere, I honestly enjoy Fallout 4's gameplay loop and some of its core systems changes enough for it to be considered almost interchangeable with New Vegas for the purposes of this list, but not quite. In cases like these, for brevity's sake I'll probably restrict myself to exactly one (1) entry from each franchise, even in cases when two or more easily qualify.
There was a time when phrases like "summer of arcade" still meant something. That old awkward nascent period for indie games that exploded shortly after the big console folks figured out digital distribution. Bastion is maybe the best game of that era.
I'm sure I had it on my old Xbox 360. I maybe had it on my PS3, but who knows, I'm not actually sure where I left it. I definitely own Bastion on Steam, even if I've long since forgotten when or how it entered my library. My finger often hovers over the Purchase button on Bastion's Switch version. In this way, Bastion foresaged a whole decade of my bad/expensive habits with games collecting.
Bastion was the perfect debut for Supergiant Games, and remained their best game - and best soundtrack, holy shit - even though both Transistor and Pyre got very very close. So it feels apt that Hades appears ready to finally knock Bastion off its throne, right here in 2020, the start of another decade.
I can't remember when exactly I started actively keeping track of my GOTY choices, but I'm 100% certain XCOM: Enemy Unknown was my choice for 2012.
Way back in the mid-1990s, a friend of mine who lived next door would often call me over to witness some new big (mis)adventure he was about to undertake at some alien installation in the original X-COM: UFO Defense. That old original game left a mark with its creeping atmosphere, its sense of dread, how it used sound design and a lack of information - even to the point of blocking out your whole screen during alien activity phases - to create a very real sci-fi horror pastiche we could only play with the lights on.
I never actually took the controller myself back then, and any subsequent attempts I've made to play that original X-COM myself has not gone well, Enterprise! But thankfully, such a deep dive is no longer necessary, as Firaxis' reboot of XCOM mostly nails the broad strokes moods of UFO Defense while modernizing and polishing everything else for the modern era. Enemy Unknown was a perfect revival. How often can you say that?
Grand Theft Auto is what it is. Radio stations. Physics! Questionable checkpointing. Strong character moments here and there, often seemingly peppered around sparingly, as if seeing them is your reward for sitting through all the weaker ones. Overwritten jokes. Edgy shit.
There's no GTA entry on this list but Saints Row 3 is here. The main reason for that is Saints Row, as of SR2 but at its peak with SR3, always felt like it was watching everything GTA tried and taking all the right notes.
Nothing in Saints Row 3 feels disposable, or throwaway, or perfunctory, as I've come to expect from a modern Grand Theft Auto. Its humour lands, and then takes off again, before overstaying its welcome. Memorable setpieces are never kneecapped immediately by old-school design choices.
That's not to say that SR3 is here simply for not sharing the same failings as a GTA 4 or 5. Peak Saints Row has a personality that remains unmatched in its genre. It has both its own voice, but also a customizable voice, a weird mix of authorial intent and player agency. It avoids the ludo-dissonance trap much like Yakuza does. There is still no better drivey-shootey-sandbox than Saints Row 3 and there may never be anything quite like it again.
So here is where I learned to stop worrying and love the rogue-like.
Along with so many other important watershed titles for indie games in the '10s, many of which are either on this list already or could be soon, FTL makes it here based almost entirely on the strength of its core design. And hey, the rest of it is great too: FTL has a style; FTL has a sound.
But as a rogue-like early on in this decade's big wave of rogue-likes, FTL's moment-to-moment landed the hardest, with only Dungeons of Dredmor really coming that close to it back then. Many more have hit similarly for me since, and more still remain backlogged or barely touched - some quite regrettably, such as Spelunky. I still have the most time under my belt with FTL, and like Bastion, across multiple platforms.
FTL is sublime.
Look, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that everything about Persona 4 holds up. This version or the 2008 original. Persona 4, its predecessor, or its successor. Game systems or storytelling. Modern Persona has been both a huge deal for me personally and something I've come to take some distance from, for all kinds of reasons.
Persona 5 turned out to be a better game in a lot of minor-to-moderate ways, or at least more refined, but the subjective side of me will probably always keep Persona 4 at the top of my personal org chart, and Golden is easily its best version (the wrong Chie voice notwithstanding.) I am a country boy, this is a country Persona. The small town Twin Peaksy murder mystery appeals to me far, far more than either big city apocalypse contained in the other modern Persona games. It's also the only particularly compelling reason to own a Playstation Vita, other than whatever retro collection you might have marooned on its drive.
We might be out of this era of Persona now with the departure of its central director, assuming that's enough to shift the style and tone and character work of Persona games yet to come. I hope so. Good memories and a place on this list or not, it's time for Persona to move on, grow up a little, and become something better.
I got a little choked one evening back in 2013 as I wrapped up a full first run through Gone Home. It's interesting to think about that in retrospect; many similar games have followed in Gone Home's footsteps this decade, and many of them were improvements in just about every way that matters - including Fullbright's own follow-up in Tacoma. But Gone Home was still the spark, the gunshot from the Pacific Northwest that launched a thousand thinkpieces and terrible forum posts.
Maybe y'all played Dear Esther first and it took you to the same place Gone Home did for me. I feel you. But it's really Gone Home that took over that whole conversation, very quickly spinning off into some absolutely rotten discourse. An early indicator of just how toxic the capital-g Gamer bullshit would become one year later could perhaps be found in performatively angry gamers going off on Gone Home's runtime or inclusivity or "but is it even a game?"
Fuck 'em back then, fuck 'em now. There are better games in this style sitting here after the end of its decade, but Gone Home still arguably mattered more than most of them.
Maybe you forgot about Never Alone, and maybe I did too, for a time. Maybe you never knew it was there at all. Never Alone is something you may never notice unless you're consciously looking for it, or looking for an experience like it.
The act of playing Never Alone isn't especially memorable, really. It's everything else. This is an indigenous Alaskan folk tale told remarkably well through the rather unexpected form of a puzzle platformer. Narration is provided in the local language by a native speaker of that language. Documentary footage is included via in-game prompts. Did I see a school board in the credits?
The world needs more games like Never Alone.
There may be no greater divide between my appreciation for a game and my total abject failure at playing said game on this list. Oh, I did finish it, thank you very much. I don't want to think about how long it took, or how many characters I got killed, or how many battles I ended by the skin of my teeth.
The Banner Saga is brutal, absolutely astonishingly brutal, and that's the point, as the part where Banner Saga needs to be a game matches the harsh tones of the story it's telling. I've come to waver a lot on how much Hard Men Making Hard Choices I'm still willing to put up with in fiction, across the board. Thankfully, Banner Saga managed to squeak itself in just under the wire, before a deluge of "prestige" television and games cargo-culting its tropes finally stretched me to the breaking point.
I may never be able to go back and rewatch something like Battlestar Galactica for those reasons. I may be able to finish The Banner Saga trilogy, however, and it gets there through its artfulness, its thoughtfulness, and its willingness to offer more than just the bleak and dreary - even if it's just a little bit more.
This one is honestly a little harder to fully recommend for a list like this than I expected. It doesn't really matter if you take Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain as a whole or not, but you should. It's not the opening that lets Metal Gear Solid V down.
It's sad, really, that just when Metal Gear finally reached its highest gameplay peak - high enough to get it here, as it happens - it also fell all the way apart as a story. Can we even say with a straight face that The Phantom Pain really ended? Or did it simply stop?
Maybe storytelling was never Metal Gear Solid or Hideo Kojima's biggest strength. That's no excuse, of course, nor is it even exactly his excuse to make. At the end of the day, Konami is probably the biggest offender regarding MGSV's ultimate fate. Kojima, left to his own devices, would have finished this thing, for good or ill, in some way or another.
But the game parts, man. Metal Gear was never better. It never will be again.
