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Foxillusion

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GOTY 2015

With how much I’ve been getting into board games in the last couple years, I wasn’t even sure I’d played ten video games this year when I sat down to write this list. I’ve missed a lot of the really big AAA titles that I’ve been meaning to play, and even some of the smaller indie titles I know I’m going to love if I ever do get time to sit down with them.

But, I was able to find plenty more than ten that I enjoyed and as it turns out, cutting items off of these lists is just as excruciating as it always has been. I’ve ended up with a list that I know lot of people will not agree with at all (#10 even on its own being listed is probably basically heresy), but I’ll try and explain why I think they’re all so worthy of recognition.

List items

  • Much like Agar.io, there’s a beautiful simplicity to the concept of what makes Rocket League mechanically fun, but it’s a wonder in its execution. It shows hours and hours and days and years of playtesting, refining the physics, refining the whole experience down to a perfectly executed little package. Perfect really is what it is – it executes everything it sets out to do flawlessly. There isn’t really a thing I or anyone could change about it to make it better. Playing it introduces the best game flow possible – controlling the car is easy, and hitting the ball is easier still. It’s your own lack of experience that makes it miss the net, or makes you lose a game. You have no one else to blame.

    Watching my friends and I slowly get better even hearkened back to my own days of playing soccer as a child. When first starting, all the kids ran after the ball at once, trying to be the star, kick it first, and ignoring working as a team. So went Rocket League in the early game – everyone just ran straight for the ball, trying to hit it as much as possible, following it around like a group of kids. Soon people figured out how to play positions, and show restraint, and act as a team, with more calculation behind their moves and strategy. Eventually more skilled maneuvers became commonplace, and we’re still reaching for the stars in terms of how we play the game together.

    Watching it evolve is nothing short of watching a sport get revealed, layer by later, exposing the real depth that makes the game so enjoyable. This is a video game I’m talking about here. That’s incredible.

    I’ll be playing this one for years to come.

  • No other game this year made me sit and think or start nearly as many deep conversations that this game does. Philosophically, it brings up a lot of common thought experiments surrounding the self, and puts them into a futuristic setting with bleepy robots.

    It flops a bit on its dialogue, with a thoroughly unlikable main character and really overly tired reflection on the things that are happening in the game world. It spends too much time pointing out the obvious and leaving the main character to spout dialogue that is not relatable and very unconvincingly delivered.

    Where SOMA shines is in its very final turn in the ending, when it shows you a simple bit of game-world interaction that it used very early on, changing nothing about it, and does magnificently well to show how much you as a person have changed during the game by how differently you respond to it. It brought tears out of me and is a really gorgeous bit of storytelling.

    I recommend this game to anyone who can put up with (or enjoy, even) a horror game, and put up with its really slow beginning to get to the excellently delivered thought experiments. This is probably the most back-loaded game I’ve ever seen.

  • There’s so much about Until Dawn that isn’t very good. The ending really left me feeling horrible, the characters were largely unlikable. But the butterfly mechanic worked on me like a charm and I’m such a sucker for B-movie style horror that I couldn’t get enough of the terrible quirks. I think this is the most significant advance for interactive storytelling in ages, and does what I wish Heavy Rain could have done more of.

  • Another game that was suck in Alpha Mode early-release limbo. When it came out, I played it nonstop. I wanted to perfect every facet of my prison design, and then make new creative designs. I haven’t enjoyed a sim game this much since roller coaster tycoon. It's partly due to the morbidity of the theme, but that odd glee is cut short when the game hits home how intense the subject matter actually is during an execution. It really worked for me and I played it for just, hours.

  • I shouldn’t find this so fun. I shouldn’t have found any of the souls games fun. I don’t like super challenging games and the RPG style of levelling was never something I was interested in. Against all odds, I loved every souls game including this one, which thematically, appealed to me even more and had fantastic lore to match. On top of that, the playstyle (light armour and lots of dodging) was exactly my style from games precious so the transition was very painless.

  • A wonderful conclusion to a game-changing series. The batmobile was fun as hell and all the stops got pulled out for the story. Every villain is up to be recaptured, and my favourite, Scarecrow (albeit heavily modified to make him seem more badass), was the ringleader for once. It’s the final form of their excellent batman formula and it sure feels as refined as it can be.

  • Exploratory games have got nothing on Her Story. Everything you do is an exercise of pure discovery, and you get to your conclusions and the end credits your own unique way. It makes you feel like a legit PI through it all and it feels legitimate. The actress is sublime and all the little details left me guessing for a long time after.

  • Real primal fear. Every time. A super creative game that has one person flipping around a bomb to diffuse, the other (unable to see the bomb) flipping through a gigantic manual of instructions trying to relay them fast enough. I played this game with an oculus rift and hand sensors, and it was genuinely terrifying – especially right at that moment when we both knew I was dead. Really creative awesome game.

  • I feel like I’d need to justify why this isn’t higher up on the list before having to justify it being here at all. This game is just Nintendo at their absolute finest, showing that signature polish in every corner of the game. I’ll keep coming back to it when a new level idea strikes hot, or when I want to play some cool new Mario jams.

  • This game shines through its simplicity. A lot of games on the list are simple enough, but this one is clever and appeals to all humans on some baser levels. fl0w tried to do this as well, but didn’t even succeed like Agar.io has, and worked wonders with online player interaction with basically no interface or features. It’s hard to stop playing this game before several hours go by.
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