Here's an ordered list of my top 10 games of 2013.
A special mention for Super Hexagon since I only started playing this year. It's so good to know that a game can still be engaging purely by its mechanics instead of its graphics or story or other presentation layers that usually come with AAA titles.
When AC3 came out, I feel like they somehow lost the very fine pacing that AC2 introduced to the series, that made the path you take through the game just feel natural. So glad that they found that rhythm again in AC4 along with a really cool tech that lets you jump onto a ship, sail the ship at sea, do battle with another ship, jump from your ship onto the enemy ship, find another island, get off your ship and run around on that island. And rinse and repeat. Seamlessly! So cool!
This is my first Fire Emblem game and I found it really engaging. The animations and 3D effects are really pleasant to look at. The mechanics, like how the relationships you build between characters plays not only into your strategic decisions but also into bits of the story, is really interesting.
The mystery at the beginning, the tidbits of information that fill you in (or give you more questions) as you go through the game, and the revelation towards the end are definitely what I love most about this game. The combat is also pretty good and intense considering I don't enjoy a lot of FPSes.
Going through the encounters in this game can be very taxing sometimes. You always have to prepare in advance and plan your approach, but it's always satisfying to survive at the end. The characters are brought to life by really good acting, which I think makes the world and the overarching story that much more believable.
I was so disappointed with the first release back in 2010. It was a broken piece of unfinished mess with a Final Fantasy atmosphere. It took them 3 years to fix it, and now we have an MMO with a decent story, a standard quest flow, multiclassing, and gathering/crafting mechanics that's more involving than just watching a progress bar fill up. Oh, and also a Final Fantasy atmosphere!
I just bought a PS3 this year, so that's why this game is here :)
It is visually stunning and the 2-hour journey and discoveries you go through (alone or with someone you cross paths with) is definitely something worth experiencing, even though gameplay-wise it only involves light platforming and puzzle solving.
This is mostly an adventure game that has you exploring the town, talking to people and playing a card game to advance the story. But you'll especially love it if you have any affection at all to the Japanese culture and childlike adventures (like me). The scenery, the animation, the music, the dialogs, the VO girl, everything is cheerful and as Japanese as it could be while having an English subtitle.
This is simply a fun logic game, with a political and personal story really cleverly integrated into it within and between levels.
This is the first type of these games I've played (I think Dear Esther is similar?), where all you do is explore and the story unfolds through the environment, the items you find and the notes or letters you read. Like Journey, it is a 2-hour experience worth having, except it is even more about exploration, with only a few occasional puzzles to solve.
Beyond is the second game I've played from Quantic Dream. The first one was Indigo Prophecy. Beyond definitely feels like an evolution from Indigo Prophecy. It looks amazing, the choices and the character and environment interactions are more interesting. But it still suffers from what I think are clunky controls, and a story that starts off interesting but at one point just does a free fall into "goofy ridiculous out of this world".
