Best of 2015
I have played Undertale, thanks for asking
List items
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What could more perfectly fit the Souls style of obscure, in-world storytelling than cosmic horror? The terror and dread of the unknowable, madness that's right above us but invisible, "the sky and the cosmos are one". You'll go mad trying to understand all the details of the story, and you never will, and that's the point. After all, we are but men, and what can man know of what lies beyond? Bloodborne only shows us the glimpses, the afterimages, gives us just enough Insight to see how much we don't see. It's a masterclass in interlocking systems and story, form and function, aesthetic and gameplay. The Old Hunters made it even better, although it's unflinchingly, brutally unforgiving.
Bloodborne is poetry. Bloodborne is everything that videogames can be.
"A bottomless curse, a bottomless sea
accepting of all that there is, and can be."
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The Phantom Pain. The pain of missing content, as its wounded fans will tell you. It's unfinished, structurally confusing and more incoherent the further in you get, and on the surface, it has almost none of the over-the-top theatricality of the Metal Gear Solid of old. I can understand why some hate it. This is Kojima trying something new - designing a game around the player, rather than the story. The player is the story. I have dozens of stories in my head of how I infiltrated bases, or how I called in a helicopter support blaring Rebel Yell that laid waste to my enemies, or how I was on one end of a bridge, being sniped and shot at, until I called in an airstrike that decimated the other end of the bridge. Or how I ghosted missions.
It started suffering from diminishing returns, to be sure, as the amount of missions outpaced the amount of locations in the game, but the core gameplay is so satisfying that I didn't mind. This is the most feature-complete stealth action game I've ever played. It handles like a dream.
And The Truth? Magnificent. The optional Medical Bay story? One of the most beautiful moments in the series. It certainly has its narrative shortfalls, but there's beauty, too. Kojima has learned that sometimes, less is more, and it has resulted in some of my favorite moments in the series. I couldn't have asked for a better swan song.
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Life is Strange nails the melancholic feeling of coming home after a long absence, or reuniting with friends you haven't seen in ages. It gets so many things right: the awkward dialogue, the social cliques, discovering your own sexuality, all the little narratives on the periphery of your own... Although this is Max and Chloe's story, it feels like it takes place in a real world inhabited by other character with inner lives and their own conflicts and struggles. This is as close to Friday Night Lights as I'm likely to get in a game.
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By far the most interesting game on transhumanism I've ever played, and one of the best stories on the subject in general. Where so many games and stories are still worrying over the "dilemma" of whether a sentient, living, feeling, thinking creature should be treated like a person, SOMA starts from the assumption that yes, of course they should! SOMA explores the idea of consciousness and preservation of the species in some really unique, interesting ways that very much take advantage of the unique properties of games as a medium. It's (fortunately) not terribly high on jump scares, but it's absolutely dripping in atmosphere, and does contain one of the most harrowing, existential dread-inducing sequences I've ever played, and it was entirely psychological. Sublime.
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Came out of nowhere to become my favorite multiplayer FPS since the original Counter-Strike. Every round is tense, exciting and different. The build-up of tension as you wait for an enemy to appear, or as you round a corner and spot one, gives way to the cathartic relief of a (usually) brief firefight, and every time it's exhilarating to come out on top. The brief feeling of panic as you see walls blowing up around you and you wait, with baited breath, for the enemy to burst through is simply unparalleled.
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One of the best examples of the trite "more than the sum of its parts". Geralt controls inelegantly; combat feels unsatisfyingly weightless and prioritizes animations over clear visual communication; Roach has to be one of the worst videogame horses of all time; for a game so lauded for its writing and sidequests that supposedly have depth and character, a suspicious amount of them boil down to "hold down the Witcher sense button and follow a trail, then kill a monster at the end". I've rarely liked a game so much in spite of most of its interactive elements just being passable.
But it does many things right. The world is bleak, yet gorgeous, and feels truly lived-in. The world feels more real than Fallout 4's Commonwealth, which is based on a real place. The city of Novigrad, for example, sprawls and climbs, from its lofty spires where the rich live to the little shacks that attach themselves like barnacles to the city walls. The game does magnificent character work - even Geralt, who could easily be a gruff, stoic, brooding anti-hero, is a sympathetic character with a lot of warmth. In some ways he is defined by the women in his life: The hot-tempered but compassionate Triss, the cold, pragmatic, sarcastic (and from my point of view, sociopathic) Yennefer, and Ciri, Geralt's daughter figure, who is both a narrative macguffin and the game's emotional center. There are some narrative missteps (the Wild Hunt itself; the way the love story resolves, or rather doesn't, if you make a crucial, but understandable, mistake; Dandelion's existence), but the characters ground the story and make you care even if you don't fully understand the political intrigue.
Heart of Stone also deserves a shout-out for being one of the best downloadable add-ons I've ever played, with a fantastic stand-alone story.
Also, character of the year: Bart the troll.
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I only finished The Beginner's Guide last night, and it's hard to know what to write about it. This short, 90-minute game has so many layers of interpretation and meaning I can't even really say definitively what it was about. But it was deeply moving in a way that very, very few games have ever been. It's incredibly tightly-controlled ("Linear") and uses the form in a way that I wish more games did, by jumping around a lot, essentially "cutting" from one scene to another. But it's so much more than a formalist experiment. It's quite amazing and worth your time.
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Boy, Fallout 4 gets a lot of things so very, very wrong. The world-building is atrocious, there's next to no role-playing or decision-making in dialogues, the story is dreadful, and your character is foisted with a dramatically inert backstory that is at odds with the open-ended nature of a Fallout game.
But god damn it, it's so much fun to play! The shooting, for the first time in the series, feels genuinely great. The gameplay loop of picking a quest, clearing out a building (Dungeon), and coming back with pockets bursting with loot is just so satisfying. The world is is visually appealing and fun to explore, never mind the fact that nothing in it makes any sense whatsoever. It's been 200 years since the bombs, and nobody has cleaned a damn thing, computers in buildings completely flooded still work, and everyone is still living in shacks.
I have a laundry list of complaints about this game, but they can't take away from the fact that I played it for 80 hours in one week and loved damn near every minute of it. I hate that I love it.
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