So far, this has been the hardest year to rank. Not only is every game in the top spots of my list radically different from the others, almost all of the games listed have several obvious flaws.
For me, 2012 was the year I realized that I play games to experience something new more than I play them to enjoy the thrill of challenge. As a result, every iteration of this list that has ever existed is fundamentally way different than the last.
Need to Add: Fire Emblem: Awakening
The reasons I love Jasper Byrne's Lone Survivor cascade into one another, then loop back around. First, I love that the game was almost entirely made by one man struggling to find his place within a new culture. I love that it feels like a more direct followup to Silent Hill 2 than Silent Hill 3. I love that the game understands 'less is more' horror storytelling than almost any other horror story I've seen. I love the way that ethos is baked into the visual design - everything is blown out pixels at an odd resolution, like you're sitting too close to the screen - AND into the game's simple, broken-feeling script. I love how Byrne's intent with the game was to replicate social anxiety and isolation in a space in which you feel uncomfortable meeting new people. I love thinking of how playing it alone on a laptop, empathizing with these things, connects me so directly to the one person who sat alone, on their computer, creating it.
Dishonored was an underdog kind of AA/AAA game back in the day, but playing it today (2021 as of this writing), it resonates as true so much more today than it did a decade ago. Dishonored's depiction of plague and English pseudo-history feels ugly and raw, yet correct. Don't let the paper-thin characterization or the caricature-style art fool you - Dishonored is a clever game with a *lot* of meaning and quiet moments of genius baked into its world.
Thirty Flights of Loving is only fifteen minutes long; all fifteen of those minutes are flawless.
Hotline Miami takes the aesthetics of Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive and sets them on fire. About a billion people have praised this game's ballet-brutal combat, and rightly so, but the fact that this thing is an abjectly uncomfortable study of the mind of a psychopath is underappreciated. I would dread having to see what the guy at the counter was going to look like after each mission in the game's second half. The ego/id/superego (re: the woman he cares for, the people he's killing and the self) conversations that occur in the protagonist's mind make Hotline Miami feel like a horror film in which you play as someone who doesn't realize he is the monster.
The ultimate rogue-like, partially because it requires so little explanation to work. Spelunky is the perfect, perpetually replayable single player arcade game. One of the only roguelikes that's nearly as fun to play when you're losing as when you're winning.
Every time I play through Sleeping Dogs I love it a little more than before. You could easily boil it down to its obvious film/video game references, sure, but to do so would miss the point. Sleeping Dogs is a game that understands exactly what makes the fantasy of the martial arts action film great, and gets you to experience that genre's greatest moments with as little to hinder you as possible. Also, honestly, I just really like Wei Shen. I like that he is an undercover cop who sometimes dresses like a banana.
Although it was almost definitely the result of EA's sharpening Bioware to a dull point, Mass Effect 3's more explosive, combat-heavy conclusion neatly pairs with a franchise that began as an amalgamation of every other science fiction subgenre. It had already possessed the Star Wars adventure, Star Trek politicking, gritty Blade Runner neo-noir crime drama, the goofy '50's pulp that the series pulls its character design so heavily from - and it all ends, fittingly, in the one subgenre it hadn't yet touched: the science fiction war film.
The fact that Rock Band Blitz isn't still a thing is a crime. Take all that money you spent on Rock Band tracks plus the mechanics of Frequency/Amplitude, and you have the pay-to-play music game you've (re: I've) always wanted. This game added arcade power ups to the tried and true Rock Band formula to make things more compelling, and it worked wonders, but maaaaan is it visually staid. People tend to say they value mechanics over aesthetics, but I bet more dynamism in visual design would've made this game a hit. Why's it so orange???
Maybe the most insane video game I've ever played. Its got more to say than its obscure, Adult Swimmy bizarro humor suggests, too. Putting Frog Fraction's interpretations of the edutainment game, the adventure game and the clicker as a mirror to those genre's mainstays reveals their penchant towards arbitrariness. A game's mechanics should interweave with its narrative/art design, and not act as a coat of paint over a mechanics-driven project. It's like the 'which came first, the lyrics or the song?' thing; it doesn't really matter, so long as one is built to be in tandem with the other.
Max Payne 3 got pummeled by critics and audiences alike both for failing to execute on the loose graphic novel brutality of the original games or the smooth, easy to pick up mechanics of other, more traditional third person shooters at the time. As such, it's one of those 'you have to re-learn how to play it to get it' games, and getting past the hurdle of deciphering Max Payne 3's very particular rhythmic combat, for me, was rewarding. Seriously, this game's incredible destruction tech and unique, well-drawn locales brought it closer to the dream of the John Woo game than anything Remedy developed. On top of that, it was refreshing to experience a Houser brothers script in a totally new genre. They wrote a hard boiled action story essentially over top of Tony Scott's Man on Fire. That's a cool thing!
XCOM does not mess around. As a story, this one is actually pretty basic, but its mechanics are so brutal and rewarding that the threadbare plot is actually kind of a plus. The amount of stress produced by losing an important squad member in XCOM is rarely paralleled, and the minimalism inherent to every other aspect of the game really reinforce how much of a roller coaster the gulfs between success and failure in XCOM can be.
Like Lollipop Chainsaw, Spec Ops is way smarter than it initially appears. Its ambition is to be the Apocalypse Now of video games, and while it fails to reach that impossible standard, it's also way more successful than might assume and has some meaningful things to say about military combat and the effects of post traumatic stress disorder.
Zombies, hurricanes, fault lines, nuclear weapons, plant people, monsters - whatever the instigating force, mass media has been hyperfocused on the end of the human race for over a decade now. Tokyo Jungle is unquestionably one of the most original takes on the formula. Humanity has vanished and Tokyo is now a mismatch of ecosystems. You begin as a Pomeranian. You hunt, you eat, you sleep, you procreate - and then you die, replaced by a litter of puppies. And then, maybe next time, you'll try your luck as a bear, or an alligator, or a house cat. I love it.
I Am Alive makes good on the promise of the story-based survival games that preceeded it, and is therefore a fascinating success; it just happens to be particularly mechanical in its delivery. The world in this game isn't exactly a joy to scrape your way through, but it knows how to make you feel like a small part of a big dystopic picture. Don't let the aged tech or the fact that the game was visibly rushed to completion stop you from playing this - the unforgiving world Darkworks created is artfully broken.
I used to play Super Hexagon compulsively on my laptop every night, and when it was ported to phones I never stopped playing it, or, at least, I never uninstalled it from my phone. Its an extremely short rhythm game that absolutely wants to kick your ass, but with Terry Cavanagh's brutal Atari-an geometry as the centerpiece. Like a pixie stick to the brain.
Dustforce is unbelievably good at what it does, and packs an incredible soundtrack and art design to boot. A challenging, deeply satisfying platformer with a super fun aesthetic. Its visual design and its blippy, complex electronic score create an innert tension to the action that elevate Dustforce to something more.
Rhythm Heaven is pure joy. The original DS title is one of the greatest rhythm games ever released, and in many ways its sequel is the better title with sharper art and an even better cast of bouncy weirdos. Its limited on the content side, which is a shame, but what's here is great. Playing this game is like if Saturday morning cartoons were a drug you just overdosed on.
Set in a dystopic sci-fi world mirroring the systemic sexism of an ancient society, Analogue is a game with real narrative ambition. Its indulgence in what I feel are some misplaced anime genre tropes sour the experience a bit, but the use of mechanics as storytelling device - you're essentially a space-faring archaeologist unearthing details of a dead space station by communicating with an AI - are so smart the clumsier moments are worth overlooking. It builds on the complexity of the simpler, better Digital: A Love Story, and I can't help but fall in love with the contrast between the two.
Journey has exactly one direction it wants to take you and it wants to get you there quick, but following it down the rigid corridors of its Pixar-ian expanses is rewarding enough an experience that it really doesn't matter. This game's anonymous cooperative multiplayer is an emergent narrative experience only possible in the context of a video game. I've never been convinced by Journey's simple 'all human action is a cycle/the hero's journey is repeated forever' vibe, but its consistently overwhelming score and visual design definitely disarmed me.
You literally couldn't generate a game I would have been happier to disregard in 2012 than yet another zombie shooter - let alone one simply called Zombi with the irritating Nintendian "U" suffix. This game, however, actually rules. It's got just the right mix of survival tactics and corridor shooting - you're expected to more or less herd groups of zombies using what limited space you have to maximize survivability and limit resource waste. It's got some clunky horror archetypes, but what it gets right it gets *very* right. The fact that you play as a randomly generated survivor who can die or be zombified permanently is what really makes it.
I'm a bit of an Assassin's Creed contrarian. As far as I'm concerned, the Ezio era of the franchise didn't make good on the promise of the original game at all, and, yes, I actually really like the staid, lumbering tone of Assassin's Creed III. It plays things way too safe with American History - depictions of the founding fathers are distinctly reverent, even in scenes most critical of them - but it gets some bigger ideas about colonization and the American seizure of land in there anyhow, even if they're only slight. Many of this game's sidequests are irrelevant nonsense and I'm in agreement with the internet at large that Connor is simply too one-note a hero to really stand out, but I love the interpersonal conflict at the core of this game, and the series has literally never been better than it is during Assassin's Creed III's shocking 5 hour intro.
It's funny now to think that Dear Esther was the game to launch a million 'BUT WHAT IS GAME' arguments. Dear Esther is a well-written exploratory poem of a video game that's ultimately a bit dry. That's the long and the short of it. It's, like, the least offensive video game experience I have ever had this side of Flower. If your conception of video games is threatened by what Dear Esther is, you are *weird.*
Lollipop Chainsaw was penned by James Gunn and produced by Suda 51, making it one of gaming's least expected collaborations in history. And it turned out so, so good. Too much of this one is spent on some empty beat-em-up mechanics, but it is *absolutely* worth indulging in that stuff to see the game's nuts "music genre as evil trope" narrative. So much better than its sophomoric cover art suggests.
Absolution is more or less the red-headed step child of the Hitman franchise. It improves upon Blood Money's incredible crowd tech, creates some pleasing Jason Bourne-esque scenarios for you to puzzle your way out of and is a, generally speaking, clever action title. Despite that, it's also frustratingly dull in the head. Brazenly anachronistic sequences like evil Hulk Luchador fistfight, or the cornfield assassination of the murder-battle nuns, or the hyper video game-y boss fights anchor what could have been a phenomenal change of pace for the series.
A Persona 4-themed visual novel tied to a simplified Guilty Gear-style fighting game. The campaign is more than a little laborious towards the end, but Arc System Works did a great job distilling their usual technical fighting game complexities to be more palatable for someone like me.
The Walking Dead was a flashpoint moment in video game storytelling. As the years pass and the Telltale games continue to roll in, it's becoming more and more clear that The Walking Dead's first season was about 10 hours of the illusion of choice. That said, unlike the many Telltale-style games that would follow, season one did an amazing job of creating horrific moral and ethical decisions for a player to work through. In spite of the obvious genre tropes - is Clementine really any more than a human vulnerability machine? - putting gaming's first true water cooler conversation starter too low on this list would be incorrect.
What if they made Borderlands, but better, because they hired Anthony Burch as the lead writer who is evidently very good? Still wish there was any meaningful plot whatsoever to these games, but the commitment to comedy and a wider variety of combat encounters ended up winning me over. One of my all time favorite podcast games.
Tekken Tag Tournament 1 was incredible, because it was a manic follow-up to some of the greatest entries in the Tekken Franchise. Tekken Tag Tournament, comparatively, is pretty good because it is a follow-up to some of the series' most middling entries. Still Tekken, though.
On paper, Halo 4 couldn't have sounded like a less exciting follow up to the supposed 'final entry' in the Master Chief 'trilogy,' but playing it as the capper on the Master Chief Collection, it becomes obvious how much sleeker and more exciting 343 were able to make their Halo campaign vs. Bungie's comparatively thin military sci-fi yarns. Things move along at a zippy pace, there's just enough time spent on character development for it to matter and there are meaningful personal stakes. Still, Halo 4 isn't exactly mindblowing - it's still ultimately one more linear FPS game in a generation full of games just like it. The biggest upset here is definitely the multiplayer - it's ticks the boxes you'd want from a Halo game, I suppose, but that's about it.
Gone are Alan Wake's Stephen King self seriousness and gorgeous world design, but Sam Lake's attempt at writing a Grindhouse Alan Wake game are successful enough. I've always felt kind of puzzled that a game so clearly not built for mechanic-driven arcade action would become exactly that, but hey, why not, I guess.
Asura's Wrath is God of War if God of War was even slightly interested in storytelling (and proportionately disinterested in gameplay). Whereas Kratos is a vessel of pointless violence, Asura is a romantic notion of a fallen angel, furious at the injustice inherent to godhood.
I love the way Asura's Wrath is borderline *obsessed* with metaphoric imagery, sometimes at the risk of coherent storytelling. This is very much an atheist's perspective on theology, in which bastardized tokens of contemporary religious symbols and deities swarm the player as grotesque combatants. I *do* wish the game could stop yelling at me for even two seconds, but them's the breaks, I guess.
There are about a billion things lurking beneath Fez's colorful pixelated exterior, but I couldn't bring myself to investigate almost any of them. There's something obtuse about Fez's gorgeous perspective-splitting world that made me bounce off of it before I was able to solve any of the game's hidden puzzles.
So - okay. Far Cry 3 is, let's just be real here, kinda fucked up. Its 'skinny, dopey rich white kid saving POC' narrative is there to force players to reflect on what it is they're doing in all the other AAA shooters they indulge in, which is good, but the reality of the situation is the game ends up falling into the very narrative trap it attempts to subvert. Voss, though, is a menacing antagonist, and several sequences of intense, ridiculous violence set Far Cry 3 apart from its predecessors and successors - I just wish it weren't such flawed critique of power fantasies. Its just so damned repetitive, and so willing to subjugate its indigenous cast of characters for the sake of its self-critical power fantasy. When the game hits, however, it hits hard.
McPixel could go way farther than it does, but as it stands it's a fairly ludicrous instance of WarioWare-with-an-edge comedy.
(iPhone)
Mr. Karoshi is a disturbing metaphor for office culture. There are too many corporate environments in which the office is a demanding space of overwhelming deadlines and stress-peaking tasks that employees must adapt to. I've worked in one of these environments, and it sucks the big one. The worst part about being overworked is that the social and mental anxiety can be very high, and yet simultaneously be so brain-numbingly dry that you can't bring yourself to try and compartmentalize what it is you're feeling.
Mr. Karoshi is grim and upsetting, but a very real product of that particularly dull ignanimity.
Oddly compelling adventure game about a janitor who travels through time. Needed more in the way of mechanics to really succeed, but I sure did like the this game's goofy '70s art style and ridiculous-yet-compelling pot.
This game is aesthetically really great; the musical puzzle platformer, conceptually, would've been an amazing experience with sound an art design like this. Like Little Big Planet before it, however, Sound Shapes uses loose, noncommittal physics that make the act of actually playing it tiresome.
This was a really fun trend! Draw Something was great because even when both players were awful at it, the resulting images were often hilarious. It lacked the structure to make it at all compelling for a long period of time, but I think the DNA of Jackbox's better, more interesting Tee Fury can be found here.
Initially appears to be better than other AAA iPhone tie-ins, but it devolves into a mindless shooting gallery fairly quickly.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was very good because it prioritizes its smooth arcade mechanics and the player's ability to jump in an play again and again over everything else. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD is, by comparison, a laboriously slow failure. It's like Neversoft built this lovably ramshackle car with the best parts on the market, and Robomodo came in and loosened all the bolts.
Try as I might, I cannot find a way in to this game. It's a delivery mechanism for the most basic, overdone '80s pop culture references in the form of a top-down GTA clone. Retro City Rampage is the equivalent of shitty novelty T-shirts from Spencer's Gifts. It is the video game embodiment of a Deadpool fan. It is not interesting or unique to point out the idiosyncrasies in the Back to the Future franchise. Please, can we just let this shit go?
