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thisluckyguess

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GOTY 2017

In retrospect, perhaps this is the year I wandered away from games slightly. Anyone who has played video games long enough will tell you it's not unusual to feel a bit burned out, but I recognise many of the games I've spent time with aren't of 2017 at all. Nevertheless, it's my list and I'm rolling with it.

A disclaimer : I don't have a PS4, and only just have a Nintendo Switch, so this might be an odd list of games. Also, these are all my opinions, so no offence intended if I yell at your favourite game.

I couldn't decide on an order, so I decided to cop-out and just dump them as a giant list.

List items

  • Eleven shows wilful contempt for the whole GOTY format by a) immediately having a number *greater than ten* in the name and b) probably not being released in 2017.

    But this game represents something for me - during a particularly tough period, I'd get home and spend thirty minutes relaxing by playing inept table tennis against a hateful, impervious computer opponent. The physics are very solid, the haptics feel great, and I genuinely believe it made me a better player in real life. In my brief period of Vive ownership, it's definitely the game I enjoyed the most.

    Oh, and I never use the replay feature in anything, but I adored this one. There's something gleeful about seeing your gestures of celebration and frustrated swipes echoed back to you. I'd commentate my own replays! I was so excited about finally beating the pro difficulty that I think I danced around the room.

    I miss you, Eleven.

  • If nothing else, NieR caused me to reflect on what 'game of the year' means to me. Reviews are inherently subjective, but at least you can usually bolster your case with 'great graphics' or 'the running around is good'. But with NieR it feels I'm mostly reviewing myself, or at least my vulnerability to cheap emotional manipulation. That is, I don't think it's a very good video game, so why do I like it?

    The graphics are functional at best, the dialogue is awful, didn't care for the controls, the characters are trite offcuts of soggy cardboard - I spent thirty hours with NieR, and didn't enjoy much of it.

    And yet, the music is lovely. Emil is mystifying but enchanting. The game abounds with awkward charm and clever framing. The user interface trickery is smart as all hell and made me want to tell everyone everywhere about it, immediately.

    More than anything, ending E. I admit, I cried. This is a hot mess of a game. Please make more like it.

  • I'm not really a side-quest completionist type, so that I spent almost 30 hours just getting to level 6 says something about this game. The character writing is excellent - I genuinely struggled to choose a mere 4 from all the options - and I don't feel pressured to follow build guides or min/max my team. If I had a real game of the year, this would probably be it.

  • I got this free with Xbox Live, and spent about a week playing absolutely nothing else. I even bought it again on PC because it's that great. I played it so much I gave myself headaches. The end game is (was?) a charmless grind, but roaming the world collecting squeaky slime guys is so much fun.

    Sometimes they escape from their little ranches, but I can't really be angry at something this adorable. Gosh they're cute.

  • I have a strict no horror rule.

    You might be thinking PUBG isn't a horror game, and I suppose you're right. But take a vaguely military shooter (something I'm bad at), and then put that in hardcore mode (oh please no), and you might as well be talking about a Saw film as far as I'm concerned.

    My internal narrative when playing PUBG is something like this: 'Am I cold? Oh god I think something moved. Please let me find a gun. Why do I never have guns? It's freezing in here'.

    Imagine the creepy little girl from FEAR, a game with the most helpful of titles because I WILL NOT play it. Now take 99 more of those girls and give them all guns and body armour, and maybe half of them have special forces training and every one of them wants you dead. That is PUBG.

  • More than any game, I'd like to sit down in a bar with the Wildlands team and find out what happened. Tonally, it's all over the place. Additionally, I don't think any real life person says 'sh*tballs', which my character seems to exclaim every ten minutes or so.

    Despite that, it's a fun Far Cry style sandbox. You rarely run out of ammo, there are helicopters everywhere, and you can't catch malaria but you can stick people in your car trunk and drive around with them. So that's good.

  • I don't like platformers, mostly because I'm just terrible at them. Despite this, I have enjoyed 2.5 platformers in my life, being this, Super Mario 64, and 0.5 of Rogue Legacy before it got too hard and I ragequit.

    I figure if you make my top 2.5 platformers of all time list, you should really be in my GOTY selection too.

  • OK, yes, it's a 2016 game, but I bought it in 2017. I'd played the demo and utterly bounced off it. At some point somebody gifted it to me for my birthday, and I gave it another shot and suddenly it all made sense.

    Factorio requires rationing, because I'm totally capable of sitting in a chair for twelve hours and doing nothing else, and that is unwise.

  • I realise there is an actual, released-this-year Zachtronics entry, but I haven't played that yet. So consider this a placeholder for all of those, since I play them identically ; dive intensely into it, absorb instruction manuals and make weird, jagged pen-and-paper diagrams, before emerging for air and not touching the game for another six months.

  • Confession upfront : I have not finished this game. I loved the old Zeldas, but at some point I drifted off, bored of endless tutorials and linear dungeons and what I saw as old-fashioned gameplay.

    BOTW is a strange, hostile throwback. There's not much in the way of hand-holding. It has a stamina system. Weapon durability. You'll cook food to restore health. You will die a lot, often senselessly. I spent an hour trying to climb an impossible hill in a rainstorm and I don't know why.

    I'm not sure any of these are good ideas, or actually make the game better. Indeed, if this were on PC, I'd probably be googling 'botw infinite stamina' right now. But more than anything, this is what I love about BOTW - it's completely unafraid to tell the player to just *get lost*, in every sense.
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