These are the games I enjoyed the most this year. Had to cut a lot, like Diablo 3, Black Ops 2, Gotham City Impostors, and Alan Wake's American Nightmare, but if a year has me cutting four games instead of reaching for more to pad out my list, that's a pretty great year in my book.
I cried at the end of Episode 5 of The Walking Dead. Telltale’s best release to date did practically everything right from both writing and design standpoints. The characters mange to be flawed and likable, and could be some of the best characters I’ve ever met in a game. Are there some technical issues? Yeah, of course, but this isn’t a review. If you take anything away from this list, it should be this: you need to play this game. If you care about gaming as a storytelling medium, it’s the most important release of the year, maybe of the past few years. But since we’re not doing Best of the Decade lists, I’ll have to stick with 2012. The Walking Dead is my Game of the Year because it’s really damn good.
It’s kind of amazing that Journey managed to wring genuine emotion from me without saying a word, right? Not only was I completely stunned by how beautiful the game was, but I was kind of…attached to my co-op partner. That’s weird, right? No voice chat, no communication besides chimes, nothing besides the knowledge that you’re experiencing this incredible world together. But every so often, I found myself hanging back so my partner could catch up, and they reciprocated by showing me the way to hidden items. Not every game manages to bring complete strangers together with sheer quality, but Journey managed to do just that.
Oh man you guys you can run up to an old lady, drag her over to a sports care that you just stole, throw her in the trunk, gun the engine, ride the car all the way down to the pier while hanging out the door, launch the car into the ocean (running over civilians along the way), and then the game tracks some of that stuff and compares it to your friends. Yeah, Sleeping Dogs has some issues. But who cares?
There are many games where you have to make a trade-off between story and gameplay. Max Payne 3 is not one of them. Its story is well told, with a delightfully bitter running narration from Max over a compelling modern noir tale, and slow-motion diving through windows as a way to flush enemies out never ceased to amuse. Any one of these aspects could work in a lesser game, but Max Payne 3 does both so well that you almost couldn’t imagine one without the other. Also, hey. There’s some pretty competent multiplayer.
For Persona 4 Golden, Atlus knew exactly what had to be changed and what needed to stay the same. Everything that made Persona 4 great has been refined with new content that iterates in all the right ways. In many ways, it’s both the most accessible Persona game yet, and something fans absolutely need to get their hands on – even if that means buying a Vita.
I played a lot of Rock Band Blitz this year. Hell, in between writing this list, I’ve been playing Rock Band Blitz, and I’ll probably skip dinner later on for some quality time with Rock Band Blitz. Although it takes a lot of practice to get any decent scores, and you’ll be playing the same tracks constantly, there’s something very addicting about the way Harmonix combined rhythm and score attack games. There’s not too much to say about the act of playing it, besides the wealth of control options for every play style, but it’s worth mentioning that Blitz is the game I spent the most time with over the past year…and I only bought it last month.
FTL isn’t the only game that kicked my ass this year. But whereas FTL was more like a friend pulling away your chair before you could sit down to eat your carefully prepared meal, XCOM: Enemy Unknown sabotages one of your chairs and gives you the tools necessary to deduce which chair is broken, but will burn down your kitchen if you pick the wrong chair. The punishments you earn are just that: earned. Whenever I failed a mission, I always felt like I was the one at fault as opposed to the game’s mechanics screwing me over. You have everything you need to succeed. It also helps that XCOM is very well designed, especially on consoles. Firaxis needs to just oversee every RTS console port from now on.
Spec Ops: The Line is an effective subversion of pretty much every shooter made in the last few years. In a year where it seemed like every dev house experimented with stories in gaming, few games did it better than Spec Ops. Yeah, the gameplay isn’t particularly exciting, but I never got the opinion that it was supposed to be. The writing and the interactive story elements carry the game so well that even if you hate third person shooters, you really shouldn’t pass on Spec Ops: The Line.
Whenever I started playing this game, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Darksiders 2 was a holdover from the last generation that Vigil brought over because THQ wanted a sequel to the first game. The design aspects here are old school; between the weighty combat, all the stuff there is to do, and the puzzles that seem to have been entirely bred out of modern games, it’s just hard to shake the feeling that you should be playing this on a PlayStation 2. I’m not saying it looks bad, the aesthetic of Darksiders has always held appeal for me, but if you love games like Jak and Daxter, you will absolutely love what is looking to be the final Darksiders release.
You will probably never finish FTL. Hell, there’s a good chance some of you will never see the final boss. This game makes you fight viciously for every inch of progress, but practically every time you crawl to the top, it capriciously kicks you back down again, laughing all the way. And yet I couldn’t stop playing it. When I died and lost hours of progress, I didn’t hesitate for one second before starting an entirely new playthrough. No game this year made progress feel so rewarding, and that makes everything about FTL that doesn’t work completely excusable.
