My Top Games of 2018:
(Dis)Honorable Mention: Throne of Lies: The Online Game of Deceit (you don't get a link. Other links mostly to Steam, although many on the list are multiplatform.)
If you'd asked me in summer, this would have been my clear #1 game of the year - a great online Mafia implementation with lots of roles that worked together like clockwork, with an active and engaged community. I spent about 700 hours playing it and many more watching it, promoted it, was a caster for a tournament, and was about to cast a second one when things went south.
A series of disastrous sweeping patches erased the old game, destroying community strategies and directly thumbing the nose at the competitive community. The developers responded to widespread outcry by banning dissenters, doubling down on the worst changes, posting abusive and harassing responses to negative Steam reviews, and more, all the while never touching the parts of the game that actually needed work.
The winners of both community tournaments have been banned, one from the official Discord, the other from playing the game entirely. It's not clear who still works for the company other than the lead developer and his wife. The second full time developer stormed off and hasn't been heard from throughout December. The new balance dev that was supposed to respond to community feedback hasn't been heard from since late October... and there are questions as to whether they even existed in the first place or were a shell identity for the existing balance dev. The latest blogpost ends on this juicy quote: "We wish we could offer something in exchange for an unbiased review (since there's annoyingly little incentive to do it, I know; I wish they added something for your time), but alas, terms of service prevents this! Call it Holiday Spirit?"
2018 saw a lot of shocking falls from grace. Telltale Games abruptly dissolved, tossing hundreds of developers onto the streets with little warning and no severance. Exposes about Rockstar and RDR2's working conditions made labor issues a serious conversation, finally sparking some actual game dev union formation. Steam did... a lot of bad stuff, and is losing its monopoly both from external competition and internal chaos. Blizzard was laughed off the stage at their own convention. The saga of ToL is the one that personally affected me. I quit, and I can't recommend anyone play it in its current state, or projected future states. It's going to die unless some miracle happens, and effectively is dead already for my interest. Really a shame. What a way to kill a great game.
Best Moment That Can Never Happen Again: Being king, trusting a single physician claim and coordinating heal+guard teamwork that stopped the evil team from killing anyone and brought the good guys back from a numbers deficit.
Game I Want To Play Most But Didn't Yet: Return of the Obra DinnEverything I read about this game, and what little I let myself see, convinces me that I will love it. Just haven't found the right time and mood yet. From all indications it would be headed for a fairly high placement.
#10: SubnauticaI don't like simulation games, especially survival sims that put the player on aggravating timers for persistently repetitive fetchquests. I don't love open world sandboxes, at least not nearly as much as other people seem to. I downright hate crafting systems in games, there's few easier ways to get me to stay away from something than talking about chains of gathering X quantity of Y to make Z to make Q to thinly veil some 20 boar pelt MMO grind loop. I admire the style and aesthetics of the Atelier games from a great, great distance, and had absolutely no desire to ever touch Minecraft even before I found out its creator was a terrible person.
So of course I'm kicking off this list with Subnautica, an open world survival sandbox with crafting and base building as primary elements. Game owns.
True, it does cheat. It has an actual story to progress, a number of setpieces, writing, blah blah. But that isn't actually why I like it, I'll claim a little hipster beat for it though and say that I was liking the game even before it had those things, back when it was early access with none of the "main storyline" implemented beyond the initial crashed ship.
The atmosphere is right. It's gorgeous. The UI feels good, somehow avoiding all the things that usually turn me off the genres involved. It's fun to swim around and explore the different environments. Aesthetically, it feels closer to all the perks of a good metroidvania. Exploring and finding some rare material feels like getting rewarded with a missile expansion in metroid, rather than "finally, boar hide 2/20". And, of course, when the story did get put in, it was pretty nice.
You can get super into the base building if you like, making stuff feels good, I still wasn't THAT grabbed but I didn't mind making some lockers and a tube aquarium that didn't look like ass. Considering how much I normally am not into these things, I can recognize this game as pretty darn great.
Best Moment: Creating a Cyclops sub and boarding it for the first time. "Wait, this isn't just a vehicle skin around me. I can... walk around? There's multiple decks? I can drive this whole thing? I can build INSIDE IT?!"
#9: Into The BreachThis is a popular pick for many GOTY lists, and I have little unique to add to the effusive praise. Go read
Rami Ismail's list if you need an overview. Super polished, super solid. When I want a small scale tactics game, this is going to be the one to turn to for years to come.
Best Moment: By its nature, the missions all kind of blend together. The best moment for me was spending 45 minutes on a single turn figuring out a way to save a train that seemed doomed to wreck.
#8: Heaven Will Be MineI guess this year's theme is followups to megahits. How, as a creator, do you continue after a smash hit magnum opus? You keep going. Into the Breach is no FTL but it's still very good. We'll see more of this later on the list as well. We Know The Devil was just such a megahit in the queer indie circle, in contention for my #1 game of all time forever, and here's the team's next work. It's different, it doesn't speak to me as much, but it's still very, very good.
It's a mecha anime story. I've never watched Gundam, I've never liked mecha, it's not really my scene, so a lot of stuff surely flew over my head. And that's fine, I always say I love works that take sight at a specific niche and make a deep appeal to a small slice of people rather than trying to shallowly appeal to everyone. Even though it is not entirely for me, it works to make me into more of a person whom it is for - I see some of the appeal now, the constant allegories of war and robots and personae (shipselves, here.)
What it does have for me is amazing characters and emotive writing. You can't help but cheer on Saturn as she goes for the title of Most Disastrous Disaster Lesbian Of All Time, or agonize with LT over whether to shoot her down (there's no question that LT can shoot her down. That's why she's the ace.) And Pluto's figurative and literal gravity well draws everyone together. I'm being a bit vague because the narrative is everything, here, but yeah, well worth the journey.
Austin Walker is more articulate than I, and much more of a mecha fan, if you want to read more praise.Best Moment: The sniper scene between Luna-Terra and Saturn in the second set of missions. The energy of the characters and the game blazes through here, giving the reader a mix of narrative, physical and sexual tension. Everyone lives to their fullest, until they die.
#7: One Night Hot SpringsA short and simple VN made in a game jam that took off in indie circles and gained well deserved exposure and applause. The protagonist, a young Japanese trans woman, is invited to spend a night at a hot spring resort with her best friend and another person she hasn't met before. What to do? That's it, that's the premise, there's no twist, and it's only about 30 minutes to play through and see all the content. And yet in its simplicity it manages to be both educational and emotional.
Out of everything on the list, this is the game I would most recommend everyone play. You'll learn things, you'll feel things, no matter whether you are trans, know trans people, or don't know any and don't care about the subject.
Best Moment: All of it. Seriously, it's short and consistently quality, I can't pick any specific bit out. The link is right there, and it's free. Give yourself a treat and go read it for yourself!
#6: CelesteAnother game that everyone else has written about, because like Undertale, it made it so big as to break out of "indie" discussion entirely and get on most people's mainstream GOTY lists. Marries the best of the precision platforming community to a great atmosphere, absolutely amazing music and touching story. It's already got a #1 placement in this very thread, you don't need me to tell you about Celeste.
If anything, it feels weird for me to have it this low, but that says more about me than it does about the game. I was already familiar with precision platformers and character-focused stories about anxiety and depression and etc, so for me a lot of the game's beats were more "ah, good, this thing is here and polished" than "oh wow, I've never seen anything like this before!"
Best Moment: Chapter 2 is really the whole game in a nutshell. Also has the best music.
#5: SURVEY_PROGRAM_WINDOWS.EXEA short questionnaire from a Smash Bros player about creating an identity and constructing some hopes and dreams. It was cute. I felt like my choices really mattered.
... by which I mean, Deltarune: Chapter 1. Again coming back to the theme of 2018, when you've made a megahit, how do you follow that up creatively? Toby Fox takes the more daring route of "yes, actually, make the same thing again. But different." It acknowledges that most everyone playing it will have played Undertale. To death. And beyond. It's the same. And yet, it's not the same at all. Everything is recognizable, but twisted around, and somehow it still manages to capture the most essential elements of surprise and delight that put its predecessor into people's hearts. "Wait, there's a battle system? Wait, there's a party?! Is this grazing?!? Is this an actual game?!?!"
It stands alone, it's intensely satisfying, and the weirder elements come a little more to the forefront. I want more, I want more of that town at the end, I want to hang out with Noelle and find out what's up with the Knight. There's a certain fascination to be played on here, where something was left ambiguous, and now it may be answered, and you wonder what the answer will be and fear it may ruin everything. But it's never quite what you expect.
Best Moment: I'll be with you in the dark.
#4: Cultist SimulatorWhen I was first writing up this list in Discord, the Celeste section sparked a discussion about precision platformers and games that seem to hate the player. I don't think precision platformers hate the player. They want you to succeed, and the difficult challenges are a way of making you think harder and become better at the controls and techniques involved.
Cultist Simulator? Cultist Simulator hates the player. This game wants you to be confused, and utterly out of your depth, and borderline frustrated, and devastated when one of the many terrible things that can happen creep up on you and consume hours of progress. "Ah," you whisper. "I am ruined." That's what makes Cultist Simulator great.
The game itself is simple when you break it down, it's a plate spinner, and it gives you little to no guidance about what you can spin in the plates, much less what you should. You stare at a table for hours, planning a route to something, and then something else comes up and you forget and drop something in a timer juggle. Nothing is explained. Even sharing tips with other players, it's impossible to cover more than a fraction of what's going on.
This is all very much by design, to walk this tightrope between confusion and overwhelmingness and keep it at juuuust the right balance to make people keep playing, get that old strategy "one more turn" going rather than making you give up. It succeeds at that, marvelously so. Every time I play this game, eight hours pass in a heartbeat and I still feel barely done. The same was true for the people I have watched play it, who got me into the game.
And there's a reward at the end of the tunnel, too, because Alexis Kennedy is a pretty darn good gamewriter. It's just not the reward you think it is. The true reward is understanding the world, when you've read enough of the books that you start piecing together connections between the brief scraps mentioned here and there, putting characters in their places, noticing the little details and connections between this and that recurring element. The true joy to be had is like what you get from reading an RPG setting guide. I know I'm going to be stealing a ton of stuff from this setting and cosmology in future projects. It is a weird game, and not for everyone. But it does not disappoint, and its strangeness and intentionally obfuscated nature are part of its charm.
Best Moment: Learning to navigate the sea of icons representing character traits, checking out several characters, and noticing what one of them lacked compared to the others: the "Mortal" aspect. "Oh.
Oh."
#3: ESCOut of this and Heaven Will Be Mine, I was more excited for HWBM and thought ESC would be a short side dish. Turns out I had them backwards, and that's no slight to HWBM. ESC is a solo project from Lena Raine, composer for Celeste, so I guess she wins the year with two appearances on my list. A cyberpunk story that is probably under the visual novel umbrella, except not quite, and more auditory than visual, and interactive except not, and derivative yet utterly creative. I played through this in a single shot on stream, have the whole thing saved as a highlight.
There's a sequence in there that I think is about ten minutes of nothing but silence and heavy breathing.
Raine is best known for her composition and audio work, and no surprise it's outstanding here. The soundscape is as much a part of the story as the text and other visuals. Feels more like something you'd go to a museum or theatre for than a video game, but undeniably has roots in gaming (it's about an oldschool Multi User Chat Kingdom, for starters).
Some of the plot covers familiar territory, if you've read books or engaged with non-gaming media in the last decade. Some of the twists I called. Others I didn't. Even the ones I did were compelling in their presentation. You know how there's a difference between watching a movie in a theatre and at home on a TV? Play ESC with headphones on.
One thing it does have in common with HWBM is a very relevant forward look at modern society, especially tech. The augmented reality parts feel very plausible within the next couple of decades, and the projected social stuff right on the nose. There were even some news stories that broke right around the time of the game's release that, without spoiling much, are quite relevant to the parts where it dares to name some specific names and corporations and things they might do.
Definitely "The Alex Pick" on the list, I don't see it on many others, but it hit me hard.
Best Moment: The overwhelming everything of the cast waking up in the city and making their way down to the train station. Exquisite.
#2: La Mulana 2Yet another "Theme of 2018, how do we follow up a smash hit" entry. Yet again, not as good as the original, but different and does its own thing that is in some places better. There is a certain satisfaction in La Mulana's exploration and puzzle solving that I don't think I've seen really replicated in anything else. LM2 manages to recapture a fair bit of it. That alone rockets it up the list, as I wasn't sure these feelings could ever be replicated. But here we are, buying caltrops from a duck.
It has warts, there are a lot of bugs, the ending is rushed. Still the pinnacle of exploratory metroidvania that it is. Sometimes I question if I even like playing games anymore, and then you have these rare gems that bring it all back and send me rushing to the computer every waking moment for nearly 70 hours straight.
Best Moment: The Kujata boss fight. Some of the best audio and visual work in the game, as the player boards the fairy king's boat and sails into a maybe-real space ocean to fight a titanic seven-eyed bull with a volcano on its back. All the grandeur of a big Fromsoft boss setpiece, placed in a delicious middle-intro of metroidvania goodness.
#1: Slay the SpireWithout a doubt the game that dominated the year for me, wrapping together a ton of themes I love into a single ultra-polished package. It has the mystery and atmosphere of Dark Souls, the pop and detail of a good adventure game, the precision deckbuilding and gameplay of a really good tabletop/cardgame like Dominion or M:TG, great music, great art, satisfying challenge, brainteasing, roguelike replayability, adjustable and accessible difficulty, a responsive and amazingly skilled development team... it has everything.
It's sort of a quiet game, since it's been chugging along in early access with continual development. Probably not on many people's top 10s. But for me, I was into Spire at the start of the year, am still playing it heavily here at the end, and will still be doing so into 2019. It is a really, really well made video game. The development alone, watching the highly transparent team at work responding to the community and tweaking things, and directly comparing that to the Throne of Lies dev trainwreck... well, it's night and day, and made it easier to understand why StS took off and met with so much success compared to similar titles like Hand of Fate. This is how games should be.
Best Moment: Any unbelievable how-did-that-win?! run. For me, probably one of my earlier runs with the Defect, the game's robot wizard archetype, where I discovered the true power of randomizing card costs and recursion to break my way into infinite or near-infinite combos on every late fight.
#0: Night in the WoodsNot a 2018 game, but that's when I got to play it. Knocks everything else on this list out of the park. Play Night in the Woods. It's a story about being a trash person on the wrong side of life at the end of the world, friendship, poetry, and life in general. There's a shoplifting minigame, and another for reading microfilm at the local library. It's the only piece of media I've seen that I felt really understood some parts of my life I've shared with almost no one. It's raw, it's real, it communicates effectively. Play Night in the Woods.
Best Moment: Lying down on the train tracks with my mouse horror buddy. Gregg shooting someone with a crossbow. Chasing Bea across a strange city after being the worst person to her. Smashing with Angus. Meeting Germ's friends. Spying on the poetry club. Sailing to Trash Island. Digging up a ghost. Becoming a breeder of vermin in the forgotten corpse of a holiday. Getting drunk in the woods. Dreaming of stars. Waking up. Realizing Mae's friends care about her.
In conclusion, play One Night Hot Spring and Night in the Woods.
Show Posts