Games
Jared’s Top Ten Games of This Horrible, Godforsaken Year
FUCK 2017.
As I’ve gotten older, I have less free time (stop me if you’ve heard that one before, right). I’m one of millions of Gen X and Millennial children who grew up with games as a daily part of their lives, a main hobby, ageing and maturing alongside with the rest of the industry. And with less time for anything to do, and exponentially more content and media and art to consume than any time in the history of civilization, everyone has to make sacrifices and decisions. Okay, maybe that sounds more dramatic than it really is, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that everyone I know cannot have a conversation about anything they experience or like or want to recommend because we are all too fractured as a society to embrace the same things. With the exception of sports and Game of Thrones, I don’t watch the same shows as my friends, or see the same movies, or read the same books, or listen to the same music, or really do the same things. The games we play barely crossover, and if everyone isn’t up to drop $60 on the same title at the same time for co-op, it’s a total waste. Especially since now there is a division between discs and digital, which plants a flag in the ground on whether you keep or return the game you intend on playing. It’s maddening, and I know why so many people want to go back to a simpler time; and that isn’t even getting into the quality of old versus new, don’t even get me started on how this console generation compares to the previous ones.
And now I sort of despise the way I play video games, because I try to cram in as many podcasts and YouTube videos in as I can possibly fit into my head and my schedule. And that means turning down, or off, the audio completely on games to double dip and multi-task. It’s my version of listening to the radio during the gym, or the drive to work, or whatever you normal people in the world do with your time. For me, it’s intentionally playing games in a way that fit my lifestyle, for the worse, out of convenience, and I hate it but I can’t stop doing it.
Instead of taking on different titles, I’m mostly now just looking for idle side quests to complete as I fly through my back catalog of pods, that help me catch up on everything else I’m missing that I deem critical, like politics or the NBA. And out of all the open world games that I grinded through, the second best one was Horizon: Zero Dawn (the first is further down on the list, you already can tell what it is). And it ended up right outside my top ten, which shows you how good this year was (for the first 8 months at least).
If you watched that video I did (above this) about satisfying gameplay loops, then you’ll know why I dig Horizon so much. And if you don’t have the time or can’t be bothered to, basically the main hook of games like this and Far Cry 3 is enjoying the constant running around and exploring and finding things to do, things to kill, animals to skin, items and abilities to upgrade, quests to complete, which help the former which feeds back into the cycle to complete the latter, and so on and so forth. If you can make a pretty game that is somewhat interesting with tight controls and a unique spin, then you’re pretty much set, but Horizon took things a bit further when it came to the art direction and story and world, and mostly the fact you fight giant robot dinosaurs. With bow and arrows and traps and shit. It cannot be simply stated how fucking awesome that is, but also how fresh is it considering you’d think someone should have already done this concept. But oh well, Horizon ended up being the Turok reboot I always secretly wanted, and I didn’t have to play on an N64 controller to get it. But I did have to endure the PS4 controller, which I really don’t love playing with, so onto the other honorable mentions!
Honorable Mentions: Gorogoa, Uncharted: Lost Legacy, Tacoma, Yooka Laylee, A Hat in Time, Hand of Fate 2, Prey, Hellblade, Absolver, Hollow Knight, AC: Origins, and a ton of other little small indies I liked a lot but didn’t love
Also: The SNES Classic does not count
Considering my time with the greatest console maybe ever, and the greatest game maybe ever, there is just nothing like holding a SNES controller and flying through Super Mario World. There is literally nothing else like it, and since it’s my favorite game of all time and takes me back to my glory days of the ‘90s I refuse to not include it on my end of year list. I won’t put it above actual new games that came out, but still, I’ve never gone all the way through Super Metroid before and now I have, and I’m better off for it, that shit is lit as fuck (as the kids nowadays say). You will be too if you can find one. I don’t have much else to say, it’s pretty much what you’d expect it to be, the classic edition mini SNES, and worth every penny. Now only if it had Super Mario All-Stars, TMNT IV Turtles in Time, and Mario Paint, then it would be number 1 on this list. But it doesn’t count. Not even going to use the Star Fox 2 argument, that game is not good.
10. Snake Pass
The two genres I like most out of all of them are platformers and puzzle games, and while I got plenty of retro platformers in 2017 I didn’t receive any new puzzle games. Nothing earth shattering like The Witness, and nothing quaint or novel like Box Boy. But I did get a really lovely mixture of the two with Snake Pass, one of those smaller indies that doesn’t feel like it was scrapped together, and has a wonderful main mechanic: locomotion. Grow Up and Grow Home, and now Snake Pass, represent a movement of games that primarily focus on and champion…well, movement. The act of slithering as a snake to travel is something I’ve never done before, and having to rewire the way I think about moving a character on screen by snaking left and right does a better job of making me feel like an animal than something like the wolf parts of Twilight Princess or Octodad. The thrilling part of the game is the risk/reward to where they plainly place the collectibles, a challenge to see how ballsy you are, or how good you are at gripping obstacles and maneuvering around as Noodle the Snake. It’s not long before I dove into harder levels with moving platforms, timers, switches, levers, traps, hazards, lava, and essentially ended up in a Dark Souls game. It’s brilliant, and I want more stuff like this even though we will never get it. Oh game industry, why do you hate new ideas so much if they aren’t rip-offs.
I was going to make this entire list “best Mark Brown videos” but I don’t think I could just post his stuff and call that my own work. He is the single best games critic and doesn’t write anything, he just shows you the gameplay footage and explains it in a way where you not only slap yourself on the forehead and say ‘son of a gun he put that into words way better than I could’, and also ‘I need to play this game holy shit’.
9. What Remains of Edith Finch
This is the pseudo-sequel to Gone Home that The Fullbright Company should have released, not Tacoma. Tacoma was incredibly short, and while extremely interesting it was too short, fizzled out by the end, and had ultimately not a lot to say. The finale ramped up into nothing, it was a super happy ending that resolved everything in a neat bow, and for the amount of work and time that goes into these ‘walking simulators’ or ‘stroll playing games’ you’d think these stories would be longer and punchier and weightier. It’s wonderful to see indie’s best and brightest tackling interesting ideas, making risks with their pacing and mechanics to tell their stories, exploring themes new to games, and are expanding the scope and breath of what characters we see in games. But besides the diversity and subject matter, it’s rare to see these narratives go for the jugular like movies do; it’s one thing to make someone cry because of Clementine’s actions in The Walking Dead, it’s another to give us something like the ending of The Seventh Seal, or the girl in the red dress from Schindler’s List, or the suicide scene from The Royal Tenebaums, or the ending 30 minutes of Nashville, or the final scenes in Shame. It’s a horrible standard to set, but the closer we get to those examples, and the more we incorporate gameplay with emotional storytelling, the better off we will be.
So that is where I transition into What Remains of Edith Finch, a giant step up narratively from Giant Sparrow’s previous entry The Unfinished Swan (which I love) and a major step down mechanically. The Unfinished Swan is a terrific series of inventive and beautiful puzzles split into chapters with a story weaved around it, and Edith Finch is a sprawling and lovely sad tale with some ingenious playable moments attached to little side stories, with a lot of slow walking in-between. There was points where I asked myself if this should be a game; the camera and controls get taken from you so often it feels like it’s on rails, in terms of where you could look (you have to stare at the words written in the world that you hear narrated over you constantly). But for it’s very short length, it trims the fat and gets right to its best moments, which is what I’m looking for. It hit me like a truck, and made me laugh quite a few times, and almost tear up more times, and when you say out loud “no way” and “get out” and “I can’t believe they did that”, you know you’re on the right track.
Edith Finch is a game about a cursed family of lovable losers, who struggle with the kinds of problems that people who play indie games probably also deal with. The characters get far too brief mini-games that explain how they died, and you control different elements of the surreal world, embodying nature or animals or concepts or dreams as you learn about how each generation of Finch handles the burden of the previous, and fails to change their outcome. And the most haunting moments for me are the final set-pieces, dealing with mental illness and suicide, so of course I felt the most attached to those segments. But Edith Finch only gets better and better as it goes along, and ramps up into some of the best mini-levels I’ve seen in an indie in years. If you google any list or video of the best levels from 2017, you are likely to find agreement on the tale of Lewis Finch:
Games are at their best when they intertwine gameplay and story in such a way that it is impossible to separate, and impossible to adapt to other mediums, and is best experienced by yourself and not in a video or Twitch stream. Papers Please, Brothers, and Edith Finch are examples of this, and it’s inspiring to see them continue to push the boundaries.
Is this the Dark Souls of walking simulators?
8. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Most triple capital A games do not touch real life. They will not touch real problems, or current events, or major cultural touchstones and throbbing thematic issues with a ten foot poll. It’s like most of the writing is more historical epic than it is ‘ripped from the headlines’, due to the fact that shooters need a story wrapped around it to explain why you go from A to B shooting things. And if some games choose to tackle serious subject matter, or try to be relevant and in the moment, it’s always indies who do it way better. AAA games? It’s laughably shallow and too far and in-between. Sorry Battlefield Hardline, you do not count. Your toothless, lazy takes and shoehorned commentary is the prime example of why most adults do not take us seriously and would rather play Candy Crush without thinking they’re gamers, then consider which toy store they should go to for holiday gifts because that is the only real place games should be sold. Toy stores.
Wolfenstein II does not have the problems Battlefield Hardline has, and that might be a cheap shot because of the story that came out about Visceral being forced to work on the game instead of the now cancelled Star Wars project. The New Colossus is biting, sharp, memorable, shocking, and very keen to bring a wholly European perspective on the rise of white supremacy and racism in America. The main thesis of the game, and Machine Games located in Sweden, is thus: fuck Nazis, they should be murdered, no exceptions, and if you do not hold this view you are a white nationalist and also a Nazi. This is not only 100% factually correct, it’s a sentiment that got turned into the core of a great game, and a good marketing campaign, the likes of which the gaming industry does not have the balls to replicate. And I hope that they do, other studios, because I know people like Ken Levine and Neil Druckmann and others have the gumption and savvy and wit to pull something like this off. I really wish they get the chance to continue to push the boundaries like Wolfenstein is doing, whether that be politically, narratively, emotionally, or just filling a game full of crazy shit that needs to be seen to be believed. I refuse to even discuss anything relating to this game because there is a magic in discovering it all, but the character work and setting of the levels and conversations you overhear by NPCs is jaw dropping, and more than makes up for any specific mechanical complaints I have about the gameplay. Because I could do that for a while, but I am not going to, everyone pretty much agrees on the old school design being a detriment all over the place.
But no other game made me feel good being a Jew, and gave me real inspiration and catharsis. It’s one thing to know you are on the right side of things and are level headed, it’s another to get that silent hug from a video game featuring outlandish violence and absurdity far beyond cartoons, science and logic and physics be damned. This game is a blast, and is exactly what I needed in this god forsaken year that we are in, because it’s not getting better anytime soon.
7. Nioh
Since nobody in Japan wanted to give us a Dark Souls sequel, or a Bloodborne 2 like we all fucking want, Team Ninja delivered on a very tight and succinct refinement of the Blood Souls sub-genre. Now excuse me while I vomit for using that phrase because there is nothing better at the moment. Same goes for walking simulators, like come on Internet, use your powers for good and give us a better name for these things I talk about incessantly.
Instead of trying to replicate the Dark Souls oeuvre, the inter-connected world, the gothic theme and setting, the confusing and intricate lore, Nioh simply opts to do one thing better than the Souls games: combat. And boy does it really make those other games look somewhat archaic in comparison. Nioh takes every single facet of Souls fights and improves them, from the way you spend and re-earn stamina, to the display of the opponent’s health and stamina, to the way you are incentivized to switch weapons mid-combo, and even the multiple stances used to create a rock paper scissors element to every encounter, it’s breathtaking and spellbinding to get good at that game. You can try and fly through it, and you feel like a badass, but sometimes you are ground into dust and have to conquer the game, and that makes you feel not only accomplished but like you dodged a bullet.
Controlling Nioh is how I want future From Software games to be like, which they can’t and won’t, and I accept that. I also want the guns of Nioh to be how you shoot in Bloodborne, but that is also an impossibility. So while more studios take a crack at topping the king, they better diverge in more directions either narratively or mechanically. Hopefully the competition to make the next Souls-killer is something developers are up to the challenge of, because so far it’s Nioh and anything Miyazaki is hiding from us at the moment.
It’s also very fun to say out loud. Nioh. Ni-oh. Nee Ho. Knee Ho!
6. Resident Evil 7
Luckily for the both of us, I already made most of my thoughts on Resident Evil 7 available in the video below, where I pretend to be Macho Man Randy Savage. That was a fun day of recording. Any who, I haven’t thought about it much since January, but it still holds a special place in my heart when I reflect on 2017, mostly because I convinced my very good friends to livestream it together, and that was the hardest I’ve laughed all year. Just simply amazing to watch people who really enjoy that franchise be scared shitless at the sight of a little girl on a boat, or the opening of one measly door. Hilarious stuff, wimps trying to go through that haunted mansion, I could watch Let’s Plays of RE7 for the rest of my life and never get tired of it. It’s like P.T., but a full game and not a demo. Perfect hashtag internet content #Content.
5. Cuphead
I’ve already made a lot of comparisons about Nioh to Dark Souls, so I will not make the obvious “Cuphead is the BLANK of Dark Souls games” comparison here. Difficulty is one thing, repetition on boss fights is another, I could go on and on, but I’m not going to do it. Nope. Will not cave into that line of thinking, everything cannot be fit into a boxed marked ‘Souls Borne’. I’ll find another way to talk about Cuphead being phenomenal.
Cuphead is the Dark Souls of run and gun platformers.
My favorite boss battle
Damnit, I fell for it again! I had to, I’m sorry, but it was going to burst out of me eventually. In any case, yes it’s tough as nails, but I found there was a real groove you can hit with that game learning to dodge and parry, and by the boss everyone has a problem with (the dragon one), and the other boss people have a problem with (the queen honey bee), you end up having the muscle memory down for the end boss, the mother fucking devil. The simple mechanics, slowly being ramped up with new powers, paid off in a way where I felt like I had movement and aiming and avoiding bullet hell down to a science, and that was immensely satisfying.
And then there is the music, and the style, and the most I watch videos on how they created everything from scratch the more I am inclined to say this is the best art direction for a video game I’ve ever seen, by a mile. My words cannot do it justice, the documentaries I’ve seen covering the studio about the ‘30s cartoons that inspired it cannot do it justice, it is just awe-inspiring. Simply the pinnacle, the zenith, the apex, of games as art.
4. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild
I had to borrow my neighbor’s Wii U to play this game, and I am very glad I did, because those three weeks were more enjoyable than any open world game I’ve had with the exception of GTA San Andreas, Fallout 3 and the Witcher 3. That is the list. It’s an all-timer for sure, hands down, based purely on what Nintendo was able to do with their world design, physics, immersive gameplay, and innovation. It could have looked like shit, sounded like shit, had a shit story and cut scenes, and STILL would have been revolutionary to open world games. I do not say that word lightly, either, because it makes all the games in the genre before it seem pointless now that you can’t glide or climb anything. No more climbing a mountain side with a horse in Skyrim, no more wondering how to get on top of a plateau in Metal Gear Solid V, no more slight parkour in Watch Dogs 2, no more mantling in Assassin’s Creed. I hate how it has forced my brain to think “boy, I wish I could get up there, I could do that in Zelda” all the time.
It’s hard to talk about games that came out earlier in the year, and ones so highly covered and so thoroughly combed over by critics and fans alike. I don’t think I have anything left to say about this game that has not already been stated somewhere online, but it’s just as impressive and creative and refreshing an experience as I can remember, especially for this franchise. I would have loved some big traditional dungeons to dig into, really chew on, as opposed to the rather thin and lightweight four boss things we got, but I’ll take what I can get when it comes to Zelda. I don’t like the 2D ones, I’m sorry, I just don’t, I’m working on it, it’s a problem, what can I do.
Breath of the Wild is the Dark Souls of Zelda games.
3. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds / Fortnite: Battle Royale
Battle fucking royale games. The type of game you never knew you needed it until you know you wanted it. And the main culprit is PUBG (which is a horrible title for the most popular game ever, and I will not be swayed on this point). It’s taken gaming by storm because A) it has a cool storm in it that kills you B) it features 100 people in a match which is the new standard I think for multiplayer shooters going forward C) you can stream it and it works really well unlike some other games that want to be ‘eSports’ D) you can play it with or against your friends and the more people you try and get to play with you the better off it is aka the League of Legends model of recruiting a team E) there are loot boxes in it and F) it’s easy to run on PC and inexpensive at only $30.
No one can really replicate that formula unless you are willing to make concessions or vastly improve on any of those major six points.
Fortunately, Epic did that by stealing the idea on the engine they lent out to Blue Hole, and simply made the mode free to boost their original game with Fortnite. Voila, you have a recipe for an instant 20 million active users, and all because that game hit consoles well before PUBG did. I’ve technically played way more Fortnite with my friends, despite liking PUBG more, and I’ve watched enough footage between Waypoint’s Breakfast and Battlegrounds, Polygon’s Awful Squad, and whatever Giant Bomb calls theirs, to last me a lifetime. It also helps that I am quite good at this game and won on release day, so I look forward to devouring more delicious noobs and Christmas noobs when more people get their hands on PUBG for Xbox.
But yeah, by the time this goes up this game will surpass 30 million copies sold and that is such an anomaly/exception to every rule in gaming that it is impossible to avoid the suction of PUBG’s black hole, it’s that important and influential, just like Minecraft was when it picked up momentum and never slowed down. I cannot wait until we get the COD 4 / MW2 version of this mode, because it will be more popular than Jesus, and maybe the Beatles when they were more popular than Jesus. What I’m saying is, Jesus is declining in popularity and I have PUBG to thank for that.
PUBG is the Dark Souls of shooters.
2. Gwent: The Witcher Card Game
It’s astonishing that between the first article I wrote about Gwent, the second one I wrote, and this now, the game has gone under some radical design changes when it comes to how Gwent is played. It’s unrecognizable to the version in the Witcher 3 for people in the know (if you aren’t they look identical, I know) but that speaks volumes to how much CD Projekt Red values experimentation and optimization, compared to Blizzard’s Team 5 and Hearthstone. One game has updates that take forever and leave the meta stale, the other keeps a healthy diet of paint coating. One is risk averse to patch their game for balance, which is criminal, the other is never afraid to rework an entire card from top to bottom, including the name you grew attached to. It’s night and day the differences between these two card games, and I hope it becomes a David and Goliath situation because I want nothing more than these two to improve their games in spite of each other, cut throat in their ambition, so everyone gets kick ass stuff to play. I’m not sure fat cat lazy Blizz will live up to it, and I don’t know when Gwent is going to actually release, but this is the era where games don’t even need official release dates. Like when could people play Battlefront 2? Does that matter? Which version is the one you review, the old one or the new one sans microtransactions? When is a game even complete? When it works? This is another rant for another day, but Gwent’s single player and storytelling puts it a step above the rest of the competition and I’m not even going to get into the actual jargon filled specifics and mechanics of the game because A) you don’t care or already know and B) I’ve written extensively about it already and I’m not going to beat a dead horse and C) I upload clips to my YouTube too often, just go watch those.
In less than 1 calendar year I have 600+ hours in this game, and that is all you need to know about why it is number 2 on my list. There is a lot of guilt mixed in with pride and enjoyment that came from me finding out I wasted 600 hours on this virtual children’s card game, but was is wasted if I liked every second of it? Is any time wasted? Can anyone truly retrieve the time they lost? Will anyone answer my rhetorical questions about time? Should I keep asking them?
Gwent is not the Dark Souls of card games.
1. Super Mario Odyssey
There is no god – god is dead – the only entity i recognize is super mario, in all of his platformer perfection, and there is nothing but pure joy and transcendent splendor in his latest odyssey – all hail mario – all praise the italian plumber – new donk city is my mecca, my one true love – i am a new donker now and forever, for life – it is my xbox gamertag now, you can see it in the playlist above – there is no other option for number 1 on this list or any other list – it will bring grown men to tears, with targeted weaponized nostalgia for a better time in our lives – i am going to start a new religion based on the mushroom kingdom and i welcome you all to join whatever i end up calling it, maybe ill use this article to brainstorm and workshop ideas
play-theism
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I have not actually played this game with my own two hands and yet I know it to be true, I searched my feelings and knew it.
To be fair, it wouldn’t matter either way, so I don’t feel guilty whatsoever. Just the gameplay I’ve seen is enough for me to shed tears of exuberance. One year I gave the demo for The Stanley Parable game of the year, so honestly if you have read this far and care about GOTY lists you need to examine your life and get your brain examined. I can do whatever I want facetiously or not, and you’ll never know the difference!
Okay I’m done talking now, goodbye everybody.