I had not thought the last couple years were strong for games, but this year was great, with at least four games credibly competing for my top slot. I actually filled out all ten spaces on this list!
- NORCO
Fuckin' incredible. My writeup here
- Neon White
Fuckin' incredible. My writeup here
- Tunic
This game's hard to talk about because almost any description of what makes it cool is a spoiler! I started playing this game because of mysterious comparisons to The Witness(?!) which made no sense to me as I started playing the game and got just a Zelda 1 clone with Dark Souls feeling combat, albeit a very nice Zelda 1 clone. And then it got weird. And then it got really, really weird and I found myself simultaneously in love and, I am not proud, actually literally screaming.
I recommend learning nothing about this game before you play it. However, if you find the combat is excessively difficult, read this: Did you know you can sacrifice items at save points?
- Immortality
This was really interestingly different. This is the third Sam Barlow-helmed FMV-based Analogue-alike. (I thought "Telling Lies" was really underrated actually.) This one doesn't start with a big obvious mystery like Telling Lies, but it's really fun as an aimless exploration and it sneaks up on you. Notes: (1) Play it on XBox if you can, the controller vibration actually matters; (2) select the easily-skippable "About" option from the main menu, as it explains the actual premise: "Immortality" is a ~interactive multimedia CD-ROM~ presenting all known recovered footage from the movies of Marissa Marcel, an actress legendary in Hollywood although none of her films ever made it to theatrical release. Okay, I guess I just explained the premise. What sells this for me is that each of the three movies in the package feels like it really could be someone's favorite movie— you know, that one movie nobody's heard of, but it's got this *mood* to it and it's *compelling* and you're just obsessed with it. Each of the supposed three lost cult films manages a pitch-perfect homage to a different era of film: A 50s Italian-shot exploitation flick with pretentions to greatness and Black Narcissus cinematography; a 70s New Hollywood sprawl with edginess and a bohemians-freaking-out-the-norms subplot; a late-90s Lynch-inflected soapy psychological thriller. I walked away actually wanting to watch these movies, and you find yourself legitimately fascinated by the behind-the-scenes footage as a catalog of movie-production procedure even though it isn't, y'know, real.
- Scorn
Nobody but me liked this. I really really liked it! This feels like the game that 90s CD-ROM games like Myst and Darkseed were *trying* to be but didn't have the technology for. As such, it has all the flaws, pacing and limited interaction modes of a Myst, and expects you to have the same inhuman patience for linear puzzle gating and obliqueness. People complain about the combat, but if you're having trouble with the combat you're doing one simple thing wrong: You're not supposed to be doing combat. Run away. This game does ask a lot of you and does have some unfortunate gamebreaking glitches (as of where I left off, I'm not sure whether I'm missing a usage detail on how to use one of the guns, or whether the game has simply glitched it into being unusable) but if you can meet it on its level you get pitch-perfect Giger horror in full living color (the colors are burgandy and muddy blue) and atmospheric storytelling that explains absolutely nothing about the decaying body-horror arcology your skinless organ man wakes up in. It's "The Stars Are Legion", the game! But without the lesbians.
- SIGNALIS
Or you could play SIGNALIS, which accomplishes a lot of what Scorn tries to do without making you angry in the process. SIGNALIS is really something. It mixes a loving recreation of the PS1 tank-controls survival horror game (with some smart upgrades to the core ideas) with what I can only describe as film techniques; it's not often you can call a video game Lynchian in all seriousness. (Hey, have you seen the Monogatari OAVs? …No? Okay forget I brought it up.) The story's great and more thoughtful than it seems at first, the "3D but rendered like pixel art" is gorgeous, the combat… well okay the combat seems like a bit of a pain, but I watched my wife play this game instead of playing it myself, so, I didn't have to do the combat. Score 😎
If the ending disappointed you: That wasn't the ending. Play again.
- Last Call BBS
Pitched as "the final Zachtronics game", this is basically a Zachtronics minigame collection, framed as an alternate-history Amiga and a BBS full of pirated games. Last Call BBS is hit or miss but the hits hit hard. Standouts: Dungeons and Diagrams, a lovely puzzle game which is simultaneously a believable 90s-mac desktop shareware puzzler and a really good Nikoli Puzzle (in other words: You could play this game entirely on graph paper without a computer); X'BPGH and "ChipWizard™ Professional", two classic "the game mechanic is programming" Zachlikes but each just a little too small to have ever been a full game, one skinned as a completely inscrutable overdesigned Amiga horror game, the other skinned as a straight-up PCB CAD package. I took EE 201 in college and never understood N-P transistors. Last Call BBS made me understand them. Eventually. I think.
- Wordle
Look, this is a really good game! Legitimately! It is not easy to design a truly minimalist game; as some French writer once said Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away, and Wordle has nothing left to take away. Every element of the design is carefully honed to make the game fun, to keep you coming back, and to entice you to spread it to others. It is quite hard to achieve all of those things in such a small package and tuning it for perfect addictiveness is even harder. Flappy Bird is a really good game. Wordle is a good game.
The NYT buyout was unfortunate (I mean I'm glad the guy got paid, but unfortunate), but little known fact, Wordle (at least the original version?) has no online component, the HTML file has like five years of daily challenge built in. I downloaded the HTML file off the site the day before it moved to the NYT domain and was able to continue playing offline as long as I wanted.
- Donut Dodo
I bought this on a whim when bringing up the Switch store to buy something else, and this was a really pleasant surprise! This is a pitch-perfect homage (yes, that's the third time I've used this phrase in this post; what of it? style parodies are an art) to the single-screen arcade game (Donkey Kong, Popeye, Burgertime) and a beautiful showcase of how densely you can pack smart design and subtle mechanics into those single screens. Donut Dodo understands what always worked about those games while improving on them in basically every way; there are tons of tiny subtle details that you realize on your tenth play encode brilliant design decisions. (There's the standard Namco "a fruit that gives you points appears occasionally, and each time it's a different fruit", but the sixth one in the chain is a burger that gives you tens of thousands of points instead of just a couple thousand; why? It's because the fruits are actually a 1-up mechanic. The cheeseburger is enough points you get a 1-up every time; collecting the cheaper fruits makes the 1-up appear quicker. It's Bubble-Bobble "EXTEND".)
My advice: Buy Donut Dodo on Switch. Change the CRT-mode settings before you play (if you're playing on TV, set it to "BURNED"; if you're playing in handheld mode, turn CRT simulation off completely [I turn the border off also, though it's very cute]). And the first couple times you play, try to go for a max flashing-donut chain. Play like this to start and the game's emergent complexities should make themselves obvious to you pretty quick.
- Elden Ring
Yeah, this was pretty decent I guess
Honorable mention: Hyper Demon. This game is amazing and dense with brilliant ideas and I am no fricking good at it and I don't think I'm ever going to be. In my opinion the best way to experience this game is to know someone who's good at FPSes and just sit in the room, not watching, listening to the incredibly bizarre emergent soundtrack of the game's SFX.
Unfortunately haven't played yet: Death Trash, The Ascent, Citizen Sleeper, Dwarf Fortress, Truss, anything on Terry's list.
