Click the pics above the entries for a music track I liked from the game!
1. Splatoon ; I’ve been a fan of shooters since the days of UT99 and have a big interest in their history and evolution over the years, everything including single/multi and FPS/third person. From a purely mechanical standpoint, the biggest strength of the genre is that over any other kind of game, shooters excel at making it interesting to move through dense 3D spaces and controlling it, building mental maps of your surroundings and using geometry to give yourself an advantage and dominate enemies or other constantly shifting factors. These fundamentals have manifested in a variety of ways over the years, but completely new concepts in this framework are far and few between. Doom took from top-down shooters and made speed and avoidance your biggest advantage over enemies, resulting in a formula never really seen again. Multiplayer arena shooters like UT and Quake 3 have their roots of competition in map control, a strategic layer where the goal is to starve opponents of necessary items. Resident Evil 4 took melee and crowd control to a new level, turning manipulation of groups and building opportunities for splash damage into an artform. There are more examples of interesting mechanical twists that change the way you think about space in this, the greatest genre of all time, but they’re far and few between. Enter Splatoon, a team based multiplayer shooter from… Nintendo?!
A lot of developers probably could have, and likely have before actually, come up with the mechanical concept of shooting as literal area control, but I can’t see anyone but Nintendo coming up with the mechanics AND making them thematically cohesive AND!! almost immediately understandable. There’s the oft repeated line about Splatoon’s “hidden depth” which makes no sense, seeing it for the first time during Nintendo’s E3 2014 thing immediately showed its potential to me, and that was back when there was only one weapon. The possibility space and some basic tactics are likely to be understood innately once the concept of “fast in your ink, very slow in their ink” is communicated. The two instantly swappable states and the multi-faceted stealth/speed/reload nature of squid mode amps up the complexity even more and makes traversal a uniquely fun thing to do. Common shooter concepts like chokepoints and hiding places, which would normally just be crafted by the level design, can be created on the fly by players in Splatoon which balloons the amount of possible strategies to a ridiculous degree. The depth here doesn’t come from obscure mechanics, precision aiming, or bullet spread patterns, it comes almost entirely from how players learn how to best manipulate the turf to their advantage. This applies to every MP mode, but less in the campaign unfortunately.
Despite the campaign focusing much less on turfing tactics, it’s still a great, if way too easy, five hour romp through Mario Galaxy style puzzley platforms. Not many shooters give you this many level design gimmicks to play with, something I wish there was much more of and Splatoon delivers. Lots of them directly correspond with the inking theme, such as small sponges that blow up into big platforms when shot with your ink and into deathtraps when shot with enemy ink. Enemies themselves are generally less interesting, mostly stationary shooters and roving melee threats. That’s the case up to but sure as hell not including the final boss. This guy is a clinic on how to do a boss in a shooter campaign, a skill shooter devs are usually sorely lacking. Unlike most of the campaign, this boss focuses much more on the shooting and turfing mechanics and less platforming. The intensity of this fight compared to the rest of the campaign is jarring but welcome, feeling like it fell out of a Platinum game and a Perfume cover by squids came along for the ride. My biggest hope for the almost inevitable sequel is a campaign that feels less like a tutorial, and with more sections that feel like shooter inkounters that make great use of turf control than just the platforming with light shooting.
Somehow I spewed praise at this game for three paragraphs and barely touched on the aesthetics, criminal given how much the aforementioned pseudo Perfume song owns, especially in context. The music is great across the board and feels more like weird alternate universe versions of popular music genres than any kind of game score. Another aesthetic and mechanical thing I think is PERFECT is when fragging enemies in single and MP, they explode in the color of your ink, splashing your color in a small radius. The pop-pop-pop-pop-SPLOOSH sound as you get multiple hits before murking someone is great, and cements this as the most ultra-violent feedback this year, more than anything in Bloodborne. You literally explode your enemies guts all over the place. And this is an ACTUALLY USEFUL MECHANIC. Jesus Christ I love this game. I should also have to mention that I’ve seen crossover fanart of at least 3 other games on this list in the Splatoon lobby at some point.
2. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain ; At number two, it’s another Japanese game where I feel like it’s more of an excellent take on Western concepts than anything from Glorious Nippon. As a Metal Gear fan and Kojima World Order member since playing Solid on a demo disc 50 times and a champion for the freeform big level with multiple objectives stealth action plan-and-execute shooter genre started by Crysis then refined (and until now, ended) with Crysis Warhead, this is like the Crysis 2 I never got, mixed with (some of) the flavor of Metal Gear and fluid Japanese action game controls. I played MGS4 after Crysis which made it even more of a disappointment, especially after the big game Kojima talked about stealth on a battlefield which was limited to like 2 hours of the game. Phantom Pain is finally the MGS3 + Crysis hybrid follow up I wanted in 2008 and the haters, storyfuckers, and neverbegameovers can suck it down.
V excels at so many small details it’s hard to pin them down individually. The component that makes it work as well as it does is possibly the enemy AI and associated factors like animation and sound design, which combine to form a complex AI model with at least 4 or 5 distinct states that are parsable by players after a surprisingly small amount of exposure. A common problem with stealth games is that the world state and interactions are more complex and interesting when the enemy is in a combat state actively fighting you, V avoids this by making interactions when you’re hidden as interesting as a firefight scenario. The variety of distractions is crazy, between clanking your mechanical arm, firing off a gunshot while hidden, detonating a remote explosive, the scope and difference in escalation of guard reaction is huge and easily controlled and loosely predicted by the player. The challenge comes down to execution and having to concern yourself with guards in multiple locations, and ones you might have not seen yet. And all that only pertains to being in a stealth state!
Mission variety tapers off halfway through the game but what is there provides a nice mix of scenarios and locations. The named infiltration areas in both Conflict Zones cover the gamut in terms of layout, size, verticality, etc and actually lived up to the pre-release bullet point of being interesting to infiltrate from a variety of angles. My favorite was probably the Afghan cliffside village
Qarya Sakhra Ee as seen in Mission 08, the one where you have to eliminate the colonel guarded by two tanks. Turns out that mission was designed by an ex-Crytek employee… everything comes full circle in the wacky world of videogames.
There’s plenty of lamentable stuff in the game, the elephants in the room of course being the dry plot and unfinished ending. Despite lacking most of the goofy tone I liked about older Metal Gears and doing weird stuff with the characters, I found Skullface’s motivation and methods interesting, if a bit obtuse. The concept of language as a theoretical parasite as well as a weird physical Cronenberg one was cool if underexplored, and when it was it was via Code Talker, maybe the worst character in MGS history. All of the grinding and Konami meddling can, of course, fuck off but I finished it before the worst of it was implemented so I can’t really complain about it affecting my experience.
3. Bloodborne ; Genius Artist Godlike King Based Lord Miyazaki has done it again folks!! When this game was first leaked as Project Beast and the easiest thing to glean from the footage was “Dark Souls With A Shotgun”, which would be my killphrase if I was a cyborg. It delivered on that promise and then some. Combat itself I ended up not liking as much as Souls despite the inclusion of shotguns. The regain system is a clever mechanic that plays into the bloody rage theming, added mobility is great, but I still prefer the slower and more varied combat in the Souls games. Bloodborne kills it atmospherically, with tons of fucked up monsters in the various Kristian Wåhlin album covers you slice and dice your way through. The architecture itself makes up for the lack of color variety imposed by the lighting in outdoor areas, I found myself just staring at the outsides of places like Cainhurst and Mergo’s Loft for minutes. The tone and thematics I expected here were closer to a dark Castlevania mashup than what we got here, masterfully subverted expectations built up from the start towards the Turn Event in the middle of the game. As always, looking forward to the next big thing from this studio.
4. Super Mario Maker ; Mario Maker is an odd one out on this list because like half of my appreciation came not from editing levels or playing them, but watching others make them and slog through devious hellscapes. The game and editor themselves are great as one would expect a faithful compilation of all things Mario to be, and the editor itself having flavor and playfulness all over it are exactly the kind of touches that make the software itself valuable as its own thing apart from more powerful fan built tools like Lunar Magic. The great thing about a mainstream Mario level editor coming out in 2015 is that millions of people have already internalized all of the objects and rules of the game to the point where when they get their hands on Mario Maker, it’s like speaking a language they’ve always understood for the first time.
It’s been great seeing levels from people I know bringing their own personal tastes and personalities into the mix. A friend’s recreation of old Mega Man levels in a Mario context, Matt Thorson of Towerfall and Jumper fame putting together clever platforming puzzles that build up concepts old school Nintendo style, and Commander Keen creator Tom Hall’s massive vertical mazes with tons of superfluous coins everywhere like it’s a DOS game in 1991. Those levels were fun to play, and possibly more fun to watch was Giant Bomb’s foray into level editing and seeing their personalities manifest in stages. The calculated cruelty of old and bitter Jeff Gerstmann contrasted with Dan Ryckert’s haphazard childlike prank levels in a very visible way, culminating in the apocalyptic Ryckert vs. Klepek trilogy. Nothing represented the success of videogames as a “culture” this year more than Super Mario Maker.
5. Life is Strange ; I played a handful of good fantasy games this year and wasn’t really expecting this to be one of them. This game is ostensibly set in the real world, but a combination of things, intentional and unintentional, made it feel like a bizarre dreamscape. French developers made this game set in a small town high school in the Pacific Northwest, two places I’ve never been and I kind of suspect the writers haven’t either. This slightly off alien feeling, enhanced by the supernatural tinges and ethereal watercolor rendering in the actual game, and me playing all five episodes while sick in bed for a week made this a more intense and immersive experience than it had any right to be. It does cool things with the format, most notably at the end of episode 2 where your powers are stripped during an intense sequence that rewards the player for actually paying attention to the environment and exploring, something I would’ve expected to be praising in an entirely different genre than Telltale But With Rewinding.
6. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt ; Geralt’s back and he’s here to explore a world bigger than ever and hit monsters with his two trusty paper bags!! Joking about the crappy feeling melee combat in this game aside, Wild Hunt owns in so many other ways it almost doesn’t matter. I think the game is most worth celebrating where its story and world design meet, the atmosphere in areas like the Swamp, Kaer Trolde, Novigrad, Crow’s Perch, etc feel unique and not like copy paste open world areas like you might see from a lesser developer. Particularly noteworthy were every appearance of the crones, both in character design and the way their presence is felt in that whole area of the world even when they’re aren’t physically there. Not sure any game characters have exuded the pure malevolence they do, and a sense of ancient and permeating evil that can never truly be destroyed.
7. Undertale ; I consider myself lucky to have gotten in on this before the rabid fanbase had a chance to even slightly color my perception of game. A lot of people seem to have personal reasons for connecting with Undertale and I’m no different, just in a kind of weird way. I spent a lot of my early teenage years using RPG Maker and hanging out in RPG Maker communities, acquiring an affection for the quirks of both JRPGs and amateur game developers. A couple of my favorite homebrew RPGs, Space Funeral and Barkley: Shut up and Jam Gaiden play directly off of both sets of quirks to great effect, mixing parody with a tangible sense of the people behind them, and throwing some catchy midicore tunes in there as a bonus. Undertale plants itself right there among those games, it just somehow got insanely popular.
The cast of characters themselves feel like a bunch of avatars from an early web forum, like the quirks of favorite RPG liking pals were drawn out into full characters. That might seem like a negative to most but a big plus for me, it’s nostalgia for a time and place and not for any particular genre of games or even the oft associated Earthbound, which I’ve never played for more than an hour. Outside of that, the surprises the battle system kept pulling kept me interested. The combat itself seems abstract and disconnected from the exploration and talking sections like most JRPG style games, but I found that it used that expectation to its advantage to connect with characters more, especially in important boss fights. The changing nature of the seemingly simple bullet hell dodging game based on the traits of characters you’re fighting was ingenious and kept going weird and surprising places for the entire game. This game might have been higher on the list if I had played the game a second time for the TRUE END, and possibly my favorite game had it come out around 2006 like other post-RPG Maker games.
8. SOMA ; It’s rare to be able to play something that presents science fiction concepts that aren’t retreads or eyerollingly trite and keep them interesting across an entire game. SOMA nails it, alternating between discussions about human consciousness, horror tinged exploration, and kind of obnoxious hide from the monster stealth sections that I think are still important to the pacing of the game despite not being great on their own. The desolate underwater facilities setting, both teeming with life and at the same time dying a slow death, provides a nice mix of sterile labs with dim lighting and weird organic-machine hybridization going on. One segment towards the end going from one facility to another on the seabed was maybe the most intense individual segment of a game I played all year even with no monsters, just great audio design and a few tiny red lights in the fog was all it needed.
9. Downwell ; The year continues to be good for games where you fall into a hole and end up underground with a bunch of monsters, only with more carnage and combos in this one. Downwell carries on the traditions of score attack arcade games with currently popular mechanics in randomization and permadeath, and the punch of a Vlambeer game. It felt great after a couple hours of play to go from just dodging and surviving in the early areas to stringing along massive combos and getting that GEM HIGH. I never actually managed to beat this but still go back to it regularly. Also, this somehow has a better shotgun than the next game...
10. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood ; It’s more of the first person shooting action I loved from last year’s The New Order with less of the charm. This prequel in standalone expansion form sends our boy BJ to a castle and a nearby village in the Alps on some mission I can’t remember what the initial objective was. The less grandiose level design resulted in some large scale encounters that felt less interesting than their TNO counterparts, largely replacing forward moving combat with more locked in areas with waves of enemies flooding out of monster closets. While I definitely preferred the former, this one has 9 of those encounters replayable in a score attack challenge mode which I got into for a while, so it’s not a total loss. The surprisingly good characters and writing from TNO kind of make it back, with no hub and a much smaller cast, Annette and Kessler’s stories were touching but felt like a much smaller and less important part of the game than arcs like Caroline’s from TNO. Also noteworthy is the sawed-off shotgun you get when things start getting real hairy, it’s one of the wimpiest sounding shotguns I’ve heard in a proper FPS and it isn’t fun to shoot either. Shameful.
