5th Place: Satellite Reign - A stunningly gorgeous city that just oozes cyberpunk out of every pore, on every rain and neon and chrome soaked street. I completely fell in love with the artstyle, and the killer soundtrack featuring Perturbator and Protector 101 just added to the wonderful ambiance. The gameplay had quite a lot of variety to it, and you're rewarded for experimenting in coming up with solutions for the problems and missions you face.
4th Place: SOMA - Meditations on the nature of consciousness aren't unusual in sci fi, but even with it being a well travelled theme, it's still one of my favourite things to explore in any form of media. Anything that encourages me to get my philosophy books off the shelf is mana from heaven. I just adored the main story, all those ghosts in the machines running around a ruined research facility. The story and atmosphere were really top notch, and it was surprising to me how the worst part of this game proved to be the monsters, who occasionally got in the way of the joy I felt just exploring the environments and figuring out what had gone on in the world. Still, that was a minor issue, except for a level towards the end of the game.
3rd Place: Pillars of Eternity - I've been waiting 13 years for a new infinity engine game, and this was everything I hoped it would be. Fantastic RPG experience, and it helps keep my favourite developers, Obsidian, open for another year! Just every improvement they made to the infinity engine formula worked spectacularly, especially in combat, traversal and dialogue options. I'm very excited to see where the game and engine goes from here.
2nd Place: Witcher 3 - The Wild Hunt - Probably the best game released last year, and probably one of the finest experiences ever put into a video game. Witcher 3 is such a huge game, full of amazing quests, dialogue, characters, areas, environments.. the list goes on. Other open world games tend to suffer in terms of quality, but the Witcher 3 has quality almost universally, with some truly outstanding moments like the Bloody Baron quest. It even somehow finds space to fit in the best card game in all video games. Amazing game, and well deserving of the 1st place it'll get in SteamGAF's GOTY awards.
1st Place: Life is Strange - SHOCKING NEWS. Life is Strange isn't perfect. Far from it. It's got some pretty big flaws really. The dialogue can be rather dodgy at times, sounding very much like the product of middle aged Frenchmen, rather than authentic teen dialogue from the Pacific Northwest. Graphically there's not a lot to cheer about, though the art style is nice, and some of the facial animations can be lacking. As for the ending, well that's polarising at best (though the people saying it's as bad as Mass Effect 3's ending are straight up delusional).
But you know what. That doesn't matter. Because what Life is Strange gets right it gets so right that it becomes 2015's most essential game. It may hit story beats from movies like Donnie Darko, The Breakfast Club and The Butterfly Effect, but those movies are awesome, and Life is Strange feels like a cult indie movie in video game form. The focus on characters and interactions with them is a wonderful touch, and I loved every single one of them. The moments of stillness where you get to pause and reflect on what's going on, or lie in bed with your best friend listening to a track on the stereo, were some of the best moments of gaming in 2015 for me. Stillness is incredibly underused, and actually having the chance to pause and reflect on events was a revelation.
Life is Strange is about the characters. It's about visiting Kate Marsh in her room. Twice. It's about going for a swim with Chloe, then pressing a button next to Chloe's bed. It's about dealing with Warren, and dealing with the cool kids in their oh so cool clique and finding out that beneath the initial impressions, there might just be something more there to uncover. It's about the bullshit of teen drama feeling like the most important thing in the world, and how that affects them when suddenly it is the most important thing in the world. It's about domestic violence, bullying, social exclusion and loss. It's about real issues and by focusing on those and seeing what they did to characters I felt emotionally attached to (thanks to great performances, especially from Ashly Burch), it left me a completely broken wreck on multiple occasions.
It's the most human game I've played in years, and is my favourite game of 2015.
Nor mine
Dare you to click the nice green button lash
What if Microsoft says no? Would Microsoft disobey Microsoft and make the game anyways? Or would Microsoft take action against Microsoft?
I wish, holy shit. Game was so fun.
Pst
Well, I dunno man. Take a look at the post above yours, seems to be slightly biased
