Hey folks! I've been out of the game (heh) for a while. This year has mostly involved me getting back on my feet professionally (it's amazing how many video games you can play when you're jobless!). In April, a couple of days after buying Heaven's Vault, the graphics card on my PC went kaput. I still haven't fixed it up, instead getting a hand me down PS4 original from a friend (who had since moved on to PS4Pro) and reacquainting myself with the joys of couch gaming.
These developments led to a pretty strange year in gaming for me. One where I finally beat Riven (!!) and played Rocket League on 640 resolution on my Macbook Pro. But a leaner year in gaming doesn't mean a bad one. I'm only going to present 5 games in my list this year (out of the 20 or so I played), but I'd vouch for them all.
- Control - Finally, a game that realizes my late 20s fantasy of flinging shit across the office. Control's visuals, powered by a beefy physics and lighting engine, feel a bit like peeking behind the curtain for what lies ahead in the next generation. This game is vivid, weird, and drip feeds you story and atmosphere in Remedial fashion. It's the best superhero game of the generation, a power fantasy in a place that feels volatile but never unconquerable. See what happens when developers pivot away from the Hollywood aspirations of Quantum Break and instead lean into the absurdity of game worlds?
- Outer Wilds - It's a bit strange to say now, but I think Outer Wilds will outlast every other game on this list. It has that it factor. That indelible combination atmosphere, charm, and incredible design that keep games like Psychonauts or Myst on the collective conscience. I confess that it took me a while for my eyes to acclimate to the developers' vision. This generation of games so often tell us what to do and where to go that being handed the keys to a spaceship in a sandbox of galactic proportions was a bit overwhelming. I'd crash my ship and die. Step out on a new planet without my helmet and die. Fiddle with alien technology and die. But with each stumble came new knowledge, slowly building a hunter's web of knowledge that inevitably leads us to the big questions that echo in the emptiness of space. Who knew science could be this fun?
- Devotion - "Keep politics out of videogames!" /s I'm writing a piece (or rather, I'm currently procrastinating on a piece) about identity and videogames. The assumptions we make about what a "gamer" is, that traces the twisting roots of Gamergate to the alt-right and shows how, fight as they may, games are consistently telling more varied, interesting, and better stories than ever before. But sometimes, the clamor against politics in art can swallow a piece whole, and so the biggest shame of the year is how many of you haven't (and may not ever) have the chance to play Devotion, a game that tells a story about misinformation, about how people rebottle hope to prey on the desperate, a game that is bolted down to Taiwanese culture in the 80s, but still feels immediate in the anti-vax, political hellhole we find ourselves in today.
- Sayonara Wild Hearts - No write up could top this quip from Polygon's review: "Sayonara Wild Hearts is basically Give Carly Rae Jepsen a Sword: the Game." I love this game for many reasons, but the best experience it gave me was playing through it with a friend, switching controllers between levels, and having her give me a breakdown of the tarot symbolism that was peppered throughout the game. It's nice to play a game that is this clear in its ambitions and executes it perfectly.
- Hypnospace Outlaw - Mmmm, we love our nostalgia laced with vaporwave, pop art and futurism. The Hypnospace is sharp in its satire, but also feels like a love letter to a bygone era. When the internet was both more innocent and sinister. It reminded me of how, in my middle school days, Ebaumsworld would present you with funny videos, porn, and gore, unblinkingly. It reminded me of the songs that I autoplayed on my Myspace page, and how long I fiddled with the HTML to get a black background that complimented my emo bangs. It reminded me of AOL chatrooms, the fun and danger of asking "asl?" You'll feel like a frontiersman of the internet again, bundled in a sort of absurdist charm and humor that help keeps the game from getting as dark as the internet of yore.
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