I've included some thoughts on each entry. Please let me know which ones catch your interest!
And if you just want the ranked list, I put it at the very bottom of the post. Skip if you want to spoil yourself. I won't tell.
I suspect if this had released at a different time, the game would’ve charted on my actual list. Alas, it released late in the year when I was deep in novel writing, and the last thing I want to do after spending hours writing and editing on my computer screen is to read off my computer screen. That did no favors to the sublime writing of Disco Elysium, which in its opening three-way argument between you and two major parts of your brain displays greater range of voice and humor than most entire games. In my few hours with it, I sustained a head injury after failing a will check to learn all the titles in a far-too-long Epic Fantasy novel series, became a radical feminist (the trait grants you POWER OVER MEN), and had to bluff a police officer into believing I knew where my pants were. It is a very funny, truly weird murder mystery game, and the only CRPG I’ve ever played where combat simply isn’t a prime option. It’s something I look forward to playing whenever my eyes get downtime next year.
Honorable Mention: Life is Strange 2 (DONTNOD, Square-Enix)
It’s unfair that this game has landed with a thud. DONTNOD’s first episode is stronger than the first episode of Life is Strange 1 or Before the Storm. Its focus on having to roleplay as a teenage older brother forced into a paternal role over a pre-teen sibling, unequipped and inexperienced at guidance exactly at the point in his life when his brother is about to develop into an actual person This means you have less agency in the story. It’s a game about trying to coax someone else to be gentler, kinder, and more thoughtful, while also trying to teach him to be wary, defensive, and safe in a hostile world. In that way, it’s one of the deepest games about family dynamics I’ve played.
Honorable Mention: Baba is You (Hempuli Oy)
Baba is You is smarter than me and I resent it. This game is about semantic reality; certain words are in blocks around the world, and if you can arrange them into sentences, you can change the laws of physics. If “WALL IS STOP” is a sentence somewhere in the level, and you move the word “STOP” out of the way so that sentence no longer exists, then you walk through walls. You can turn fire into water. You can make every tree in a forest into a clone of yourself. You can play god - if you’re smart enough. I relished the couple of nights I spent with friends messing around, and it seemed like every one of us solved at least one puzzle that left everyone else screaming. If you loved Fez and The Witness, you owe this to yourself.
Honorable Mention: The Outer Worlds (Obsidian Entertainment)
Parvati is my favorite character of the year. In all the games with big parties, I’ve never played one with an asexual character who wanted help before - let alone one that let me out myself as ace to sympathize with their marginalization. Of all the games where your character might have too much agency over the affairs of others (especially your party), it makes total sense to tell an ace story where Parvati is so repressed and conflicted that you have agency in coaching her and helping her accept herself.
The whole game is structured well, and if the bugs were fixed it would direct your party-building hero to a heck of a climax. But it’s Parvati that’s the star for me. More ace characters, please. And some aro ones too, if you will.
Onto the main list! Which starts off with... a tie! Yes, this Top Ten list has no number ten, since two games are technically in ninth place.
Technically #9: Devotion (Red Candle Games)
Red Candle Games was gravely wronged by the Chinese government. This Taiwanese studio was harassed and pressured out of existence because their game included a reference to Winnie the Pooh, something that the authoritarians in China have an irrational and dangerous hatred for. As such, Red Candle will likely never make another game. As it is, Devotion is no longer legally for sale anywhere in the world because of Chinese censorship.
It’s such a silly, petty reason for such a profound game to be destroyed. Devotion is the story of a once-proud screenwriter whose life was derailed by belief in nonsense medicine. You are trapped in his apartment, reliving various phases of his existence, in his rise and fall, and his daughter’s rise and fall as a child star. It is a deeply unsettling Horror game that uses mannequins and reenactments rather than high-fidelity cut scenes, and it made my friends shriek until my ears hurt. That the horror melts away into a deeply personal story of self-delusion and betrayal makes it one of the most memorable stories in games this year. It deserves to be remembered.
Instead of a trailer or gameplay clip, I've included a full gameplay video. It's the easiest way to see what they made now.
Technically Also #9: Cadence of Hyrule (Brace Yourself Games, Nintendo, SPIKE CHUNSOFT)
An indie studio got Nintendo to let them make a Zelda game? That’s surreal.
And it rules.
A curse has caused Link and Zelda (both are playable, unlike how it’s usually just Link) to move to the rhythm of cosmic music. You can only move, attacked, and solve puzzles on the beats of the soundtrack. In turn, the soundtrack is mostly dance-club remixes of classic Nintendo songs that are incredibly catchy. Often I’ll mute a game to listen to a podcast, but not with this one. With its 16-bit style, musical reinvention of Hyrule’s monsters (you won’t believe the boss fights), and damned clever rhythm-based combat, it’s one of the best 2D Zeldas ever made.
#8. Katana ZERO (Askiisoft)
Do you love Hotline Miami and katanas? Do you like getting caught in the rain?
Katana ZERO is an uncompromising combat game that is drenched in 80’s synth and nostalgia. All you have is a katana and the ability to slow time for a few seconds, and they expect you to out-fight buildings full of gangsters and machine guns. Each level is so demanding and tense that I was happy when they story breaks happened so that I could breathe.
The story carries it, though. Your action hero is a veteran and a drug addict whose own therapist is enabling him. Your therapist is the biggest villain, giving you hit assignments. The game’s ability to break dialogue conventions and tell him off is at first empowering, and soon gives you the hope that you can derail this story and break the patient free of the military industrial complex that has him hooked. You played Hotline Miami for the excitement; the change here is I often played so they I could get to the next story beat.
#7. Resident Evil 2 Remake (Capcom)
I never played the original Resident Evil 2; that era of Resi games was too mechanically clunky. The remake puts it somewhere between the accessibility and action of Resi 4 and the peril and ammo conservation of Resi 7. It’s deliciously tense to pause in this abandoned police station and listen for foot steps of predator monsters. I’ve run to the safe room over and over to duck the Terminator-like Mr. X. Even though the multiple story campaigns retell the same things too much, the balance of exploration and triumph is so fun that I completed them all.
This is a thoroughly polished Survival Horror game in a time when the AAA space is not too interested in making them. I had to nostalgia for the dorky Claire and Leon before. I will now.
#6. Blasphemous (The Game Kitchen, Team 17 Digital)
I expected a more ironic game. Blasphemous looked like a Metal cover turned into a brawler. It’s surprising, then, how sincere it is in its exploration of a literal Catholic universe. A great sin has cursed the world, driving people made and rendering some undying. The further you get in, the more angles in this weird world come up. It never reduces its conflict to “God is bad and needs to be beat up” or “Anti-theists are uncaring monsters.”
It’s a game that uses every pixel to simulate gore that’s more disturbing than high-fidelity would be, and it uses that as part of its theme on if pain is meaningful. If you enshrine someone’s suffering, what does that do to the culture around them? Economically, what happens to the underprivileged who wind up having to sin-eat and accrue guilt so others can have it easier?
The obvious answer to all its questions is a brutal Soulslike where you kill a bunch of enemies to level up. You could cynically dismiss it. Except the violence is a major part of the point here, just as it is in actual Catholic history. It’s an interrogation of a worldview that has more rigor than C.S. Lewis’s Narnia or Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials ever did.
Next up is a second tie! 4th and 5th place are split between two utterly different games.
Technically #4: Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Intelligent Systems, Koei Tecmo Games)
Three Houses opened me up to a genre. I never gave TRPGs (Tactical Role Playing Games, like Banner Saga and Final Fantasy Tactics) a chance. Even XCOM intimidated me.
What Three Houses does is balance its demanding turn-based, field-command battle sequences with quiet, long visits to your school. Half of the game you’ll be playing a Homeric war game where you dispatch your heroic kids around the field, striving for tree cover and flanking position. For the other half, you’re coaching them through their insecurities, helping them bond and support each other, and basically helping them grow up into the people they could be if they survive. The closer two students are at school, the higher bonuses they get for serving near each other in battle. If they heal each other or take out an enemy that imperils each other, they’ll grow closer at school and be more likely to talk.
That would have been enough to charm me. I did not expect the major plot twists halfway through the game that complicate everyone’s story and seriously increase the risk that your students could be in jeopardy. At first, playing as a teacher and picking to serve whichever house has the most amusing students was a lark. The idea that the entire plot pivots and expands extremely differently based on who you taught and served still has me floored. I haven’t had the time to play as another house yet - but damn do I want to, just to understand why the hell everybody did what they did.
A single campaign has more than enough content to warrant a hefty game. The idea that Intelligent Systems created three robust sides to its JRPG story, each of which only seems comprehensible if you were on that side, is ambitious beyond belief. I hope I get the time next year to play those stories out.
Technically Also #4: Ape Out (Gabe Cuzzillo, Devolver Digital)
Ape Out is a perfect videogame. Everything is does is excellent, and everything it does ties into something else that it does. You’re an ape escaping a lab (or a zoo, or a private animal collection, or other levels), and all you can do is smash or grab the hunters that are after you. Every time you play, the path out of the level is randomly generated so you’ll be disoriented. Any wrong turn could get you shot - and any action you take affects the Jazz-infused soundtrack. Rampage through the level and an entire band will be jamming with fury; trying to sneak by and a single cymbal will chime along as though encouraging you. All of this is depicted in an expressionistic, stark color pallet that also shifts. An alarm system going out, the power cutting out, or entering new areas will abruptly change everything’s color, and sometimes it’ll change everything’s visibility.
Few games click everything they do together as tightly as Ape Out. You hope anything you make can have this much harmony.
How did you like that tie? Because I've got another, even more inscrutable one for you. Yes, a third tie in ten games. Rule of threes, buddies.
Technically #2: Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo)
This likely landed harder for me because I didn’t have a Wii U. Mario Maker 2 was pure novelty to me, both in the suite of abilities to create whatever level I wanted, and the myriad levels others made. There are a dozen nights this year when I was in too much physical pain to sleep and calmed myself down by designing another stage based on a weirdo idea.
It’s a dream game that verges on not being a game. After all, can a level editor be a game? What if it’s packaged with the ability to play everything that everyone else makes? I like not knowing. I like it almost as much as I like taking the World Record time on a tough level.
Technically Also #2: Control (Remedy Entertainment)
Control feels different. Its world is so nebulous that no map can guide you through it; you need to combine the map with signs, and for once signs around the world are actually helpful. It’s eerie at first because this game takes place in one skyscraper. It should easy to navigate. Instead, this ancient, inscrutable building, far older than our idea of skyscrapers, bends reality.
You play as a woman who’s been hunting for this place all her life, hellbent on revenge against its owners. She walks in and everyone addresses her as the new director. She runs the place that she hates, and has no idea why.
This organization collects uncanny objects to study them and render them safe. A traffic light might actually pause reality with a red light; a refrigerator will teleport if someone isn’t looking directly at it at all times. As the story unfolds you feel like the latest uncanny object pulled into the sway of this place. The telekinetic powers and astral beings you encounter are equal parts videogame tropes and additions to your identity as part of the New Weird.
Control is a game built out of things make me feel at ease with being uneasy. Getting lost here is like coming home.
1. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (From Software, Activision)
Up until now I could more-or-less rank From Software's games. I could decisively say that I prefer Dark Souls 3 over Dark Souls 2, and Bloodborne over Demon's Souls. From’s games are ugly and gorgeous, and they mostly came from a certain mold that made them comparable to each other.
Sekiro changes that. It's just similar enough to From Software's other games that its early hours feel impossible, because you want to play it like other games. In ditching the stamina meter and stat grinding, giving a tight jump and grapple mechanic, and giving us an honest-to-Kosm PAUSE BUTTON, Sekiro goes in another direction. It is about terrifying fast paced swordplay unlike anything yet achieved in games, and equally perilous and creative stealth.
Much as I've loved Mark of the Ninja, Assassin's Creed Origins, and Batman: Arkham Asylum, Sekiro is the benchmark for ninja-like games. It makes you so vulnerable that every pause in combat is less of a breather than the actual fighting. You need to read the environments for what surprises may pop up, and more you need to read your opponents. In enemy design, From Software has outdone themselves designing enemies with strong physical tells. After a couple of skirmishes with any enemy, you have all the information you need to know every attack they're going to make. It's up to you to be clever enough to dodge, counter, and punish all of it.
Because this is a ninja-like game and not a samurai-like game, you're not a tank. There are fights that plainly feel like you shouldn't be in them. This is a job for a hulking warrior or a fire mage. All your young lord has is you.
Just The List
1. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (From Software, Activision)
2. & 3. Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo) & Control (Remedy Entertainment)
4. & 5. Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Intelligent Systems, Koei Tecmo Games) & Ape Out (Gabe Cuzzillo, Devolver Digital)
6. Blasphemous (The Game Kitchen, Team 17 Digital)
7. Resident Evil 2 Remake (Capcom)
8. Katana ZERO (Askiisoft)
9. & 10. Devotion (Red Candle Games) & Cadence of Hyrule (Brace Yourself Games, Nintendo, SPIKE CHUNSOFT)
Honorable Mentions: Life is Strange 2 (DONTNOD, Square-Enix), Baba is You (Hempuli Oy), & The Outer Worlds (Obsidian Entertainment), & Disco Elysium (ZA/UM)
I haven't played any of those. Ape Out sounds interesting, especially with the shifting music.
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