25 Games of 2012: Part 5 (5-1)

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

5. Dear Esther (The Chinese Room)

Ah, Dear Esther. Such a magnificent, divisive game. The kind of game that makes people write “game” in scare quotes or pull out something ghastly like “interactive experience” because it challenges all their narrow preconceptions of what a game can be. It isn’t interactive enough! It doesn’t have enough gameplay! It doesn’t have any challenges! I don’t have enough agency!

What a load of rubbish.

Dear Esther stands against all of our embarrassingly narrow ideas of what a game must ‘be’ and calls our bluff. It demonstrates that all a game needs for a player to have a meaningful, playful engagement with it is a world to move through. The idea that Dear Esther has “no gameplay” (a saying that, sadly, started with creator Dan Pinchbeck himself) is misleading. Walking across the island is its gameplay. Walking across the island is an interaction. Dear Esther takes that element of gameplay so fundamental to so many games—navigating a space—and highlights just how much of our pleasure with games is this simple navigation. It highlights just how reductive and inadequate our presumed notion of 'interactive' really is.

Most fascinating about Dear Esther is how the story changes. It’s like a computer program that produces poetry in the way it stitches together fragments of narrative, the way different objects might or might not appear in the world, the way you might hear one piece of dialogue one game but a different piece the next time. There is no ghost in this machine but a poltergeist. A spirit moving things around and making the player doubt their senses. Has that kidney bowl moved since last time? Was that a ghost that disappeared behind those rocks or am I just imagining it?

There is a story here, but you will not strike at the heart of it. Each time you play you just skirt around the outside, feeling at it, getting a vague and ambiguous idea of its shape. Each time you play you will see a different perspective of the story even as your previous perspective flickers out of view. And people complain this game is too linear!

Dear Esther is a manifesto. It’s proof of what games can do and what games don’t need to do. It shows that the basest pleasure of videogaming is not freedom or challenge but simply traversing, being, and comprehending. Everything else is built on top of this. 

As mentioned before, I wrote an article at Edge about minimally interactive games like Dear Esther, Journey, and Proteus. You’ll need to find a copy of the print magazine to read the Q&A with Dan Pinchbeck, though, sadly. Eric Swain writes about how Dear Esther works as horror. Zach A asks some questions and finds some answers about the game at his blog. This led to an epic Google+ discussion between Zach, Katie Williams, and myself about the game’s possible meanings. 

4. Driver: San Francisco (Ubisoft)

Yes, Driver: San Francisco was released in 2011 but like most people, I completely ignored it until this year. It was  Eric Swain's constant preaching on Twitter, along with a drunken ramble from Brian Taylor (okay, maybe I was the drunk one, not Brian) in the back of a San Francisco cab (fittingly) that tipped me over.

What can I say about Driver: San Francisco? It is clever. It is special. I feel like I have overused the word ‘magnificent’ on this list, but it is magnificent. It takes the weirdest, uncanniest plot device (you’re character is in a coma and everything is happening in his head) to succinctly and elegantly depict just how similar dreams are to videogames. It’s intentional artifice, it’s deliberate pointing out of the virtuality of its virtual world, makes the world all the more convincing. It embraces its game-ness with both hands and uses that to craft a world that is convincingly a dream. It allows the game to shine with an unreserved self-confidence. Why is there an invisible wall there? Because this is a dream, that’s why. It does whatever it wants to do, and it never stops to justify itself.

The shifting mechanic (allowing you to leave Tanner’s body to possess the driver of any other car) sounds ludicrous on paper, but works magnificently in practice. It’s like Grand Theft Auto but without the walking between vehicles. The game’s missions don’t just use shifting as a crutch, though, but constantly innovate on top of it, constantly throwing new and fresh challenges at you that require the skill to be used creatively. 

And underneath it all is a driving game that simply feels spectacular. A game this left-field in concept, I would assume to be left wanting on a simple mechanical level. But every car feels so great to drive. So heavy and weighty yet slick and powerful. This is the first time I’ve ever wanted to play a driving game from a behind-the-steering-wheel perspective. It just feels right. 

I think, really, Driver: San Francisco is the realisation of a Hollywood-style, cinematic car chase game that the Driver franchise has been striving to achieve since its inception thirteen years ago. It’s ironic, perhaps, that it had to fully embrace its game-ness to achieve it.

I wrote quite a bit about Driver: San Francisco. I wrote an initial piece at Unwinnable to explore how the dreaminess of the game makes it all the more believable. I followed this up with a series of posts at Gameranx for my first “Sum of Parts” series of posts. Back at Unwinnable, Jay Pullman has his own look at the dreamlike nature of the game’s San Francisco. Eric Swain’s review at Popmatters provides a good breakdown of the game, too.

3. DayZ (Rocket)

DayZ is the videogame we all thought we wanted. Okay, that’s a ridiculous claim. It’s the videogame that the 90s, with its virtual reality fetish, insisted that we wanted: a massive, diegetic world populated by real people simply (“simply”) trying to etch out a day-to-day life, with all the mundanity that entails. People who need to eat and drink. People who get sick if they stay out in the rain for too long. People who are scared to death of death. 

DayZ’s strengths are very much of the ‘real’ world: trust, betrayal, death, near-death, survival-at-any-cost, survival-despite-the-odds. For all its fixation on utter, diegetic immersion, it’s perhaps ironic that what primarily draws me to DayZ are the very real emotions it evokes in my real body. 

It was always difficult to get working. I would spend up to an hour trying to get into a server, but it was always worth it. The most mundane events—the events that wouldn’t even count as an event in any other game—are peppered with a tension surpassing anything the most intense authored moments of any other game can hope to achieve. Here, just sitting on a hill overlooking a service station for ten minutes, or walking down a road in a forest and hearing a gunshot, just a single gunshot, are visceral (yes, visceral), breath-stealing moments.

It’s because DayZ isn’t about living; it’s about not dying. Every moment you’re not dead, you could die. Every moment you don’t die is another victory. In an article for Hyper, I compared playing DayZ to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Each, for me, evokes that sense of oppressive desperation, of wanting to survive until you inevitably die.

And then there is the world, one of the most incredible virtual worlds I’ve ever explored. The sheer, quantitative size of Chernarus allows a graduality of the terrain that no other game could hope to achieve. The way a city peters out to houses, to farms, to woods. The way you can (the way that I have) walked down a dirt path in the woods for hours and seen no one. It is a terrific world, a world perfectly suited for DayZ.

It has more maps now, I believe. But truth be told, I have not played DayZ for many months. Not since the hackers attacked after the first time it appeared in a Steam sale. I’m sure it is a working fine again now, But I just haven’t had the time. But for many late nights earlier this year, DayZ and I produced some of the rawest, most vivid memories I’ve ever had with a videogame, and I won’t be forgetting them anytime soon.

While I’m very happy with my Hyper piece comparing DayZ to The Road, the writing about the game that stands out most are the retellings of personal stories. When my ‘first’ character died (that is, the first character that didn’t die in like five minutes), I felt compelled to immediately write up his final hours. Jim Rossingol’s captivating multi-part write up of his experience with the game in true New Games Journalism style at Rockpapershotgun is perhaps responsible for bringing DayZ to many people’s attention, including mine.  

1(tie). Spec Ops: The Line (Yager)

So I sincerely can’t choose which of my two remaining games meant more to me this year, and it seemed meaningless to split hairs just to make sure I have a number two. So, instead, I have given the top spot to two quite different games. First of all, I’ll do the one you knew was coming (who am I kidding, you know what they both are): Spec Ops: The Line.

I knew nothing about The Line before it’s release. I’d heard of an announcement of a new military shooter at the VGAs or something about a year before its release, but I’d seen no trailers and played no demos before playing my first game. All I knew was a murmuring on Twitter—at that stage still a rather quiet murmur) that something special was happening here. Then, at a bar one night, Hyper editor David Wildgoose told me I should check it out, that it was my kind of game. He was right.

The Line is a game about something. Much like Supergiant’s Bastion last year is one of those rare games that doesn’t feel like a bunch of people worked on separate parts and shoved them together, it feels like a single collective artist named ‘Yager’, of which individual developers were just limbs, pieced together a single, focused, confident piece of art. In the AAA space, it is a phenomenal achievement. It has a sense of ‘self’ I’d come to believe was impossible for games made with large teams to achieve, but here it is.

I was shaking the first time I finished The Line, then I loaded a new game and played it through again. Then again. There was so much here to unpack. Not in a "put-the-puzzle-together” way, but in a “How does this game work so well?” way. I became obsessed with dissecting it and understanding how all of its parts contributed to such a focused work. That, organically and unintentionally, led to me writing my first ever book, Killing is Harmless. 

A lot of people think The Line failed (or simply doesn’t go far enough) for a lot of decent reasons that deserve to be explored. But it made a lot of people think. A lot of players who had never before been given a reason to stop and think about the violences they perform in videogames in a nuanced were suddenly thinking about it. Not dislike it, necessarily, but think about it. This might seem like nothing to those who already question (or outright dislike) more violent videogames, but that takes for granted their own opinions on the matter. Many people had never thought about this stuff before, and now they are. That, I think, is an incredible achievement.

People also like to say the ‘game’ bit is bad, meaning the mechanical actions of taking cover and shooting. Personally, I find it to be both a solid and satisfying cover-based shooter. Though, I generally do enjoy sticky-cover shooters so I have an obvious bias in that regard. 

My only real gripe about the game was the checkpoints occurring before cut-scenes, but that was only annoying while I was actually playing. What has stuck with me since has been everything else: the violent acts I performed without once thinking I should just stop.

Killing is Harmless has been met with much praise and thoughtful critique. As for other writing about The Line (of which there is a lot), I compiled a critical compilation for Critical Distance. 

1(tie). Ziggurat (Action Button)

What can I say about Ziggurat? For all the words I’ve penned about it, I really can’t say much. Ziggurat taught me that I don’t know how to write about games, about the mechanical coupling of human bodies and technological hardware where the most fundamental pleasures of videogames lie. Ziggurat taps into that corporeal, carnal place; it dips me in and allows me to gaze with a rare clarity at the very act of bodily coupling with a videogame. But when I come back out I don’t know how to describe the things that I saw. When it comes to Ziggurat, I fail as a critic.

What I got out of Ziggurat is what a lot of people got out of Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon, or perhaps Shawn McGrath’s Dyad. It was something sublime. Something above words but also below them. It’s something in the way I can roll my thumb to change the elevation of a shot by a single pixel. The way I know when to release from the screen and fire as naturally as I know how to tap a beat with my foot. The way I would, eventually, be able to fire a shot into the air at the exact right point of the ever-progressing music so that it would fall down atop the UFO making its single pass across the screen. 

But its not just ‘mechanics’ that make Ziggurat so special. It perfectly combines these with a simple narrative—a mere epilogue, really—to craft an intense end to mankind. Most arcade games are, in some way, about inevitable failure going back to Space Invaders and Missile Command—try as you might to succeed, you will eventually fail. Ziggurat, meanwhile, is about fighting back against the inevitable. A single game constantly progresses and never repeats. Time—diegetic time, within the world on the screen—is forever moving forward. The sun sets, the moon rises, new enemies appear. But despite this, there is no ‘end’. There is a set amount of content present in the game, to be sure, but far more content than anyone is ever intended to see. If people get close to the end, the developers just add more content, subtly and unannounced in a “bug fixes” update. It’s this weird thing where the game deliberately includes content that no one will ever see just so you can both constantly progress and inevitably fail. Space Invaders is a looping limbo. Ziggurat is a final human standing against the end of the world, progressing into the future each second they survive until they eventually die and humanity ends. Its tension of repetition and progression is never resolved, but it is exactly that tension that Ziggurat draws its energy from. 

Then there are the controls. Touch controls that don’t require you to obscure the action on the screen with your fingers. Touch here for action to happen there. It’s a brilliant, elegant, and obvious solution to smartphone gaming’s biggest hurdle. One I can’t believe I still have not seen widely replicated.

There is a commentary to be made, too, on the fact the game is designed by the infamous Tim Rogers, perhaps best known for his unique approach to games journalism and criticism. For a writer best known for excess and distractions and tangents and flourishes, Ziggurat is restrained, held back, conservative, minimalist, simple, to the point. I’ve seen Facebook comments written by Tim that take longer to read than an average Ziggurat game takes to play. 

Ziggurat is a game of its time. It can only work as a digitally distributed title (so that the developers can keep piling content on the backend as needed), and is one of the few games in existence that demands a touchscreen. It is, without a doubt, the game I have been most intimately engaged with all year. If The Line had not been so thematically potent, not a game played this year could hold a light to the time I shared and continue to share—getting close to 35 hours—with Ziggurat. 

I wrote a series of articles about Ziggurat for my “Sum of Parts” column at Gameranx. At Insert Credit, Patrick Miller wrote the article that is responsible for my falling in love with Ziggurat with his piece “How Not To Suck At Ziggurat”. Here, Patrick manages to talk about the game in that mechanical way I find myself unable to do. Andy Corrigan uses Ziggurat to talk about the insufficient nature of classifying a game either casual or hardcore. At Kotaku, Tracey Lien talks about her experience getting better at Ziggurat while showing off her amazing Ziggurat-inspired paintings. And in classic Tim Rogers, style, Tim introduces the games in this post on Kotaku. And, in another post, he discusses the playable character’s gender. Kind of.

And with that, so ends my top twenty-five games of 2012. Thanks for reading!

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

25 Games of 2012: Part 4 (10-6)

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

10. Fez (Polytron)

I think many people were sick of Fez before it was even released. They were sick of the hype in the press, sick of the perpetual delays, sick of Phil Fish’s unfortunately rash, headline-grabbing rants, sick of the glorifying of a single indie game over all others. Its incredible 2D/3D world-turning mechanic had been stripped of all novelty by the time the game found its way into peoples hands. Fez was a victim of its own fame—not unlike Fish himself.

Yet it remains one of my most most memorable games (and worlds) of the year. I don’t understand the complaints claiming it is too simple or boring, or too dependent on NES-era nostalgia. What I see is a beautiful and unobtainable world, always out of reach of my sensory apparatus. There is an entire world there, but my perception of it conceals as much as it reveals. This uncanny feeling of never quite ‘knowing’ the world made the world-turning far more than a gimmick for me. It was a way of seeing, and a commentary on the way every game (never mind our realities) has a specific way of being seen.

People were perhaps expecting a challenging platformer or spatial puzzles. Instead, we got a world that, for the most part, you simply move through. It’s not unlike Nifflas’s Knytt games, or Super Metroid minus the combat in this way. You just move through the world and unlock its secrets, figuring out how it is threaded together. The minimalist music and bright colours and lazy day-night cycle reinforced this relaxed play style of just wandering through a world.

Then there are the riddles—not puzzles, riddles. Each world is like a page from a Graeme Base book. At first the backgrounds are just pretty images and textures. But over the course of the game you realise their are languages hidden in those textures. As much as flipping the camera ninety-degrees, this totally shifts your perception of the world. Suddenly, there are meanings and allusions everywhere—a whole new layer of connections stretching across the worlds. 

Finding the messages, interpreting them through mappin images of  Tetris shapes or rumbles of vibration motors to controller buttons, became a whole new game atop the simple pleasure of exploring the spatial world. I played through the entire game with my girlfriend, who decoded the alphabet and solved many of the world’s more obscure riddles. We never could ‘see’ the whole world, but together we understood it the best we possibly could, and that felt pretty special.

I wrote about the phenomenon of never quite ‘knowing’ the world in any objective sense for Unwinnable. Also at Unwinnable, I wrote some thoughts about Indie Game: The Movie, especially in relation to the depiction of Phil Fish. 

9. Tokyo Jungle (Crispy’s)

I had assumed the rabid, near desperate cult following that quickly formed around Tokyo Jungle were attracted simply by its ‘weirdness’. This isn’t 2004. We don’t get many low budget/big heart weird games these days. That was (understandably) enough for people to sing the praise of this post-apocalypse-pet-sim-roguelike-like, I thought. But, truly, Tokyo Jungle fully deserves the praise it has received. More than simply weird, it is refreshingly unique and unlike any other game I’ve played.

The point is, simply, to keep your bloodline alive for as many years and decades as possible. You are constantly dying, however. In the short term, your hunger bar is always emptying while, in the long term, your animals will die of old age (if they live long enough!). Breeding is thus crucial, requiring you to find a mate and pass the torch to the next generation. 

There is always something you need to be doing in Tokyo Jungle, be it eating, breeding, drinking hunting, hiding, or migrating. While other permadeath games are about making the downtime between conflicts more tense, Tokyo Jungle is about never having downtime. Downtime is to starve to death.

The greatest attraction to Tokyo Jungle is the sheer variety of animals, each requiring a slightly different approach. The greatest variations are between carnivores and herbivores, but every species has its own identity and nuances to take into account. More than the way they all play differently, simply trying to complete the challenges to unlock all of them is enough to keep the game engaging for ages.

The challenges are an interesting (and perhaps divisive) twist on the gameplay. Not just achievements to be completed whenever you desire, they are only active during certain decades, demanding a certain amount of forward planning and resource conservation. Maybe next decade I need to get to Dogenzaka, and I need to change generations twice. So I’ll stop in Shibuya Station, breed once, go to Dogenzaka, and breed again.

The world is open enough and, remarkably, not at all constrained by its side-scrolling perspective (something I was originally skeptical about). The music supplies a perfect beat as you run through the decades, bringing to mind Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now” video. Even standing still, each animal bounces with a rhythmic pulse. 

Most satisfying, though, is Tokyo Jungle’s utter disregard for plausibility. It’s not that it is simply being weird for the sake of being weird; it’s just not concerned at all that what it wants to be might come across as weird. “Armour” can be equipped on different animals, in the form of baseball caps or paw slippers. It’s hilarious and no more jarring for being ridiculous.

Tokyo Jungle sits squarely in the vacuous hole that sucked ‘B’ grade games out of existence, that no-man’s land between AAA and indie. This is low budget and big heart, and exactly the kind of game we need more of. 

Joel McCoy wrote about how ‘survival’ mode is really about consumption and capitalism. Jackson W Ryan, meanwhile, looks at what Tokyo Jungle has to say about the ascent (and perhaps the fall) of human kind.  

8. Binary Domain (Sega)

I think Eric Swain said it best at Popmatters: Binary Domain assumes that you are intelligent. It assumes you’re just going to get the complex themes it is presenting. It isn’t going to force its themes of looking past artificial binary construction to a more complex, contradictory reality of existences and ways-of-being down your throat. It isn’t too concerned if you don’t get that at all. It just seems to assume your going to be paying attention and that you’ll get it. (Side note: Far Cry 3’s writer seems to think that game is doing exactly the same thing, yet I would argue it failed miserably. Not sure what the difference there is yet.)

Binary Domain isn’t an exploration of what it means to be human so much as an exploration of what it means to define human in the first place. This sounds like bizarrely high (and bizarrely intellectual) praise for a Japanese cover-shooter about shooting limbs off robots. When Binary Domain starts, two burly US bros march into Japan to shoot giant mechs, but pervading this de rigueur gameplay are the kind of themes I'm more accustomed to finding in an academic text by Donna Haraway or N Katherine Hayles. 

There is a maturity to its archetypal (and at first hugely problematic) characters and dialogue that isn’t immediately obvious. It has gimmicks like voice recognition and a ‘trust’ system that, similarly, seem to have no thematic relevance or resonance with the game’s story at first. But as the game progresses, it all just works together superbly tell an excellent story. It’s generic, conventional, and straightforward, to be sure, but there is a distinct and focused motivation behind the game that is clearly trying to tell a certain story with certain themes, and it uses all its available elements to strengthen it.

I still have trouble pinning down exactly how Binary Domain  succeeds so well. Ultimately, I think, it has a voice and it knows what it wants to say. It might be punching about its weight, but that just makes it all the more charming. 

I wrote a series of posts about Binary Domain for my “Sum of Parts” column at Gameranx. Apart from Eric’s post linked above, though, I’m not sure I have read anything else about Binary Domain, sadly.

7. The Unfinished Swan (Giant Sparrow)

The Unfinished Swan wasn’t an unknown game by any means, but it certainly didn’t have the same hype behind it as the likes of Fez and Journey. It’s been on its way for many years (it started life as a student project in 2008) and then, suddenly, it was out as a Playstation 3 exclusive. 

The game’s drawcard is its opening stages. You are dropped in a pure white world and must throw blobs of black paint around to add depth and perspective to the world. It feels just like stumbling around a dark room with your hands out in front of you. You are blind, trying to get a vague idea of your surroundings, trying to understand just where the world is so you don’t kick your toe on it. It’s a marvellous and disorientating feeling.

Where the game will lose many players, sadly, is when you realise this world-revealing mechanic is only one fifth of the game, thrown away by a bored developer for another toy—not unlike the story’s king throws away his own projects.

But this is exactly why I think The Unfinished Swan is such a grand achievement. All of its mechanics—both the way they are developed and the way they are abandoned—resonates with a story about embracing imperfection, about creativity as being about process and not end products, about art as just playing around. 

The best analogy of this comes from early in my playthrough. Just for fun, I painted a white hallway completely black, leaving not a pixel of white. When I was finished, I was just as blind as when I started. It was cloying and claustrophobic. I was trapped by my own perfection. 

At just over two hours long, The Unfinished Swan is just a really, really nice game. I know ‘nice’ is typically a lazily used word when a writer can’t think of an actually useful world, but ‘nice’ is exactly what I want to say The Unfinished Swan is. When I was done with it, I just felt good. I felt content. Like I had just had an engagement with a game that was just right. Just long enough. Just short enough. Just enough new ideas tossed aside at just the right time. Everything was just right. Everything was nice.

It’s like one of those children’s books that is just as pleasurable to have read to you when you’re an adult. The kind of children’s book that doesn’t talk down to kids but assumes they are intelligent and is respectufl of them. It’s beautifulelegantsimplenice and well worth your time.

J Stephen Addcox’s essay at Game Church about The Unfinished Swan’s theme of unfinishedness is one of my favourite pieces of game criticism this year. It is succinct, to the point, and perfectly communicates what the game achieves. Scott Juster provides a convincing breakdown of the game’s story and its themes at Popmatters. In Five out of Ten magazine, Kris Ligman writes a beautiful piece about The Unfinished Swan and the effect that striving for perfection has had on her own family. I wrote the game’s review for issue 230 of Hyper, I gave it a 9/10 and, according to Metacritic, I said it was “succinct, smart, tight, fresh, mature, and beautiful. One of the year’s standout titles.” That sounds like something I would say.

6. Mark of the Ninja (Klei)

Mark of the Ninja feels like it really shouldn’t feel as incredible as it does. It feels like, surely, it existed years ago. It so perfectly achieves what it is trying to do that it is hard to believe that no game like it has really existed before now. Playing it, I am amazed at how utterly superb the game is in every way, to be sure, but moreso, I am simply confused that no one has done this before. 2D sidescrolling stealth. Surely that just makes sense?

That isn’t to downplay Klei’s tremendous achievement. Level design, animation, mechanics, story, audio design all combine to create what is simultaneously a near-perfect stealth experience and a near-perfect platforming experience. Everything has been polished. Everything has been considered. Each problem can be approached from a variety of ways. Checkpoints are regular enough to avoid having to repeat segments but not so regular as to close off the possibility of reconsidering your way forward.

The animations and the visual design are superb. Simply moving your ninja through the world, watching him slide around corners and up walls with all the elegance of a rhythmic gymnast’s ribbon. The subjective rendering of the world to fit with the ninja’s senses and perception is a creative way to counter the traditionally omniscient perspective the player has in sidescrolling games. Areas obscured by ledges or doors are blurred, with ripples of white and silhouettes of red standing in for not how the world is, but how it seems to be to the ninja’s senses—where an enemy last was, where a sound is coming from. 

This is enhanced even more in New Game+, limiting the player’s vision to what is in front of the ninja, forcing you to continually look around at your surroundings.

Many critics and players overlooked the story as something just tacked on to give players an excuse to be sneaky violent ninjas. I think these people missed a very subtle commentary on videogame violence and complicity—not unlike Bioshock or Spec Ops: The Line, but with a far finer (some would say less ham-fisted), elegant touch. Perhaps it was too fine for most people. Much like, say, Portal, Mark of the Ninja’s was a story I didn’t realise I cared about until I was entirely wrapped up in it with no way out but through. 

Mark of the Ninja is a love poem to stealth games written by people who clearly love playing stealth games themselves. The various costumes and gadgets and achievements force you to play in different styles, much like many stealth enthusiasts give themselves self-enforced rules and challenges. Want to play a game without killing anyone? Then choose the suit that doesn’t even have a sword. Mark of the Ninja formalises what most stealth games just leave open. It feels like Klei have just made the game they want to play which, really, is what everyone should do.

I wrote at Unwinnable about perception and subjective worlds, looking at Inception, The Line, and Mark of the Ninja. At The Gameological Society, Drew Toal interviews lead designer Nels Anderson about the game. And… I can’t recall any other articles I read about Mark of the Ninja but I’m sure they exist.

As a disclaimer, I would consider both Nels and Chris Dahlen (the game’s writer) as good friends, and have previous worked under Chris when he was editor at Kill Screen. But even if I didn’t know either of them, I feel confident saying that I would still think this game was absolutely superb.

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

25 Games of 2012: Part Three (15-11)

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

15. Persona 4: Golden (Atlus)

I have never played a Persona game before. Really, the only JRPGs I have ever played have been either in the Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest franchises. I’ve tried a few others from random series I forget the names of, but found them all rather terrible. Over the last decade, I have just become sick of the same blue/grey text boxes and pseudo-medieval, pseudo-steampunk, pseudo-European worlds with terrible dialogue and worse stories. I fondly remember the first few JRPGs I ever played (namely, the Playstation-era Final Fantasies) , but the genre has been so stubborn in refusing to evolve in any meaningful way (except for a few notable exceptions on consoles I don't have access to) while, conversely, becoming so horrendously bloated, that I had all but given up on the genre.

So Persona 4: Golden (the re-vamped Vita release of 2008’s Persona 4) has been a shot of adrenaline in the genre’s arm. It’s shown me that I do not fundamentally dislike the JRPGs genre, just nearly everything that’s been done with it in the last decade (or, more accurately, what hasn’t been done). Persona 4: Golden avoids the worst, most stagnant tropes of the genre and pulses with a youthful, fresh energy. The music is fast-paced; the menus are bright and vibrant; battles are quick and non-invasive. 

The game uses the JRPG skeleton to craft a simple-enough/compelling-enough story of a group of modern Japanese high-schoolers trying to catch a serial killer. The story is surprisingly coherent and mature (so far, at least). The dialogue makes sense and, most importantly, conveys the characters as actual, empathetic people. Persona 4: Golden does everything JRPGs should do but rarely do.

Where Persona 4: Golden really shines for me is its unique treatment of time. Whereas most games exist in a weird kind of Groundhog Day limbo where the only day is Everyday and time just conveniently progresses once you walk to a certain place, Persona 4: Golden is constantly telling you what the date is, what day of the week it is, what season it is. The implications of this are far-reaching and fascinating. You can’t simply grind forever to level up before you fight a boss because time is constantly progressing. Sleep to restore your health and it will be tomorrow. 

It gives you a kind of temporal context. You can look at the calendar on the protagonist’s bedroom wall and know exactly how long until the end-of-semester exams, until soccer practice, until the latest victim will be killed. Further, you are constantly stressed out. You are constantly running out of time. A day spent doing anything is a day spent not doing any of the other things you could be doing. 

As the game plays out over a school year (or longer, I haven’t finished the game yet so I don’t know!), it mirrors strangely the one year I spent as an exchange student in Japan, going to a high school. The constant pressures of having to study, socialise, club commitments, part time jobs. To the countless pressures piled on top of Japanese teenagers (and all first-world teenagers generally), having to grind through magical TV-worlds to save friends is only a small addition. The need to get on with daily life around the more traditional JRPG escapades creates the most interesting of omniscient tensions.

The Persona franchises has been a mystery to me for the few years that I’ve actually known it existed. I could never understand how such a game could possibly function. But now, playing Persona 4: Golden, it just makes so much sense. Everything functions in a magnificent, unified way. It doesn’t subvert JRPGs conventions so much as redefine them. It is a game that pumps new life into the JRPG genre, but which perhaps could not have existed without the stagnating genre to prop it up. 

I’m sure a lot has been written about Persona 4 over the years. I’m holding off my hunt for articles until I complete the game, but here is a post on Kanji’s sexuality that looks interesting, and a post by Mattie Brice on being transgender and a character I am yet to meet. 

14. Gravity Rush (Japan Studio)

Another Vita title. It’s hard to pin down why Gravity Rush is so great. It is because the three-dimensional, VVVVVV-esque gravity-shifting never feels like flying and always feels like falling. It is the fact that the main character is a girl who is allowed to be a girl while also being allowed to kick arse. It is the world that is anime-steampunk without being cliché, impossible without being incomprehensible. 

It is the entire art direction. The buildings, the people, the distinct colour palette of browns and yellows and purples, the blimps.

It is the mission that is nothing but falling off the bottom of the world after a lost love letter for kilometre after kilometre. 

It is running up a building’s walls and falling sideways past chimneys and steeples across city blocks. 

It is, above all else, a playful sense of whimsy that pervades the game. So many games (like the previously mentioned Borderlands 2) try not to care too much about their story, usually to their own downfall. Gravity Rush somehow manages to care about its own story—taking it seriously enough—without taking it too seriously. Maybe it is just Kat’s intoxicating optimism that allows this to happen.

The fighting is, sadly, a bit flimsy. I would have found it much more enjoyable if only the lock-on was more liberal. The touch-screen and gyro sensor are used in entirely arbitrarily “Hey! Look at this platform’s crazy new input devices!” ways that harm the game more than they contribute. Sliding requires you to touch the screen with both thumbs while you steer by turning the device. It is terrible and, as a result, I only ever slid when the game forced me too. But these are minor complaints about a game that is an absolute pleasure to play and explore. 

I can’t recall having read anything this year about Gravity Rush, besides Kirk Hamilton’s Kotaku Melodic post about the game’s lovely music. I’ve written no articles about Gravity Rush myself, but I did use the Vita’s built-in screenshot function (something that should be mandatory on all consoles!) to take some photos that I then used to write out some more detailed thoughts on the game in this blog post. That’s something I want to try to do for more Vita games in the future.

13. Proteus (Ed Key & David Kanaga)

“Somewhere between Dear Esther and Minecraft” is how I typically think of Proteus. It’s like Dear Esther in its minimalist gameplay that simply asks you to walk around and explore an environment. It’s like Minecraft in the way that world is open and slightly different every time you play. 

Stitched together with David Kanaga’s beautiful audio (like a parallel, ethereal world overlapping Key’s corporeal one), Proteus is perhaps the most calming game I’ve ever played. It has an ending that you can work towards, but it never pressures you towards achieving it. It is happy to just sit back and let you just spend some time with it for a while. It is happy for you to just walk among its pastel trees and musical frogs. In a recent update, Key added a ‘sit’ button. Press the spacebar and your character will just sit down. You can sit on a hill and watch the sunset, or the motes buzzing over the field, or the crabs scurrying on the sand. 

A memory: at the Wild Rumpus part during GDC in March this year, I was drunk and exhausted from a week of parties, lectures, and games. The party was a loud ruckus of music, talking, local multiplayer, and kareoke. Proteus was being played in a side room, sealed off as much as possible from the rest of the commotion. It was projected onto a wall-sized screen before two old armchairs. People were sitting cross-legged on the ground like attentive young children listening to a story, backs to the player, sitting in her chair with her controller. I collapsed in a vacant armchair at the back of the room, behind the player, and watched her chase a frog for the longest time. I just slumped there, eyes unfocused, and let the colours and sounds wash over me. It was pointless, but beautifully so. It was magical. Proteus is magical.

I wrote an article for issue 240 of Edge while at GDC where I spoke to Key and Kanaga, as well as thatgamecompany’s Kelly Santiago and The Chinese Room’s Dan Pinchbeck about the recent trend of minimalist ‘walking’ games. It was republished online, sans my Q&A with Pinchbeck and the phenomenal formatting of the print version. While it isn’t explicitly related to Proteus, Kanaga wrote a transfixing post on his blog about games, music, and spirituality. Meanwhile, Matthew Sawrey thinks Proteus is like sorbet.

12. Gun Godz (Vlambeer)

During one of last year’s (surprisingly few) abandoned projects, I commented on how I hope that the sprite-based first-person aesthetics of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D make a comeback in the same way 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art has in the past few years. It was only a couple of months later that I obtained Vlambeer’s Gun Godz as part of my reward for kickstarting Venus Patrol (you still can obtain Gun Godz by subscribing to Venus Patrol now). Gun Godz takes the simple run-and-gun play of early shooters and supercharges it the way that only Vlambeer can supercharge something. Vlambeer are master craftsmen at making a game feel tight and responsive. In all their games, controls are twitchy but solid, audio feedback is meaty, and visuals are rich and vibrant yet free of superfluous detail. Gun Godz is no exception. 

Like shooters of old, each of Gun Godz’s stages has a par time. The catch is, you only get the award for finishing under a par time if you also kill everyone and find every item. It is the par time to perfect the stage, not just to get to the end. This means learning exactly what projectile to fire at exactly what second as you draw an imaginary racing line through each stage. Each stage is short enough for mistakes to not get frustrating. Instead, I would repeat one stage over and over, changing weapons pulling the trigger at exactly the right moment became as instinctive as running through the corridor. For me, it became a kind of three-dimensional Super Meat Boy with guns.

Testament to Vlambeer’s auteurship, Gun Godz has an energy, a vibrancy, that few first-person shooters past or present possess. Serious Sam is perhaps the closest to what Gun Godz achieves: that stripped back focus on the running and the gunning as the most important part of the experience. 

I wrote a blog post about both Gun Godz and Adam Saltsman’s Capsule when I first played them both. Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman wrote an extensive postmortem of Gun Godz at Gamasutra.

11. Journey (Thatgamecompany)

Following 2012’s trend of games that do so much with so little, Journey evoked a rawer emotional response from many players than any other game recently released. It made people cry who couldn’t really tell you exactly why they were crying. It wasn’t about having a reason. It was about having feelings and letting those feelings rise to the surface for their own sake. 

Through magnificent audio and visual design, and incredibly well-considered multiplayer mechanics, Thatgamecompany managed to convey a sense of agoraphobia and loneliness, of a journey that is taxing all that there is of the little creature that refuses to give up. The gradual change of the landscape, the way the camera lifts up or drops down to reveal or conceal the horizon, the way your character has to lift her legs and push her torso forward to climb the steepest dunes, the relief in the way she just slides down the opposite side. It all comes together to create the sense that this journey is so important to this creature that she is willing to destroy herself to complete it. 

It’s a religious pilgrimage. You don’t need to know anything about this religion or this creature or this world. All you need to know is that she is trying to achieve something she believes in so fully. That is enough.

Then, of course, there is the multiplayer component, allowing you to find other pilgrims on your path. You can never talk to them using real words but you know—you just know—that behind them is another real human player, sitting at their own television screen somewhere in the world. You stop. You dance around each other. You test their humanity by seeing if they react to you. 

The game is masterfully designed so that it is impossible to not be friendly with other pilgrims. The worst you can do is ignore them and continue on. Otherwise any acknowledgement of the other player’s existence feels like the grandest of favours.

Which, I think, is because Journey is not about companionship at all. It is about loneliness. The simple fact that you know other human pilgrims are out there somewhere on the road makes you feel so much more lonely when you are alone. To be alone, other people must be absent. Really, even when you are with a companion, you’re not really ‘with’ them at all. You are just spectres in each other’s worlds. Each of you are still on your own pilgrimage to the top of your own mountain. You are just following each other for a while.

The only grudge I have against Journey, and one I rarely see mentioned, is the hugely problematic ending that seems to completely negate any point of undergoing the journey in the first place. The very final scene that suggests a cyclical nature of the journey, of getting to the end and returning to the start, contradicts all the effort I put into getting to the end in the first place. But that aside, the process of getting to the destination is meaningful while it lasts.

A lot of things were written about Journey this year. At GDC, one of the developers, Chris Bell, gave a great lecture about how they designed friendship into the game. Much later in the year, another of Journey’s developers, Robin Hunicke, spoke at ACMI in Melbourne while playing Journey in front of a live audience (something more developers should do!). Dan Golding provides an excellent write-up of that night. At Unwinnable, I further explored this idea that Journey is about loneliness. 

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

25 Games of 2012: Part Two (20-16)

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

20. Lim (Merritt Kopas)

Merritt Kopas is one of the most exciting voices in videogames that I’ve discovered this year. Not only does she write amazing and insightful essays, but she created one of the most effortlessly meaningful games I’ve played this year. (Edit: The Nightmare Mode piece I originally linked here was actually by Porpentine, not Kopas. Apologies to both for the misattribution.)

Lim is a simple game that beautifully conveys its message through how it feels to play. By sliding this cube through a series of rooms, you sharply (and violently) feel the compromises Kopas and countless others have to make in their daily lives and the social exclusion they feel when they dare to be themselves.

A simple mechanic: other squares will ram you violently and refuse to let you pass unless you fit in. To fit in you hold down a button to change colours. When you do this,  the camera zooms in on you, bringing fake-you under ever-increasing scrutiny as you try to fit in. Hold it down for two long and the screen starts to shudder, like the real you is trapped inside fake-you, banging on the walls and trying to get out. Eventually you let go—you have to let go—and the squares start attacking you again in a violent barrage. The juttering of the screen and the thudding sound are nauseating. 

Then there is the beauty of being pushed out of the world itself, playing into an aesthetic of the glitch to send home such a powerful, powerful message.

When I say that Lim conveys its message effortlessly, I don’t mean that I think Kopas put no effort into the game. On the contrary, I think she has poured her everything into this. Rather, as a player, there was no barrier between me and what the game wanted to say to me. A marvellous, intimate game; a work of art; a must-play. Kopas is certainly a developer and a writer to keep an eye on in the future.

At The Border House, Zoya has a far more detailed breakdown of why Lim is such an incredible achievement. RockPaperShotgun also featured it and wrote a few paragraphs about it. Cameron Kunzelman also wrote a post about both Lim and Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia. On that note, Anthropy’s Dys4ia is an absolutely incredible game that will only take five minutes of your time. The only reason it doesn’t have its own place on this list is because I am a terrible person and only played it yesterday. But it is phenomenal and you really must play it. Dan Golding does it more justice at Crikey where he named it Game of the Year. 

19. Pocket Planes (Nimblebit)

I was one of those people that really liked Tiny Tower. Sure, I understand why you wouldn’t, but the slow-burn gameplay, the way I gradually built up this tower in real-time was something I found incredibly rewarding—without ever spending a cent on the game’s microtransactions. 

Pocket Planes follows a very similar formula as Tiny Tower, but with the added attraction of actually having things to do and some kind of creative input into the network you develop. Every Tiny Tower player has a narrow skyscraper full of random shops. In Pocket Planes, however, each player is going to start in a different corner of the world, will purchase different airports, will set up different trade routes. The same slow-burn, impossible-to-fail gameplay remains, but has been rendered much more compelling and customisable.

I loved watching my network slowly spread from Australia’s east coast back west across Asia and Europe to London. Sadly, I stopped playing before I crossed the Atlantic to New York, but zooming out and looking at the network I had constructed felt like a real achievement. 

Pocket Plane’s most frustrating aspect was its flat, non-circular world. You couldn’t travel from Australia to LA! The Pacific Ocean just hits a wall. Though, this just made the other side of the world so much more exotic, so much more attractive.

J.P. Grant, who wrote a great analysis of Tiny Tower last year, wrote an excellent breakdown of Pocket Planes at Gamers With Jobs.  Ryan Kuo wrote at Kill Screen about how the game demonstrates the importance of being bored in videogames. Gus Mastrapa makes a valid critique of the game at Unwinnable taking issue with the inability to set up automated routes in the game and wanting a button that presses itself. And also at Unwinnable, I wrote a “Pocket Treasures" article about how I enjoyed Pocket Planes as a kind of world exploration but felt unattached to its citizens.  

18. Borderlands 2 (Gearbox)

All I wanted from Borderlands 2 was more of the same, and that’s what I got. People like to complain about Borderlands’s carrot-on-a-stick grinding and disposable, capitalist weapons; they lament the lack of a ‘point’ to the motions you go through when everything you are rewarded with will be thrown out for the next marginally shinier thing in five minutes. But what such critiques miss is that the process of grinding can be fun in and of itself. The goals and their rewards are meaningless in Borderlands 2, but they’re also not the point. The motions themselves, the process, is what is enjoyable about Borderlands 2.

The pleasure of Borderlands is that its infinite weapons are more than a gimmick. Each feels slightly different, and each requires a slightly different approach to how you play. The rest of the game is practically meaningless. What kind of enemies you are facing, what environment you are facing them in, the reason you are facing them. It is all irrelevant. It’s all just an excuse to see how this weapon feels in relation to that weapon. It isn’t enough to just read the stats and see which has the highest number. It depends on the scope, the speed of the bullets, the look and sound, the recoil. 

This was the pleasure of the first game, and perfectly carries over to the sequel. Borderlands 2 adds a far more diverse range of possible attributes to weapon, keeping that persistent feel of experimentation all the fresher. All the guns simply just feel a bit weightier, too. Characters are more customisable; there are more kinds of enemies that must be approached in different ways; there are more locales and secrets. Borderlands 2 is a textbook sequel: more of what was good of the predecessor, refined. 

And then there is Borderlands 2’s story, which isn’t really refined so much as rubbed in the mud. The game shows an absolute disregard for its story as though, like most games, it has to go out of its way to tell you how much it doesn’t care about its story. But then this becomes a weird kind of playing chicken with the player, where both game and player try to care less about the story than the other until the player loses simply from the sheer amount of time they’ve invested about it. I wrote about this weird phenomena. So did Lana Polansky. It never really succeeds as a parody, nor does it succeed as a good story. It just works as a story that breaks you, and that is something.

Though, there is still the pervasive casual sexism throughout the game. Sometimes it seems self-aware (like when you fire an artillery cannon at some misogynist’s house) but mostly this just comes across as the game trying to find an excuse for its behaviour. Then, of course, there was the “Girlfriend Mode” fiasco before the game even released (that really should not have been a fiasco at all, if Gearbox had just apologised for poorly chosen words). I was one of the hot-headed people during that drama. I regret foolishly saying I was going to boycott the game, but I don’t regret being angry over an AAA developer stubbornly refusing to apologise over some casual sexism. 

Surprisingly, perhaps, there has been plenty of good writing about Borderlands 2. Apart from the (at times) fruitful discussion during the Girlfriend Mode thing (see above link for those articles), and the articles about the weird storytelling, I wrote about the unique way guns are used in FPSes to convey our character to us. Patricia Hernandez looks at the game’s blatant consumerism. And at The Wall Street Journal, Yannick Lejacq looks at how irony functions in Borderlands 2—or perhaps how it doesn’t.

17. Trials: Evolution (RedLynx)

I never played Trials HD when it came out. I was never a fan of motorbikes, or of racing games, so it didn’t really look like my kind of thing. It wasn’t until various friends started getting hyped the Trials: Evolution that I realised this wasn’t a racing game, it was Super Meat Boy on wheels, and that is exactly a game for me.

Trials: Evolution is a precision platformer. It’s about being in exactly the right position in exactly the right place at exactly the right speed so as to be in the next position 0.0001 seconds sooner. What’s so refreshing about the Trials games, I think, is that the language of a dirt bike (accelerate, break, lean forward, lean back) is an entirely new vocabulary for platforming (opposed to the usual walk, run, jump, jump higher). The need to focus on exactly where your rider’s body weight is in relation to their bike creates this really intimate bodily connection between player and character and controller. 

When you screw up, you know exactly what you did wrong. When you make a jump that should be impossible, maybe bunny hoping onto a protruding pipe just large enough for your rear wheel, then flipping forward to land with both wheels perfectly on a downhill ramp, it feels like the greatest achievement of your life. 

I’ll always have a soft spot for twitchy games that require that real intimate understanding of the controller in my hands. Games like Geometry Wars, Super Meat Boy, Ziggurat. When I am able to get good at these games (or even just ‘capable’) I feel like my flesh has merged with the technology, like I understand it just that little bit better. Tilting my weight just that little bit forward or back with the left stick, tapping the right trigger to throttle the engine just enough, has brought me closer to my 360 controller than any other game.

For an idea of the kind of precision that Trials: Evolution demands, here is a video of Jason Killingsworth (twitch gaming extraodinare) completing one of the game’s Extreme difficulty levels. Note the images in the bottom right corner that show the replay viewer exactly how much he was pressing each button on the controller. Watch. Learn. Simon Parkin wrote about the phenomenally unique “Gigatrack” course. And Mark Serrels compares Trials: Evolution to rock climbing.

16. Spaceteam (Henry Smith)

In September this year, I went on my first international press trip. I flew to Montreal, at the publisher’s expense, and spent two days playing two much anticipated AAA titles. Since I was in town (and since it took me about 30 hours of airplanes and airports each way to get there) I spent a few more days of my own time just checking the place out. Neither of the games I was paid to see are on this list. But while in town, I went to the Mount Royal Game Society monthly meet-up. There I was introduced to former Bioware programmer Henry Smith and his local multiplayer iOS game Spaceteam. The loud bar was the perfect place for a game that requires two people to co-operatively yell over the top of each other.

Spaceteam is a simple idea magnificently realised. Two to four players, each with their own iOS device, have to obey the computer’s written commands: pulling levers, turning dials, flicking switches. The trick is that the commands you receive probably apply to a control panel on another player’s screen. So each player is frantically telling the others what to do while, simultaneously, trying to listen to those other player’s yelled commands. 

It’s a strong central idea, but what makes the game are the little touches. The tongue-twisting dial names (“Flushflux” almost actually made me cry with frustration after having to say it ten times); the need to wipe away dripping slime or grab on to panels that have popped out of their holdings. The game demands you look after so many things at one time, leaving you exhausted by the time you inevitably get consumed by an exploding star. 

We’re currently going through a re-birth of local multiplayer games, it seems—visible both through the re-introduction of split screen multiplayer in various shooters this year, as well as the Sportsfriend kickstarter. But unlike Johann Sebastian Joust or its ilk, finding people to play Spaceteam with is a breeze. Every other person has an iOS device, and the game itself is free (but seriously, buy a 99c upgrade and give Henry some money). 

I wrote a more thorough review of Spaceteam for Unwinnable, which includes this cliffhanger video of Helen and I playing a typically intense game.

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

25 Games of 2012: Part One (25-21)

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

GOTY lists! As therapeutic as they are meaningless. On one hand, ranking individual artworks against each other to decide which is better and which is worse is exactly not what criticism is meant to do. On the other hand, looking back over a year of games and trying to summarise why the games that stood out for me did stand out for me is a really interesting and enjoyable writing exercise. It’s a chance to be reflective, to get away from the pressure of having to rush on to talk about the next new release.

The last couple of years now I have written Top 20 lists (this year it has ballooned to a Top 25) of my favourite games of the previous year. But more than just a list of titles next to numbers, I like to spend some time writing about each game, why I care about it and why it has stuck with me. So over the course of this week I will be posting my top 25 games of the year five games at a time so I can spend some time talking about each of them.

The numbers, meanwhile, shouldn’t be read as saying one game is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the others. All the games on the following list are exceptional, and many other exceptional games came out this year that are not on this list. Instead, all the ranking represents is the amount that game has resonated with me and stuck with me.

As with previous years, I’ve tried to link to a few memorable articles written about each game, as well as anything I wrote myself. These are far from exhaustive lists, though, and I would love it if you could comment with any other relevant articles that I may have missed.

It’s a bit of cliché to say that this year has been a huge year for videogames, but it’s also entirely true. For the first six months, though, I don’t think I played a single AAA release that really stood out. It was the downloadable titles (especially on Playstation Network and iOS) that stuck with me this year. It wasn’t that there were no good AAA releases; it’s more that the big franchises that did have releases this year were franchises I have no investment in, like Mass Effect. This did give me a chance to catch up on all the 2011 games I never got around to last year, however: Saints Row 3, Rayman Origins, Driver: San Francisco, Dead Island (unfortunately). 

Things changed slightly in the second half of the year, when a few more interesting games were released, and I discovered a few games that had slipped under my radar from earlier in the year. Still, in the 25 games that I’ve chosen to highlight as standout moments of my past year, only four of those are tradition AAA games, and this is something I’m really excited about. Not because AAA is stagnating or dying or anything like that, but because of the strengthening ecology of alternative strands of game development that are maturing around AAA. Sure, ‘indie’ (in its various strands) has been around for quite some time now, but it’s no longer a case of a rare indie/handheld game being able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the big AAA games. Now it’s a few AAA games that are able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the far more worthwhile indie and handheld games.

But enough rambling. On with Part One of the list!

25. Sound Shapes (Queasy Games)

I’ve always had a soft spot for games that visualise music. As someone who loves listening to music but has absolutely no intellectual understanding of what is happening in the music I enjoy, games like Sound Shapes are excellent because they convey music in a language I understand: games. I can see the things making the sounds on the screen. I can see how they are working together to create a beat and a rhythm. Sound Shapes is particularly interesting to me as it is based on one of the few instruments I actually understand: the Tenori-On. 

All platforming games have an unseen grid mapped over them (or perhaps sitting underneath them). We use this grid to mentally comprehend if Mario is going to make the jump or if he can just sprint right over the gap. In Sound Shapes, this grid also determines pitch and timing. Objects closer to the top of the screen make a higher-pitch note than those close to the bottom. Those to the left of the screen make a sound earlier than those on the right. As I move my little ball avatar across each world, I can see the song coming to life around me.

While most of the stages are entirely acceptable ‘music’, it is Beck’s “Cities” level that succeeds best as a song. As you progress through the dead city, the song works its way through an intro, a first verse, a chorus, a bridge, a second verse, another chorus, and an outro. Even the lyrics fit into the world of the level through platforms that take things very literally. It is the first time I’ve ever not been able to get a videogame level out of my head for days.

However, the very feature that should’ve boosted Sound Shapes’s longevity, it’s custom level creator, is its weakest point. The editor is fiddly, requiring you to choose what sound effects you want before you are able to preview what they sound like. A few good songs have been made, but in the weeks after the game’s release, there was little being shared other than Mario and Final Fantasy covers. I have yet to play the game on my Vita, though, so perhaps the touch screen makes things a bit better. Still, once I had played through the pre-packaged stages a few times each (and Beck’s stages a few times more), I found little reason to return to the game.

I wrote about the living dead cities of Beck’s “Cities” level for Unwinnable’s theme week on cities. Kirk Hamilton also wrote a bit about the same level (it really is the game’s highlight) at Kotaku. 

24. Angry Birds: Star Wars (Rovio)

It’s cool to hate Angry Birds if you’re a slightly older, ‘real’ gamer. It’s everything that’s wrong with our industry. IOS game with micro-transactions, gameplay based largely on luck, endless iterations of the same ideas instead of a complete overhaul, utterly ruthless saturation of merchandise. People see kids wearing Angry Birds t-shirts, holding Angry Birds toys, eating Angry Birds-themed birthday cakes, and they are aghast that Angry Birds to these kids is what Mario was to them twenty years ago.

Of course, this is just like complaining that the music Kids These Days listen to is terrible compared to the stuff you listened to when you were a kid, and it completely misses what is unique and enjoyable and excellent about Angry Birds. It misses that the fact Angry Birds is so easy to play makes it accessible to an incredibly wide range of players who otherwise might never try to play videogames. It misses the fact that not every game has to be based on skill, accessible only to an auteur elite, and that luck-based gameplay can be incredibly satisfying in its own right. It misses the fact that each incremental iteration of the Angry Birds franchise has both refined and advanced the base formula in really interesting ways.

Angry Birds: Star Wars takes the best of the original Angry Birds and the planetoid-slingshotting of Angry Birds: Space and adds a range of entirely new, Star Wars-inspired skills to create a range of new challenges. It is these skills that make Angry Birds: Star Wars is the best realised Angry Birds to date, and well worth the one dollar asking price. Obi-wan's force push, Luke's lightsaber, Han's laser—each is more interesting than any bird's skill in the previous games.

I wrote about Angry Birds: Star Wars for my “Pocket Treasures” column at Unwinnable, musing on how the two franchises don’t really come together so much as Angry Birds completely subsumes Star Wars.

23. Spelunky HD (Mossmouth)

We got off on the wrong foot, Spelunky and I. Now that it was out on Xbox Live Arcade, I was so excited to play and master this game that I had heard so much about it. As someone who typically loves simple yet difficult games like Super Meat Boy or Geometry Wars, I thought Spelunky would be exactly my kind of game. But when I finally played it, it just seemed unfair. How could I master a game that kept changing the playing field on me?

It’s a bit of a taboo to tell someone they played a game wrong (not that that stopped me). But, truly, there is a wrong way to play nearly every videogame. Sure, play any game however you want, but don’t blame the game when you don’t find it enjoyable. Certainly, when I first started playing Spelunky, I was playing it wrong. When I finally learned how to play it correctly, my experience improved considerably. Initially, when I was wanting to approach it like Super Meat Boy, I was hoping to master Spelunky in a way that would mean I could play it with my eyes closed. But this is impossible in Spelunky. The game is capable of screwing you over in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with your motor skills.

Then I read this piece by Jason Killingsworth and it all made sense. Spelunky isn’t Super Meat Boy; it’s poker. What you have to learn to master in Spelunky is the ability to improvise and cope with the hand you are dealt. Spelunky isn’t about winning or losing. It is about doing the best you can possibly do with this hand, and then dying.

Spelunky was an important reminder to me that how I want to play a game is not necessarily the ‘right’ way. Once I was willing to give a little, once I was willing to meet the game on its terms, I found the bombastic, slapstick comedy I had heard others praise. My deaths no longer felt like a bastard game laughing at me, but a game laughing with me at the unfortunate tribulations of my character. This is permadeath at its funniest. 

Apart from Jason’s great essay, my two favourite articles about Spelunky were both at Unwinnable this year. Gus Mastrapa talks about Spelunky as an acquired taste akin to olives (my own experience seems to say this is an apt metaphor). Meanwhile, Chris Dahlen’s kid keeps sacrificing the babysitter.

22. Cool Pizza (Secret Library)

Cool Pizza is a simple and suave iOS game that drips with style. The slick visuals are full of life, as much in the animations that are bulging with life between their two frames as in the colour palette of black, white, and fluro yellow and pink. For perhaps the first time ever, the tilt controls feel perfectly right, used as they are to tilt a skateboard left and right as your skater chic protagonist just kind of dangles with a “whatever man” apathy. And then you jump and suddenly the skateboard is in her hands and she is unleashing a salvo of hits on monsters that look like rub-on tattoos. 

The gameplay is heavily inspired by Sega’s classic Space Harrier, but is far from a simple clone. The most obvious difference is that your skater is effected by gravity. Keeping her airborne requires you to keep taking out enemies, and a multiplier is added for every monster taken out without touching the ground. 

It’s a simple game that is simply a pleasure to play. The only disappointment is that the game ends rather abruptly, cancelling any desire I have to try to top the leaderboards. With a finite number of enemies in a game, I know from my first missed multiplier that I won’t get a high score, so I give up. If Secret Library were to make an update for an endless play mode, I would probably still be playing Cool Pizza regularly. As it stands, though, I thoroughly enjoyed the time we spent together for a while.

I reviewed Cool Pizza for Unwinnable, and mused over how the game really struck some kind of 90s nostalgic chord for me (and probably an 80s nostalgic chord for those a bit older than me.) 

21. Knytt Underground (Nifflas)

Most people have their Game of the Year lists up in time for Christmas. Personally, I’ve always preferred putting my list up in the first week of January. Really, this is mostly because I am lazy and really don’t want to be writing out a Game of the Year list before Christmas, but it also allows me to catch any games released in December that I might have missed. Nifflas’s Knytt Underground is one such game. This wasn’t immediately obvious, though. I had probably played for a good few hours before I realised just how hooked I was.

Just like Knytt and Knytt Stories before it, Knytt Underground is all about exploration. It is a metroidvania game in the way the world is a series of screens (or rooms) that slowly fill in a grid like map as you explore the world. Though, instead of allowing the world to open up organically in the traditional metroidvania way of finding power-ups and using them to access previously inaccessible pathways (something Knytt Stories did), Knytt Underground makes the curious choice to split the game into chapters, each one resetting the world with a character with different skills.

The first chapter has you play Mi, a sprite capable of climbing vertical walls. In the second chapter you play as a bouncy ball—incapable of climbing, but able to bounce far higher than Mi can jump. These two chapters are really just tutorials to get you accustomed to each character’s skill set before the game really opens up in the third chapter, where you play as Mi, who can now transform into the bouncy ball with a tap of a button. 

And it is about this point, at the start of the third chapter, that you realise you are hooked on this game. It’s at this point that the entire world is suddenly open to you and you don’t know where to go so you go everywhere and before you know it you have discovered over 1000 separate rooms with plenty more to go.

Knytt Underground is all about exploration, but it is not just about exploring a geographical world. You are also exploring for a reason to be here. There is no great info dump telling you how this world functions or what your purpose is. Just like the labyrinthian map, Mi’s purpose becomes clear gradually as you explore the world. So too does the tensions between the worlds various fractions, living in impossible towns spread throughout the world. Underlining the entire game is an exploration of the tension between rational skepticism and ideological faith. The game seems to play as Nifflas’s own back-and-forward musings on the subject as characters explore the strengths and dangers of each. 

The simple exploration is, at times, marred by overly fiddly platforming. This is often needed when trying to reach a hidden item or room. Some challenges take up several rooms, having you climb up a ledge and then transform into a ball in mid-air then land on a blue-plant to shoot horizontally across two screens to land on a yellow plant that will shoot you straight up another three screens. It is well-designed and challenging platforming, but it often seems completely out of place in a game that is otherwise an incredibly slow-burn of just wandering around a world and getting to know it.

One element that must be mentioned about Knytt Underground (but which almost doesn’t need to be mentioned at all) is the lavish, photographic backgrounds. Instead of flat, pixellated backgrounds, Knytt Underground’s world is a silhouette against realistic photographic images of flowers, fruits, mushrooms, trees, clocks. It’s a distinct, surreal, and fascinating stylistic choice and really gives the game a distinct character. An excellent little touch, on the Vita at least, is the ability to make the plants in this background shake by swiping the rear-touchscreen. Sometimes you will do this on purpose, but often it is an accident as your rear-fingers are just trying to find a place to rest, causing a kind of organic rustling of the bushes. It adds little to the game, perhaps, but it is great little flourish and an excellent use of the rear-touchscreen.

You never quite feel like you know what you are doing in Knytt Underground. At least, I don’t yet. I feel like I am perpetually lost and just fortuitously stumbling across the right person or the right item or the right quest. But it is a beautiful and intoxicating world—one I am entirely happy to be lost in.

Contents: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]