1.
Dungeons of Dredmor ;
(PC)
For all the impressive setpieces, sweeping orchestral scores, and fancy technical achievements of the "AAA" games released this year, nothing took up more of my time or provided as much fun as this unassuming new roguelike did. The premise, as with most roguelikes, is straightforward: take your massive-eyebrowed hero, work your way through all of the nasty floors of Dredmor's dungeon, find Dredmor himself somewhere at the bottom and kill him. Again, I guess, considering he is a lich. I don't know why we are assuming that would do anything because that obviously didn't work the first time, with him being undead and all.
If you're unfamiliar, a roguelike is a type of turn-based strategy/RPG game that generally entails randomly-generated floors, lots of unfair traps and complex things that usually have little explanation, and most importantly permanent death. Every time you perform an action, everything else in the dungeon will also perform an action. Sometimes they have graphics, and are often painfully obtuse and hard as hell. Obviously, these are not the most mainstream of games nor have they ever been. Dungeons of Dredmor is an attempt at trying to make a roguelike that is a little more accepting of the average player, while not compromising too much of the core tenents of roguelike design.
They achieve this goal wonderfully through a combination of slightly less daunting mechanics, excellent sprite-based artwork, and a fantastic sense of humor that throws the concept of taking itself seriously out the window and accepting that it is, in fact, just a video game. It even allows players to disable permadeath or change the difficulty so just about anyone can get in and start running over traps like an idiot at whatever pace they are comfortable with. At the same time, it still packs a solid punch and persistently asks you to learn and get better at managing all of your skills and resources. The game takes the sting off having horrible, horrible things happen by making most of those things hilarious; having your character die permanently isn't quite as bad when it is because your viking-pirate hybrid that wears a traffic cone and has mysterious powers of veganism dies because he ate a root of T'Char and could not handle the dark gifts of Zalgo. Poor lad... he chucked like a sailor.
It's just the right blend of needing to be taken seriously (or else you'll die horribly and have to start over) and not wanting to be taken seriously at all (you will get an achievement if you equip parachute pants while wielding a hammer) that make this such an easy game to come back to. For all it offers, Dungeons of Dredmor is also the cheapest game on my list: $5 USD for the base game, and $2.50 USD for the expansion. If you can't afford this game, then you can't afford things like food, which is bad and I'm sorry. But it also means you can't afford things like internet access, which means if you're reading this I'm not sorry because you're a liar.
2.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim ;
(PC/360/PS3)
Everyone's probably talked about Skyrim enough that even if you've never played it, you've got a pretty good idea about what it's all about. Noting that, I'm going to skip any introductory explanations about the basics.
Straight to the point, then, is that the things I love about Elder Scrolls haven't changed in a decade. Sure, we've seen all kinds of modifications to the formula since Morrowind; the introduction of much more level scaling and loot scaling, leveling system changes including the addition of perks, combat rules changes, and so on. There are tangible differences between Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim that set them apart from each other in meaningful ways.
What hasn't changed, though, is that the core of the game is still about creating your own personal character, getting set out into the world, and immediately being able to go out in any direction and find something interesting. Almost every truly memorable moment in these games has come from exploring some area I had never seen, had no foreknowledge of or quest leading to, and discovering something completely unexpected. That sense of exploration and discovery is the one thing that I feel like no other series of games that has even come close to matching. Part of making that feeling of discovery potent is to create a world that feels genuine; the act of finding something doesn't translate as memorable if what is found doesn't feel like it was actually there long before you found it. It's an incredibly difficult thing to try and purposefully craft into a game, and Bethesda shows with Skyrim that they have begun to reach masterful levels of understanding how to do that. That journey is set to the backdrop of an amazing musical score that ranks among the very best they've ever put forward.
Unfortunately, it's hard to say that they are reaching any kind of mastery with most aspects of the rest of the game. The combat sees improvements from Oblivion, certainly, but when your improvements only elevate you to the level of mediocrity it's hard to appreciate them. The quest structure feels like it hasn't changed at all since Morrowind, and in some ways even comes across as a step backward, as concepts like faction allegiances and interplay continues to be minimized. The characters, too, feel like the same simple NPCs they've been crafitng since Morrowind; characters with little depth that mostly serve as infodumps or dots connecting the points between quests. Crafting remains woefully balanced as well, and the forces of loot scaling and level scaling are still felt to the detriment of the overall experience.
It's still nowhere near enough to impede the desire to explore Skyrim's landscape just to see all the interesting locations they've filled it with. Much like every other Elder Scrolls game, I find myself doing so for dozens of hours and enjoying how well it sates the wanderlust in me, flaws and all.
3.
King of Dragon Pass ;
(iOS)
If you took a text-based RPG, a strategy game like Civilization, and a pint of depression and blended them all together, you'd get something like King of Dragon Pass. It's a strange simulation and RPG hybrid that uses hand-drawn art and distressing amounts of numbers to tell the story of a small barbarian clan trying to stay alive in a strange land. There's a lot of management to be done, hard decisions to be made, and absolutely no animation to speak of whatsoever.
In the world of King of Dragon Pass, the gods and mortals once walked together and shared the world; the gods were eventually attacked by the forces of Chaos, and were being destroyed in a war that seemed to come from all sides, so they abandoned the world and left mortals behind to save thesmelves (like I said, this game is depressing). In King of Dragon Pass, you govern the fate of a small clan long after all of these events took place. Driven out of their homeland, they're forced to rebuild in the Dragon Pass, a land not well explored by men and full of all kinds of terrible and mostly depressing things.
What makes this game compelling is that balanced against very solid and well thought out simulation mechanics, you'll constantly be thrown curve balls in the form of crises that you will be given a selection of possible solutions and asked to choose between. We're talking real choice and consequence an order of magnitude more meaningful than modern games; one single decision can chain into any number of consequences that play themselves out over years if not generations of your clan's existence. Those consequences aren't trivial and many of them completely change the course of the game in ways you can never predict. As a brief example, when out on an exploration mission my men came across the corpse of a dragonnewt warrior; there were five or six ways to handle the corpse, and my advisors came to no concensus. I decided to try and craft a set of armor out of it, producing a treasure that made one of my advisors much more effective at combat. A few years later, my village was approached by another dragonnewt claiming to be the owner of the body we made the armor out of! I tried to lie my way out of it, but the dragonnewt had a mystic connection to his previous body and called me on my bluff. I gave up and returned the armor, not knowing what kind of magic the dragonnewt was capable of. Since he clearly seemed capable of reviving I didn't want to risk my clan's safety. The next year I was raided by a neighboring clan, and we lost the battle as we had a much smaller force and no longer had the aid of the magic armor. Our food stores were pillaged, and my clan began a slow descent into starvation (not depressing at all).
The overarching goal is to strengthen your clan and make alliances with other clans to form a tribe. Other tribes form of clans that don't join yours, and eventually a kingdom is formed; the win state, as you might expect, is derived from the game's namesake. Just how much is tracked by the game on both macro and micro levels is impressive. Other clans will form feuds with yours that you can solve in a variety of ways, and that clan will remember the feud even if later you add it to your tribe. The invidiual clans are not of one mind, either - the nobles and the villagers might hold different opinions about your clan, causing unrest among their villagers if their nobles start dealing in favors with you. Pretty much everything you can think of is tracked; if you recruit farmers, the game tracks where you recruited them from, so recruiting people from clans of poor relations can cause bad blood on either side. If you take prisoners during a raid, you can ransom them to the clan they came from, free them, kill them or keep them as thralls - if that same clan raids you later and wins the battle, they can free those same people you took as slaves. Not only that, but if you chose that your ancestors were not thrall-keepers, you can lose favor with their spirits and they'll not answer you when you need them.
I'm not going to try and explain all of the game's intricacies, but the point is that the game's depth is amazing and shows a care for granular detail that most games don't even dream of. On top of that is layered a fantastic crises system of choice and consequence that games pretending to be focused on that very thing pale in comparison to. It may not be a looker - though I hesitate to say even that because it is chock full of quality hand-drawn art - but Kingdom of Dragon Pass has it where it counts in spades.
4.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution ;
(PC/360/PS3)
Even if you've never played the 2000 original, you probably knew that this sequel had a lot to live up to. I'm not actually one of those that considers Deus Ex in the highest regard; I very much like the original game, but I always felt the nonsensical plot got a little too crazy for its own good, and the overall balance of the game's skills and weapons was kind of a mess. Also it ran like poop back when it released. What it did have, though, was some phenomenal level design that accounted for a huge number of different play styles and really allowed you to build your character however you wanted and still find content that felt tailored for exactly how you built J.C. Denton.
To get it out of the way immediately - this game does not reach the heights of Deus Ex when it comes to that level design. Even with the fewer skills to be accounted for, there's not quite as much thought put into the setpieces and it simply doesn't pack the level of complexity Deus Ex's environments did.
It isn't far off, though, which means it is still a very intelligently designed first-person adventure that allows the player to explore and exploit their particular character's strengths to achieve all manner of goals in the gold-tinted future Jensen lives in. That exploration is accompanied by a wonderful presentation; the art design for Human Revolution is truly phenomenal and from start to finish employs a cohesive and distinct style that makes the world seem very genuine. The sound design is even better, with what I consider to be one of the best complete soundtracks in gaming. The balance of the individual skills and weapons is also much better than the original's, with most every skill serving some kind of useful purpose and each weapon being worth the inventory space for one particular role or another.
Certainly it is not without flaws, as the skill system allows for too many skills to be acquired over the course of a single playthrough, and the hacking skill is provides far more benefits than it should, making it feel almost mandatory. More notably though the much-maligned boss fights stick out like tumors that contradict the rest of the game's wonderful design; luckily they are few, and their encounters are straightforward and brief.
For me, the strengths of Human Revolution came together much more than the the original's, even though the flaws are more evident.
5.
Portal 2 ;
(PC/360/PS3)
The first Portal is one of my favorite games of the current generation. It did one thing, did it phenomenally well, and right when they ran out of the good stuff, the game ended. It's about as smart as you can get when it comes to game design. That made me nervous about the idea of a sequel at all. I wasn't sure what direction they were going to go, and whatever that turned out to be, surely they couldn't hit that pitch-perfect pacing twice in a row.
Unfortunately, that thought pretty much turned out to be accurate. It's not the perfectly tuned slice of puzzle gaming that Portal was, nor did it have the same laser focus on mastering one singular element of design. While the gameplay does introduce some new ideas - mostly revolving around fluids that have different effects on the environment - the puzzles seemed a bit more straightforward throughout the game compared to the original. There's not much room for ingenuity when working through a room in Portal 2; at one point I stumbled across a means to solve a puzzle, and was actually blocked by an invisible wall. To proceed I had to turn around and solve it in the manner that they had put forth instead.
What they did manage to do though is expand the scope of the game in ways that were still very thoughtful. There's a much bigger thread of exposition that runs through Portal 2 in an attempt to replace the mystery of the first game's setting. Losing that kind of mystery always comes at a cost, because whatever you trade mystery for becomes subject to examination and value judgments. That said, I think the folks at Valve were not just smart enough to recognize this, but skilled enough to do it anyway and give something back in return that felt worthwhile. In Portal 2's case, that definitely comes from the characters they've decided to invent and expand upon. They manage to make robots into some of the most memorable, emotive characters in all of gaming. Not just that but they made them genuinely humorous; a risky mark to take aim at but one they manage to strike well and it adds a wonderful element of depth to the cast.
While I adore the characters they've created with this sequel, I can't help but hope that in the third game that a balance is struck between exploring the game's setting and bringing that tight design focus back. The quality of the puzzles seems to have suffered slightly under the additional burden of drawing out the content. That said, Portal 2 is still a puzzler of fantastic quality with some of the best writing I've enjoyed in ages.