1. The Witness ; It's interesting to see all the things people praise about this game. Reading about how some things blew people's mind, how thought provoking they found the narrative or how genius they thought the game's way of teaching you things was. It's interesting because I didn't really care about any of this. I just really liked the puzzles. It's simply amazing how the game took such a simple idea - draw a line from start to finish - and then kept introducing new mechanics that kept the idea fresh for hundreds of puzzles. Sure, not all of them work - a certain section of puzzles relying on sound is completely terrible for instance - but those cases are a minority.
And it's not just the diversity of the puzzles that makes the game great. The puzzles in the game are simply among the most fun and well designed in any puzzle game I've played so far. There's so many puzzles that seem impossible when you first see them, but after spending half an hour or so on them you finally see the solution and feel like an idiot, since the solution seems so obvious in retrospect. For example, there's this one puzzle later in the game. It starts of as an incredibly easy puzzle, one similar to the ones you've solved a dozen times before. But when you solve it, the game adds new elements to it, making it harder. You repeat this couple of times, the puzzle getting harder and harder each time, progressively adding more and more complicated elements. You struggle with the penultimate solution for what feels like ages, but you eventually get it down by building on your past solutions. And then, for the final part, the game adds a single new element to the puzzle. A joke really - you've seen this element before. It's incredibly simple and shouldn't cause you much trouble compared to what's been added on before. Except it's not. None of your past solutions work anymore. None of then come even close to working. NOTHING works. You're back to square one. That single, simple element forces you to completely reevaluate your approach. It's genius really. And that's just one of the many great puzzles in the game.
And while I said i just really liked the puzzles, that's not the entire truth. The game
has much more going for it - there's
a lot of content, the game's way of teaching you things
is great and the structure is amazing - an open world that allows you to tackle the puzzles in (mostly) any order, which means you will rarely be stuck on just this one puzzle . It also "ends" on a spectacularly high note, presenting you with a challenge that pushes you to your limit and at first seems impossible, even compared to everything that came before. When you solve that, you really feel like you've mastered the game, even if you've still got dozens of optional puzzles to get through. It's just such a great package overall.
I can't thing of much that impressed me as much as this game did, not just this year but in general. The game's simply a masterpiece.
2. Tyranny ; When Obsidian released Pillars of Eternity, I was quite disappointed. The game was supposed to be the second coming of Baldur's Gate 2, but I just couldn't stay interested in it for very long. The combat was good, but outside of that it was just too bloated with middling content which just wasn't very memorable. A year from playing the game I only remember a total of about two quests I did - one because it had a challenging combat encounter and one because the story was interesting. Well, aside from the characters Avellone wrote. Those were great, but felt rather out of place in the game. But this year Obsidian released Tyranny, which immediately fixes most of my problems with Pillars of Eternity. Right of the bat you're dropped into an interesting world and forced to define your character's backstory through a series of interesting (and meaningful) choices. This both immediately connects you to the world and gives you a reason to care about your character, as well as defining his place in the world. It's a lovely piece of exposition that means the game can start off strong right away. Several RPGs have tried similar to set up your character's backstory in a similar way (Dragon Age: Origins being a notable example), but none of them connected me to their worlds as much as Tyranny, mostly because you're making big choices that get brought up a lot through the course of the story, and because the world's actually interesting. When the game properly starts, Tyranny continues to impress with excellent world building and great characters. Instead of trying to create a massive world with thousands of years of history, like Pillars of Eternity, it focuses on a smaller, much more contained conflict. This means you're meeting important characters right of the bat, and get to devote your attention to events that actually matter, instead of doing 100 fetch quests and killing rats for the first dozen hours. The game's just really good about not wasting any time. This shows in the characters to. Instead of talking to generic inn keeps in a godforsaken village, you're talking to soul devouring gods, mind controlling singers and generals who can keep their entire army from dying, IN THE FIRST HOUR OF THE GAME. Of course, Obsidian's stellar writing is present, making dialogue with those characters consistently fun to read through.
The combat is slightly less stellar, but it's by no means bad. It's similar to Pillars of Eternity, in that it's a real time with pause tactical game, but it's simpler and more streamlined. Playing on the hardest difficulty forces you to constantly keep your positioning and ability use in mind, and crafting your own spells keeps the strategic side of things engaging. Sadly, the last third of the game is stupidly easy and combat just devolves into murdering everything. The bosses in particular are pretty sad. It's not perfect, but it's fun for most of the game, and definitely not bad enough to bring the overall package down.
3. Umineko ; This one is a bit weird. The fan translation has been available for quite a while now, but the game (well, the first half at least) got the official English release this year. As such, I suppose it should count for this year. Umineko is quite simply the best visual novel I've ever read. By a very large margin at that. Better than Stein's Gate, better than 999, better than Ace Attorney. Much better.
The first thing that sets it apart is the setting. The game begins with a yakuza family convening on their private island to discuss their future since their current leader is on the verge of death. Now, as the Yakuza series has thought us (and if you haven't played that yet, you probably should since it's great) any game featuring yakuza as its protagonists is bound to be something special. And Umineko is. It takes about two chapters to realize every character present on the island is:
a) Completely crazy
b) Itching to murder everyone else on the island
It's great. First of all - it's unusual. Generic high school kids and anime tropes (not that it's entirely without those, but they take a seat very far in the back) are replaced by an Agatha Christie style murder mystery staring crazy mafia members. Secondly, the characters are great. Most of the early chapters are dedicated to setting up the characters, but they manage not to feel boring since the characters are interesting enough. The fact that it's a murder mystery also immediately makes you pay attention to clues.
The thing is though, that's not really what makes Umineko great. In fact, it's not even what Umineko really is. It describes the first game pretty well, but there's 8 games in total, and the story gets COMPLETELY CRAZY pretty early on. The murder mystery remains central to the plot, but on top of that there's magic, several love stories, tragic tales of child abuse, more magic, witches, gun fights, magic gun fights, a meta analysis of the detective genre, several different stories occurring simultaneously, gods, personal musings from the author on various things, and so many different things. It's INSANE.
It sounds incredibly silly, but it works. Somehow, all of it works together to create an incredibly cohesive story and even the most completely insane subplots manage to tie into the central mystery. Because despite everything, Umineko actually is about the murder mystery. It's incredible.
4. Sunless Sea: Zubmariner ; It's more Sunless Sea basically. There's not really much to say here. If you enjoy great writing and incredible word building you've probably played Sunless Sea already (if you didn't, you really should), and this just adds more amazing content to the game. For those that didn't like Sunless Sea there's not much here that will change your mind.
5. Hitman ; I've tried to get into this franchise a bunch of times, but I never really could. It was always a bit to clunky for me. The new Hitman finally fixed that. The game takes all the good parts of the previous games, fixes the bad things and adds some great new gameplay mechanics. It also has some of the best level design of any game out there.
6. Dark Souls III ; Yeah, it's more of the same. Yeah, a lot of it is a retread of the first Dark Souls. But until another company makes something that can match the Souls franchise, that doesn't really matter. It's more souls and that's great.
7. Devil Daggers ; This is hands down the most surprising game of the year. I remember reading praise for it here, but I've never really liked Doom-like single player shooters. They always felt a bit to empty, mostly consisting of circle strafing enemies and shooting everything that moves, with every death feeling arbitrary (oh, enemies shooting at me slowly withered my health down. Or maybe they shot me from somewhere I didn't even see). So I dismissed the praise, which was a big mistake. This game is incredible. It's just full of amazing design ideas that add up to an incredible game.
First, there's the movement. Bunnyhopping around the arena just feels great. But that's more of an afterthought really. What makes this game work is how incredibly the enemies are designed to constantly challenge you. Every new enemy introduced forces you to reevaluate your approach to the game. The skulls keep you moving around. The squids (as the game website calls them) keep spawning new enemies forcing you to deal with them sooner or later, but you can only do so from a specific angle, since you need to hit their weak spot. Just when you get the hang of dealing with these basic enemies, the game introduces a faster skull that you can't just run away from. Suddenly you constantly have to be on the lookout for those to avoid getting killed from behind. Then there's spiders, which must be dealt with as soon as possible, before they overwhelm the arena with spider-lings that will kill you. The game keeps adding on different enemies for far longer than the wast majority of the players will ever survive.
Because of this you constantly have to think about what to do next. Should you kill the spider that just spawned, or is it better to kill the squid right in front of you? Do you have enough time to do that before a skull catches up to you? How will you ever find the time to deal with that giant centipede that just spawned? And you have to do this while jumping around the arena like crazy, constantly dodging things in front of you.
The best part for me though, is that I always know what killed me, and I know exactly where I made the mistake that got me killed. That's because every enemy is unique and has a distinct way of killing you.
8. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun ; Another surprising game, since it released so far into the year. I've always found the concept of the Commandos games appealing. Real time, strategic, party based stealth? Sounds great. Unfortunately the games have always seemed a bit to dated for me, which is why I'm glad this game took that formula and modernized it.
The level design is my favorite thing about it. The levels are open, allowing for many different approaches and strategies. Sure, there's not a whole lot of them, but the optional challenges really push you to explore each map to its fullest.
9. Overwatch ; I was sadly quite late to this game, so I can't really rank it higher. It's definitely fun - the most fun I've had playing a multiplayer shooter since TF2 when it was still relatively new.
10. Stardew Valley ; It's Harvest Moon/Rune Factory on the PC, and it's great. Tons of different things to do and the farming's nice and relaxing. It's the kind of game you can just keep playing for hours, never really getting bored. For some reason I can't really find much to say about it though.
