2011 is secretly an awesome year. Dark Souls, Deus Ex and Skyrim are all easy 'game of the decade' contenders, and most of the AAA titles of note were host to some surprisingly personal, reflective narratives.
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I have never had an experience with any piece of media quite like Dark Souls. It takes the repetition inherent to video games and extrapolates it into what is more or less a lesson about patience and persistence. It doesn't 'give' the player anything. There are no easy wins, no clear path ahead, no explicit narrative. It is a game in which every single decision you make matters. The way in which you are rewarded by playing Dark Souls comes more or less from how you approach it. Want to understand the game's lore? Then you have to decipher it yourself by collecting the world's artifacts and studying the history of the spaces you're funneled through. Trying to beat a sequence that seems impossible? Think long and hard about the character you've built and the obstacle you're trying to overcome. That's all there is to it; you put in what you get out. I also love the idea of a world afflicted with dementia. People become undead - i.e. lose their minds - when they give up hope. Your ability to achieve in this world is inherently tied to your belief in yourself. What I'm saying is, the takeaway from Dark Souls is ultimately optimistic, and you feel good leaving it. That is, as long as you're okay getting smacked around a bunch to get there.
Yakuza's sense of style and dynamic, semi-soap operatic storytelling has been there from the first PS2 title, but Yakuza 4 is the entry that defined Yakuza's grand ambitions, taking the series from bombastic, street brawl vacations through Tokyo to a truly singular depiction of a city and the kinds of people who live in it. If the first three Yakuza games are an action movie-style facsimile of the Yakuza genre films, then Yakuza 4, 5 and 0 are a search for humanity within that fantastical excess, of finding goodness in the lowest places. Yakuza 4 defines its aesthetic in stricter terms than its progenitors. Gone are the crunchy PS2-era action game techno tracks, replaced by an uptempo jazz score reminiscent of '60s and '70s crime thrillers. The series' heretofore staid soap operatic cutscene style is no more, replaced by dynamic, fluid cinematography that echoes a certain film noir grit. Even the street fashion in the game has personality, whereas in past titles NPCs were either too plain or hilariously unreal. Unlike the heroic, idealistic posturing of previous games, this title opens with a loan shark smoking a cigarette in the rain, on his way to collect. While series mainstay Kiryu is a major part of the story by the end, we spend so much more time with three new playable characters: the loan shark with a code of honor Akiyama, the convicted mass murderer Saejima, and Tanimura, an extortionist on the police force. All of their stories reveal a different side of Yakuza's fictional Kamurocho district - Akiyama, who hoards and subsequently redistributes his wealth, has easy access to all the expensive spots in the city, along with access to the interconnected rooftops of nearby businesses. Saejima, being on the run from the police, lives in the city's underground with other homeless folks. Tanimura, the only character fluent in Chinese, is a familiar figure throughout the enclaves of Chinese immigrants living in the backstreets of the city. Suffice to say, while I like the original three titles in the Yakuza series quite a bit, Yakuza 4 is a more textually dense and thematically cogent title - even the minigames are designed in such a way as to further each protagonists characterization. I sure wish I'd have picked up this as my first Yakuza game back in the day rather than the comparatively unfriendly Yakuza 3, or I might not be playing catch up with these games all these years later.
It's fitting Superbrothers was released the same year as Skyrim, because they both tie into the same childhood memory of losing hundreds hours to The Legend of Zelda games. Sword and Sworcery takes that childhood wonder and pulls the camera back on all parties involved - the player's ultimately pointless hunt for the geometric mcguffin, the developers left to anonymously grumble in and around the outskirts of the world they've invented - even the publisher's ability to ensnare you into an immersive experience they absolutely don't understand are treated as characters in a narrative arc. To give the NPCs such dry, meandering lives and to imbue the player character with internet-casual monologues make for an ingenious examination of how - and, importantly, why - we engage with video games.
After 80 hours of playing Skyrim as a Nordic werewolf vampire hunter melee lady, I never once have felt an urge to return. If one were to graph out my experience with Skyrim, it would be a quick skyrocket to the top and then a slow descent to the bottom. At the outset, Skyrim is an unbelievable, gorgeous world with endless possibility. Around hour 40, your character's level progression is no longer a matter of tactics but a matter of course; when new enemy types have run out and each encounter becomes another version of something you've been doing over and over all along, and when you begin to outright predict where literally every single dungeon is bound to end up the second you pass the loading screen, the clockwork of the world is laid bare and the charm inevitably fades. But those first thirty hours? No world had ever felt so open, and massive, and my role as a wanderer in it so appealing. It reminded me of seeing playing Ocarina of Time time as a kid. I have some substantive problems with Skyrim's perpetual need to empower the player over the world around them all the time no matter the circumstance, but I'm willing to forgive the game just about any flaw for giving me those first thirty hours.
When players finished L.A. Noire, we were all more than a little done with Cole Phelps. His by-the-book attitude and dark past as a war hero made him an engaging enough character, but dude STOP yellin' at all the victims you're helping out! This unsolvable issue (if the 2017 re-release is any indication) of how to best represent the Truth/Doubt/Lie mechanics proved to be a frustrating narrative stumbling block, but swallow that and you'll be rewarded with one of the most convincing period pieces in video games. L.A. Noire came so close to achieving the dream of the mature AAA title in which the player commits little to no violence. So close! It is the great video game unicorn that, if you're only playing the big releases, we've still yet to catch. Thank God for indies, I guess.
Like Fear 2, Condemned 2 and (arguably?) Resident Evil 2 before it, Dead Space 2 is the follow up to a critical success that ratcheted up its action to broaden its audience. For me, Dead Space 2 is the most successful example of a developer completely turning around the ship on a franchise. I can't say Dead Space 2 was particularly scary, but I can say it's an intense horror shooter full of fun (re: awful, sickening, very gross, bad) surprises.
It never seemed possible to me for this to succeed as a follow up to a game that reinvented complex player choice, but Human Revolution is so good because it limits the game's scope rather than expands it. It is a thirty hour cyber punk epic that revolves around a single cultural issue: what will the repercussions of voluntary genetic modification be? Literally every side quest is in Human Revolution reflects an aspect of the conversation too specific for the globe-trotting campaign. How does an idea-based job market function in a fair manner if some people can afford to buy themselves faster brains? What happens to professional sports? How would grass roots human rights organizations respond to the inevitable discrimination? It's all here, and there isn't a moment passed in this game that doesn't open the door to some further explication of the issue. Even the title, Human Revolution, is pointed in its ambiguity. What makes Human Revolution so cool isn't that it just introduces these issues - it also allows you to make decisions in that space, and therefore draw your own cultural and sociopolitical conclusions as you play.
The Witcher 2 is one of the only AAA games I can think of (from this era of game development) that implicitly trusts the intelligence of its audience. It assumes you are an adult and can handle complexity. The plot in this one is a bit slight for me, as it has a very Game of Thrones-y tendency to throw a ton of plot at the player at a time, but that's the only complaint I can think of. I would argue CD Project Red's Witcher 2 equals and occasionally surpasses George R. R. Martin's complexities in ethics-questioning storytelling. Imagine being put in a space like that, and then being tasked with making on the spot decisions that heavily affect the world around you, and you'll have a pretty good idea of why I like Witcher 2 so much.
As a puzzle game, Catherine is...how to put it. Mystifying? The game is so clearly designed to be a narrative-driven psycho-sexual drama, I can't fathom a guess as to why the meat of the game's challenge comes from a bunch of bad Tomb Raider block puzzles? The idea of having to climb a tower in your dreams to escape your real-life guilt is a neat metaphor, though, and I love Catherine's willingness to ask blunt questions to the player. Sex is treated almost entirely as a reward in video games - beat Metroid fast enough and see Samus in her swimsuit, work hard enough at a relationship in Mass Effect and see a sex scene, etc. - but here it's the subject at hand. Vincent's dilemma of settling down in a relationship he's worried has peaked or indulging in some meaningless fling is treated with a fair amount of complexity. After each day passes, Vincent spends the night at his favorite bar with his crew, fading in and out of conversation to type drafts of texts he struggles to send. That is a fascinating, mundane, cool thing to do in a video game. More games need to exist in this space.
Edmund McMillen's critique of religious absolutism that stars a naked, abused boy who fights with his tears somehow became everyone's favorite rogue-like. How? I'm sure I don't know. I do know this is a rewarding, deep, grimy game that is a joy to suffer through. The self-aware additional content packs cheapen the experience, I think.