So far, this has been the hardest year to rank. Not only is every game in the top spots of my list radically different from the others, almost all of the games listed have several obvious flaws.
For me, 2012 was the year I realized that I play games to experience something new more than I play them to enjoy the thrill of challenge. As a result, every iteration of this list that has ever existed is fundamentally way different than the last.
Need to Add: Fire Emblem: Awakening
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The reasons I love Jasper Byrne's Lone Survivor cascade into one another, then loop back around. First, I love that the game was almost entirely made by one man struggling to find his place within a new culture. I love that it feels like a more direct followup to Silent Hill 2 than Silent Hill 3. I love that the game understands 'less is more' horror storytelling than almost any other horror story I've seen. I love the way that ethos is baked into the visual design - everything is blown out pixels at an odd resolution, like you're sitting too close to the screen - AND into the game's simple, broken-feeling script. I love how Byrne's intent with the game was to replicate social anxiety and isolation in a space in which you feel uncomfortable meeting new people. I love thinking of how playing it alone on a laptop, empathizing with these things, connects me so directly to the one person who sat alone, on their computer, creating it.
Dishonored was an underdog kind of AA/AAA game back in the day, but playing it today (2021 as of this writing), it resonates as true so much more today than it did a decade ago. Dishonored's depiction of plague and English pseudo-history feels ugly and raw, yet correct. Don't let the paper-thin characterization or the caricature-style art fool you - Dishonored is a clever game with a *lot* of meaning and quiet moments of genius baked into its world.
Thirty Flights of Loving is only fifteen minutes long; all fifteen of those minutes are flawless.
Hotline Miami takes the aesthetics of Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive and sets them on fire. About a billion people have praised this game's ballet-brutal combat, and rightly so, but the fact that this thing is an abjectly uncomfortable study of the mind of a psychopath is underappreciated. I would dread having to see what the guy at the counter was going to look like after each mission in the game's second half. The ego/id/superego (re: the woman he cares for, the people he's killing and the self) conversations that occur in the protagonist's mind make Hotline Miami feel like a horror film in which you play as someone who doesn't realize he is the monster.
The ultimate rogue-like, partially because it requires so little explanation to work. Spelunky is the perfect, perpetually replayable single player arcade game. One of the only roguelikes that's nearly as fun to play when you're losing as when you're winning.
Every time I play through Sleeping Dogs I love it a little more than before. You could easily boil it down to its obvious film/video game references, sure, but to do so would miss the point. Sleeping Dogs is a game that understands exactly what makes the fantasy of the martial arts action film great, and gets you to experience that genre's greatest moments with as little to hinder you as possible. Also, honestly, I just really like Wei Shen. I like that he is an undercover cop who sometimes dresses like a banana.
Although it was almost definitely the result of EA's sharpening Bioware to a dull point, Mass Effect 3's more explosive, combat-heavy conclusion neatly pairs with a franchise that began as an amalgamation of every other science fiction subgenre. It had already possessed the Star Wars adventure, Star Trek politicking, gritty Blade Runner neo-noir crime drama, the goofy '50's pulp that the series pulls its character design so heavily from - and it all ends, fittingly, in the one subgenre it hadn't yet touched: the science fiction war film.
The fact that Rock Band Blitz isn't still a thing is a crime. Take all that money you spent on Rock Band tracks plus the mechanics of Frequency/Amplitude, and you have the pay-to-play music game you've (re: I've) always wanted. This game added arcade power ups to the tried and true Rock Band formula to make things more compelling, and it worked wonders, but maaaaan is it visually staid. People tend to say they value mechanics over aesthetics, but I bet more dynamism in visual design would've made this game a hit. Why's it so orange???
Maybe the most insane video game I've ever played. Its got more to say than its obscure, Adult Swimmy bizarro humor suggests, too. Putting Frog Fraction's interpretations of the edutainment game, the adventure game and the clicker as a mirror to those genre's mainstays reveals their penchant towards arbitrariness. A game's mechanics should interweave with its narrative/art design, and not act as a coat of paint over a mechanics-driven project. It's like the 'which came first, the lyrics or the song?' thing; it doesn't really matter, so long as one is built to be in tandem with the other.
Max Payne 3 got pummeled by critics and audiences alike both for failing to execute on the loose graphic novel brutality of the original games or the smooth, easy to pick up mechanics of other, more traditional third person shooters at the time. As such, it's one of those 'you have to re-learn how to play it to get it' games, and getting past the hurdle of deciphering Max Payne 3's very particular rhythmic combat, for me, was rewarding. Seriously, this game's incredible destruction tech and unique, well-drawn locales brought it closer to the dream of the John Woo game than anything Remedy developed. On top of that, it was refreshing to experience a Houser brothers script in a totally new genre. They wrote a hard boiled action story essentially over top of Tony Scott's Man on Fire. That's a cool thing!