2014 was possibly my least favorite year in video games; or, put differently, 2014 was an amazing year for pretty good video games, and a terrible year for excellent video games (the perfection that is Nidhogg aside, that is).
Need to add: Always Sometimes Monsters
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Nidhogg is one of the most pure, exhilarating competitive multiplayer experiences in video games. When a match goes way longer than it should, it only skyrockets the tension. The game's sense of style is so evocative of an Atari medieval dystopia, too; the last time I played a few rounds of this with friends we ended up essentially creating fan fiction about Nidhogg's world. Maybe no one can die in this world unless they're fed to the Nidhogg, and they just spawn forever until they're consumed? If that's true, who are the participants in these duels? Are they prisoners - or do they want this? Is it THE Nidhogg? Or just Nidhogg? Or, maybe, its the more informal 'hogg? This is a good video game.
Episode 3 Kentucky Route Zero is a fascinating project, and one of the best-written fictional texts about American life in any medium. Each episode is exponentially better than the last: the first episode and it's side-chapter are good, but maybe not all that compelling in and of themselves, until Episode 2 and The Entertainment got released, which are two genuinely wild experiences. Episode 3 clicks into place many of the overarching themes in Kentucky Route Zero's central narratives: it's in this chapter that the concept of debt takes center stage, and in which KRC introduces this gorgeous, bleak visual metaphor for debt, particularly medical debt, in which the parts of the character which are 'owned' by debt and indentured labor appear as glowing bones while the rest of the body is rendered normally. I think episode IV is the apex of Kentucky Route Zero from both a narrative and a design perspective, but episode 3 is a close second. Here and There Along the Echo This side-chapter is pure interactive art object. The entire experience consists of a landline which can be used to call an automated number for the Bureau of Secret Tourism. Dozens of phone extensions are revealed through each call. The deeper into the phone tree you explore, the more bizarre the calls get. There's not a lot of 'play' here, sure, but you won't forget experiencing this episode once you play it. Cardboard Computer is one of the only development teams really willing to *do* something with their narrative in an unabashed sense, to extend the themes of their landmark series this far. It's terrific.
Big series like XCOM and Fire Emblem are often heralded for their perma-death design ethos, because they disempower players who start those games expecting power fantasies. That's all well and good, but at the end of the day, those games are about fighting some video game-ass video game monsters with extra complications added in. This War of Mine is brutal in an entirely different, more difficult sense, because it disempowers characters who are normal, likable people who have nothing and who ask for nothing except to survive. I've played a decent chunk of this game, but have never once finished a campaign because losing someone in This War of Mine is devastating, tragic in the way that losing someone in real life is tragic. If nothing else, This War of Mine is one of the most innovative games of the decade in its genre; I can't think of a single other game that uses procedural gameplay to tell a story this bold and realistic.
I bounced off of Dark Souls II a few times but couldn't help myself from coming back to it. It took a while for me to accept that Dark Souls II just isn't the mysterious, compellingly brutal experience of the first game. It actively wants to welcome players. It has a friendlier gameplay loop that doesn't reward your ability as a player to overcome impossible odds so much as it rewards your ability to just be generally persistent; kill an enemy enough times and it will vanish from the map forever, allowing you to empty out the entire world by fighting one enemy at a time. Comparing this tamer design along with the endlessly varied, un-tethered plot of this game against its predecessor and you'll find yourself disappointed, but appreciate the game for its merits as its own experience and you'll be rewarded with some occasionally magnificent instances of artistic design. There were more than a few times playing through this game and all of its DLC where I had to let myself stop and just stare dumbfounded at the cryptic, beautiful space I was inhabiting. I don't think the game works as a "Dark Souls II," exactly, but it definitely feels complete as its own experience. Maybe if they had filled in the blank with another D word and called it ____ Souls instead I would've jumped on board more quickly.
(P.T.) I have never played P.T., but I sure have watched a lot of it. Many of the greatest horror stories of all time shroud themselves with mystery. It's scarier to believe there's something more hidden beneath the story, something lurking in the shadows that may reveal itself at any given moments. It's why people were so shocked at the apparent realism of the original Blair Witch Project, and why communities like creepypasta flourish. It's a travesty that Konami shuttered Silent Hills, but because we'll never get a resolution to this unsettling piece of gaming history and, more to the point, the fact that Konami outright deleted this game from existence has shrouded P.T.'s already unsolvable Pandora's box with an even greater density of theorizing and misinformation. This game is a myth.
My love for Tomodachi life is true and unabashed. One of the most bizarre Nintendo titles ever released. I guess I should say I wish there was a little more of it, but honestly I don't care that much. I admire that Nintendo built a social machine that encouraged Barack Obama get married to Bart Simpson without any input from me whatsoever. It's beautiful, and that's all there is to it.
There isn't much for the player to do in Glitchhikers other than drive, look, and then think about what you're looking at while you drive. It's a surreal experience that perfectly captures that specific kind of isolation that comes with being on the road way too late at night with only your thoughts to keep you company.
While nowhere near as fucked up or prescient as its insane sequel, The New Order is satisfyingly pulp. There's a tonal imbalance to this game that feels like unsteady storytelling - you're waxing philosophic about a life lost one minute, then you're sunk in the existential hell of an Orwellian dystopia the next, and then you're doing acid with Jimmy Hendrix in his bedroom. It never reads as cohesive, unlike The New Colossus, which abandons the pretense of staid blockbuster movie tropes to skip straight to the batshit satire at the heart of this series (re: The Good Stuff). As a singular story it's therefore uneven, but it works more than it doesn't. The one area where The New Order excels over its successor is in the difficulty ramp up. The solutions to The New Order's combat arenas are (mostly) legible, and I rarely found myself manically firing in all directions hoping to God I reach the next checkpoint in one piece.
The Evil Within is the worst best game of all time. The general consensus at the time of its release was that it was a miserable slog through rusty video game corridors filled with punishing PS2-era boss fights. That's not *exactly* incorrect, as it certainly ticks all those boxes, but The Evil Within is also one of the only games bold enough to construct sequences that actually mirror the hazy, subliminal, associative nature of a nightmare. The plot requires quite a bit of decoding to make any sense of - probably too much - but it's also a genuinely new flavor of horror story which re-contextualizes a lot of ancient tropes to great effect, and the imagery is inspired. The Evil Within is flawed, definitely enough so that I would hesitate to recommend it to someone who isn't already into horror, but if you do try it you'll find that beneath the repetition and unfriendly enemy encounters lies a wholly new horror narrative that lives up to the hype.
I played every episode of this as they released. It is a cinematic Edgar Allen Poe story, the length of a short novel, portrayed as a cursed Atari game. It is translated rather poorly but crafted with real heart. It's also genuinely scary in spite of its familiar aesthetic.