Top 10 Games of 2018

Born to die. World is a fuck. Here are video games I liked in 2018.

10. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Everyone is here! This is an enormous, ridiculous game that shouldn't exist- I love that it does. 70+ characters from Mario to Bayonetta to Solid Snake to the Wii Fit Trainer.

The formula is as much fun as ever, but more importantly for me, this is probably the best single-player Smash Bros. there's ever been. The new World of Light mode is packed to the gills with unique fights, every single one inspired by a specific character- or "spirit" from another game. Every fight is fun and inventive, and the Spirits kept me going just to see what obscure deep cut joke the next fight would be.

9. Astro Bot Rescue Mission

2018 is the year I entered the VR Zone, with PSVR. So there are a lot of VR games I could mention here, but Astro Bot Rescue Mission is easily the best. It doesn't have any guns, it's not a short-lived gag, and it never stops being surprising. You guide an adorable little robot on a journey to rescue all their friends- all while inhabiting the world yourself and looking down on the goings-on.

What makes it special, though, is how each new level introduces a new mechanic, a new trick, a new spectacle. Astro Bot knows it's a VR game, but is never content to let that be its only trick. It wants to use VR to try a thousand different things and make you smile with all of them- and it succeeds.

8. Subnautica

There are a lot of "survival" games out there now, and even as someone who loves them, the fatigue meter is getting full (ha). Another thing I love though, is being underwater. Deep underwater. In the dark. Alone. The word "love" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Subnautica strands you on an ocean planet, with nary a Kevin Costner in sight. You have an escape pod floating on the surface, and some blueprints to start building. As you get more confident, you'll start to explore further- and deeper- from the bright and colorful reef you began your journey on. You'll salvage technology upgrades that let you store more oxygen in between surfacing, withstand the pressure at greater depths, and even build bases and aquatic vehicles.

Subnautica nails two important things for me. One, an extremely rewarding progression- building more advanced equipment and vehicles was really exciting and accounts for some of my favourite memories this year.

Two, the abject fucking terror of pushing forward when you can't see more than a meter in front of you because those headlights are worthless this far down. But you can hear. You can definitely hear. And then you can see. Because it's close now. The thing that sees you.

7. God of War

Boy this is a complicated one. The God of War series has a messy history, to say the least. The original 3 games (or 58,172 games, if you count spinoffs) were really tight, well-made action games. They were also the brutally violent, angry, misogynist fantasies of an edgy middle-schooler.

2018's God of War can't outrun those sins, try as it might- though it does try, and that's something, I guess. It certainly falls into brand new sins too, fridging a female character before the game even begins so that Kratos and his son can begin their journey. Maybe that's not a brand new sin- maybe there's more shared DNA with the old games than nu-God of War wants to admit.

It's still on my top 10 list though, innit? Despite those problems, this is a game I really, really enjoyed. It's a character flaw I'm well aware of, but I can still be a sucker for stories like this. Even as I see what the game is doing, there's a little Dan Ryckert in me who's kind of excited to see Kratos struggle with his past. It's cliche, it's predictable, it's a story we've seen before. But it would be dishonest to say I didn't still have a pretty good time going through it.

It's also just a really fun game to play, the combat feels great. But that's less interesting to talk about, no?

6. Celeste

An early surprise this year! Celeste is a 2D platformer of a breed I'm admittedly a bit tired of. Games that tout grand ambitions of tackling big topics like mental illness, and try to do so through grand abstraction. It can be a beautiful approach, but it's one that's never worked well for me. An excellent and more recent example is this month's darling Gris, an undeniably beautiful game that nonetheless rings hollow for me. See game designer Anna Anthropy's excellent twitter thread for a much better dive on this than I could ever give.

Celeste, though, hit me really hard. It's certainly less abstract, for one, but its particular metaphors also struck me and felt deeply relatable to my own experience with anxiety. I adored its small cast of lovable characters, I pumped my fist in the air as Madeline conquered Celeste mountain along with her self-doubt.

There's a particular sequence partway through the game, in which Madeline has a particularly bad episode of panic and anxiety. Her occasional companion, Theo, tells her to imagine a feather floating up and down with her breath. You help Madeline do this by pressing a button in time with a feather that appears on screen, slowly floating up, falling back down, and floating up again. I know this exercise, I use this exercise, I've gotten through days because of this exercise.

It's a fairly common breathing exercise, all told- but seeing it represented in-game was still powerful. I knew Madeline very, very well in that moment. And I could tell that the folks behind Celeste knew her too. That we'd all been Madeline before.

5. FAR: Lone Sails

There are a couple of very specific mechanical things that I love doing in video games. One of them is operating enormous machinery by myself, and that's what the gorgeous FAR: Lone Sails is all about. You're a tiny little character, and your goal is to travel to the right. You have a big, lumbering vehicle with which to do this. It's got two worn-down wheels, big torn sails, and an engine that seems ready to give out at any moment.

So you scramble around inside the metal beast, keeping the engine fed and the wheels turning as best you can. Solving problems with duct tape and hope. Venturing outside when there's something in the way, solving physics puzzles to keep pushing forward.

FAR: Lone Sails is quiet, short, and intimate. It's just you and this machine, on a journey of about 2 to 3 hours. I played through it in a sitting and haven't booted it up again, but it's one of the most memorable and enjoyable experiences I had this year.

4. Frostpunk

There's another very specific, odd thing that I like in video games. Cold. I love games about being cold. It's why I have over 100 hours logged in The Long Dark, and it's why Frostpunk is here on my list.

It's the early 20th century, a vague apocalypse has caused the planet to fall into a new ice age. You're in charge of a city, built around a colossal turbine, a tower-sized jet engine, stabbed into the ice. Heat from the engine is the only way anyone could survive here, and fuel to keep it running is scarce.

Frostpunk is a brutal city management game, less about building nice houses than about deciding which districts you'll have to risk letting freeze to death. You'll have to send scouts out for food and supplies. You'll have to decide how your city operates, socially. How you care for the sick and dying, how you treat thieves and criminals, and how much humanity you're willing to lose to make it through the storm.

The game is extremely difficult on the standard settings, and there are tougher difficulties that I can't fathom even trying. If you do manage to survive to the end-point of the game's main scenario, it won't be shy about telling you what it cost to get there. You'll be given a summary of your decisions, and a reflection on whether it was even worth it. It's tough stuff, a lot of which I don't feel qualified enough to talk about, but I can say it's evocative as hell and kept me coming back to try and do better.

3. Hitman 2

Hitman 2 is, of course, the seventh game in the Hitman franchise. Because that's not confusing at all. It's the sequel to 2016's Hitman, a soft reboot that brought the series back to its highest highs.

I don't have much to say about Hitman 2 that I haven't said about the previous game, except that it's just more of what I love. It's another set of intricate clockwork levels filled with targets and countless opportunities to kill them. The levels are larger, mechanics have been improved in small but impactful ways, everything has been iterated upon.

I wish I had something profound to say here, and perhaps I would in a post that was just about Hitman 2. But for now it suffices to say that it's just a completely successful sequel to a game I already loved. I'm thrilled IO Interactive was able to pull through financial uncertainty and get this project out.

2. Marvel's Spider-Man

I've wanted this exact game since I saw the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man film at 12 years old. I played every Spider-Man video game I could get my hands on. Sometimes they got close (2004's Spider-Man 2), most of the time they were a mess (either of the adaptations of The Amazing Spider-Man films).

But this year I got it, the one. A traversal system even better than Spider-Man 2, and this time it's not the only thing holding the game together. Combat is challenging, frantic, and rewarding in a way that past attempts have just never gotten right. And on top of all that, it's a solid Spider-Man story, well told, not related to any films.

It has its problems- Spidey needs to stop helping the fucking cops- but it is the game that most consistently put an enormous smile on my face in 2018. It's my first Platinum trophy on any game, in any generation. I did everything in this game. And then the three DLC packs were released, and I did everything in them. And I still want to start a New Game+ and do it all again.

I can't deny this is a personal one for me. It's an extremely competent if unremarkable open world game, massively elevated because it's Spider-Man. I love Spider-Man. I love this game.

1. Hollow Knight

Alright here it is. This didn't come out in 2018, I know. But it did come out on the Switch in 2018, and that's where I played it. And I loved it so profoundly that there is simply no way I could have written a list this year without Hollow Knight at the very top.

You are a small bug, a Knight, with a sword called a Nail. You're in Hallownest- a beautiful, haunting, dying land. You meet friends and rivals and you help them, maybe. Or you hurt them, maybe. You move through this space and you learn about it, if you want to. If you're driven to. You defeat the creatures you're told to defeat, and maybe there's a greater purpose behind it or maybe there isn't. Maybe you don't care. Maybe nobody else in Hallownest does either, anymore. It's on you.

I need you to understand that I'm reining myself in here. That whole fawning incoherent paragraph was me showing restraint. I want to grab you by the shoulders and insist that you play this game. I'm terrified of tattoos but I want a tattoo of some of this game's incredible art. The two soundtrack releases (For the main game and for the DLC, Gods & Nightmares) are my most played albums of the year. Characters like Hornet and the Stag are phone backgrounds. This game caught me completely off guard and swallowed me whole. It took most of the year to finally see it through to the real, "true" ending. I wish I could forget it and do it all again.

Fucking play Hollow Knight.

Notable Mentions:

These are games that didn't make the list for a variety of reasons, but still merit mentioning. Maybe I just didn't get enough time to play them, maybe they have significant problems, but they were still a part of my year.

EXAPUNKS

I never get more than a few levels into Zachtronics' games. I don't have the brain for them, or maybe I just don't have the patience. But I still always admire them, and I made it farther into EXAPUNKS than I usually do with these games. It's a really rad little programming puzzle game with a great aesthetic.

Red Dead Redemption 2

The Xbox doesn't surface how much time you've spent playing a game, and I think that's probably for the best. I don't know how much I've played this game but I know it's a lot. I'm almost finished the story, which is implausibly, agonizingly long. I like it, I think. I might even like it a lot. But there are so many reasons not to recommend it that it just could never find a place on my list. For all it does well, for all its remarkable technical achievement, it's still a Rockstar game- even when it desperately doesn't want to be. It's in love with itself, it's plodding and slow, it's deeply tone deaf.

And all of that is just the game itself. It was also made in a studio whose heads declared with pride that workers had put in 100 hour weeks to get the game done. There were moments in Red Dead Redemption 2 that I really, really enjoyed. Maybe even a lot of them. But I just cannot bring myself to recommend it to another person. Even my own enjoyment is tempered by knowledge of the toil that went into making it, and the guilt of being complicit in the worst of this industry. Because I still bought the damn game, didn't I.

Jurassic World Evolution

This is a pretty bare-bones, maybe even poor theme park management sim. But it's also got the Jurassic Park license. So I played 54 hours of it.

Monster Hunter World

Like it did for so many this year, Monster Hunter World got me to care about Monster Hunter. I still eventually fell off and haven't felt much desire to go back to it, but I'll never forget the short love affair we had. I hope the series continues in this direction, because I might be a real MonHun fan.