My Incredibly Late Top 7 Games of the Year 2015

I know this is really late, but I finally got around to writing this list up after a very busy few months. So although I missed the GOTY zeitgeist, I feel like this is a case of better late than never. I need to set the record straight on my personal feelings after the debacle that was my podcast's GOTY awards. Without further adieu, here's the list:

7. Yoshi’s Woolly World- I just started playing this game in early January, but the music and the aesthetic are so great that I felt I needed to include it on this list. In only the first world I’ve seen Monty Moles burrowed beneath fabric, yarn butterflies, and Shy Guys wielding knitting needles. On top of the look and feel, Nintendo’s excellent level design has been in full effect for the first few levels. The cuteness got me in the door and the design got Yoshi on this list.

6. Broken Age- Broken Age Act 2 didn’t quite stick the landing, but that is only because Act 1 set the bar very high. The puzzles in part 2 were notably more obtuse than part 1 and I can’t help but think that this was the result of backer feedback. Broken Age was pitched as a return to adventure games of old and I think the first half might have incorporated too much modern knowledge about difficulty curves and puzzle solving logic for the audience that crowdfunded this game. As a result, I played the entire second half of Broken Age with a guide. I still loved the painterly art and the heartwarming story, but the gameplay shift put a damper on an otherwise great experience.

5. Until Dawn- I loved what I saw of this game in the GBeast coverage so I was very excited to give the game a try of my own. Knowing the game’s general story beats took away some of the suspense and mystery inherent in its cabin in the woods setup. However, playing after having watched a playthrough allowed me to see the different ways that your choices effect the game. While the main story is fairly inflexible, the various subtle and not-so-subtle dialog shifts really change the tone of the game. For example, Emily was nowhere near as catty in my playthrough as she was in the GBeast playthrough and my version of Matt wasn’t quite as dumb. This game’s adaptive story really made me question how much emphasis we place on whether our gameplay decisions lead to characters living or dying. Games like Mass Effect and The Walking Dead play up the fact that every choice you make can be a matter of life and death, but by escalating the importance of dialogs to that degree some subtlety is lost. Small dialog choices might not be a matter of life or death in Until Dawn, but they might be life or death for a romance or a friendship. That ended up mattering more to me than whether someone gets stabbed or not.

4. Massive Chalice- I backed this game at the bloodline backer level so I was looking forward to Massive Chalice for a while. I’ve enjoyed strategy RPGs since I first played FF Tactics Advanced on my GBA and the notion of playing one with my own family was hugely appealing. While Massive Chalice has a number of flaws, playing as my own family for 300 years was an experience that elevated an otherwise average strategy RPG to something more. The relics and keeps just mattered a whole lot more when they bore my family crest. I doubt Massive Chalice would rate this highly if I didn’t back the game at this level, but with that added element I couldn’t put the game down.

3. The Talos Principle- I know this game technically came out in 2014, but games that come out in late December never get any GOTY love and The Talos Principle deserves a lot of it. From the first moment the Talos Principle creates an environment like nothing else I’ve seen in a game. It’s world simultaneously made me feel like I was playing through an Old Testament parable and a high-end sci-fi story at the same time. It manages to smoothly blend robotics with Grecian, Egyptian, and English architecture while also blending artificial intelligence papers with theology and philosophy. The Talos Principle somehow brought a fresh take to the seemingly ubiquitous video game question of the moment: “can AI or robots be human”. While the puzzles didn’t beguile me, the game’s unique narrative approach elevated it above its puzzle game label. I don’t want to spoil it, but you should give The Talos Principle a try.

2. Splatoon- Splatoon is the first multiplayer shooter that I’ve enjoyed in years. Since I’m among the group of people that cannot stand random assholes with microphones in online games, multiplayer online shooters have largely passed me by since the original Xbox. Splatoon’s ability to both remove microphones from the equation and keep people focused on team-oriented goals won me over. I love successfully switching between multiple playstyles without having to coordinate with all of my teammates. One game I’ll go for kills with a paint roller, then next game I’ll dash around the map with a paintbrush, and if I want to win I’ll use a rapid-fire paint gun. All of these weapon changes drastically change how I approach levels, but they don’t completely ruin the experience for everyone else in the way that a poorly organized team would ruin a game of Team Fortress. I’ve also never been able to focus on exploring in a shooter before and laying paint changes the focus of the game so dramatically that I can dominate while playing swim and run. There is such a fundamental difference between how I enjoy the movement and splatting of Splatoon and what I enjoyed about Halo, that I don’t know how I’m going to go back to other shooters. It’s like there was this fresh world out there that I never knew I wanted.

I haven’t even mentioned this game’s style yet, but it is 100% up my alley. It’s all great: from the fish puns to the squidified versions of Japanese clothes. I listened to the soundtrack to the point that my significant other put up a ban on all Splatunes in our home. I love the way all of the NPCs look, animate, and speak. I even enjoy the small changes that happen to the shop music when you move from store to store. Seeing new Inklings in the game’s main plaza also manages to make the world feel alive in a way that a shooter lobby usually doesn’t. I love getting to see the weird Miiverse scribblings that people have chosen to feature on their accounts. Its one thing to see a person’s name and loadout, but it’s quite another to see what they think is funny or beautiful. And at the end of it all there’s DJ Octavio. Man I love Splatoon.

1. Undertale- I loved almost everything I played of Undertale, but the reason that it’s at the top of my list is that it answered a few of the problems that I have with RPGs and games in general. Undertale attempted to fix a longstanding issue I have with RPGs. Most modern RPGs either rely on the tried and true menu based system popularized by games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy or they veer the other way and become action adventure games with an elaborate skill tree. I haven’t seen many RPGs, indie or otherwise, attempt a different gameplay system outside of the Puzzle Quest family of games. Undertale not only blends RPG and bullet-hell gameplay, but it also manages to utilize its bullet-hell elements to develop characters and tell stories. Undertale doesn’t just staple some stats to an otherwise unrelated system, it makes the bullet-hell/RPG fusion work on multiple levels.

Undertale also manages to be a game without being a toy. Video games so often allow players to explore every inch of their possibility space without commenting on whether players should. Grand Theft Auto IV doesn’t care that players can ruin the tone of Niko’s story by going on a killing spree. Crackdown doesn’t care that a super soldier shouldn’t be punting parked cars for no reason. The stories of so many games are secondary to the mechanical systems that players love to toy with. The two counterexamples that I can think of are the chickens in the Legend of Zelda and the desynch that happens in Assassin’s Creed when you kill civilians. However, neither of those games make examining the negative possibility space as central to their design as Undertale does. I love that Undertale actually acknowledges a problematic possibility space within its structure and accounts for it in a major way. I don’t want to spoil the game, but this element of its design moved me.

On top of those two great design decisions the game also featured a memorable cast of characters, an excellent soundtrack, and a main storyline that sticks with you. There were a lot of games that I enjoyed this year, but no game changed the way I think about game design in the way Undertale did. There is no game that influenced my own game designs as much as Undertale did. So at the end of the day, Undertale wins my GOTY award.