Best of 2018

If 2017 was the year of back-to-back incredible games, then 2018 has one of the more diverse selections in recent memory. There’s not been a year in quite a while that has so much variety in the GotY lists of the people I follow, where my main takeaway has been either “oh I’ve not had chance to play that” or “oh I’ve not even heard of that”.

My list of favourite games this year isn’t exactly full of obscure, indie bangers but there was a good 4/5 month chunk where I blitzed through my backlog (Hollow Knight, Yakuza 0, Tokyo Xanadu Ex+, Rise of the Tomb Raider) and this year finally managed to finish off some titles in long-running series’ that I never got around to earlier. I’ll probably end up writing a bunch about that latter group specifically, but a lot of time went into Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Everybody's Golf, Gyakuten Kenji 2, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC, Steins;Gate 0, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3^rd and Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia.

Oh, and on the mobile side, since Tales of Link was shut down…a lot of Fire Emblem Heroes has been played.

As for games that actually came out this year, here we are:

"Didn't quite make it" Shoutouts

Pokémon Let’s Go: Eevee

I only got this for Christmas, but anyone who knows me knows how ingrained Pokémon got into my life back when Red came out and it’s never really gone away since. Seeing Kanto in all its 3D glory is a nostalgia hit that’s so, so cool.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings

This was the first Atelier game I’ve played and it’s just a wholesome, chill game about two anime-sisters mixing potions, exploring colourful worlds and basically just trying to get by as alchemists.

The World Ends with You -Final Remix-

It’s TWEWY on Switch, it’s great. Ok the controls are a little more futzy using your finger instead of the DS stylus, and losing the dual screen combat makes it a little less hectic, but it’s still a great game.

Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves is very much a ‘make your own fun’ game, especially so at launch, and I enjoyed playing this with friends just sailing around and doing very little.

No. 10: Burnout Paradise: Remastered

This was the first game for me that got 5 or 6 people together on a regular basis just to spend hours on Xbox Live playing it, trying to do all the multiplayer challenges and generally having a great time just chatting. The even more amazing thing about it was these weren’t even gaming friends - they were people from work, overcoming the fact we already spend 8 hours a day together just to spend even more on the evenings.

Still my favourite racing game ever, and only Forza Horizon even remotely scratches that itch now, but memories of 2008 came flooding back as did the layout of Paradise City which will forever be burning into my brain.

I was never able to get the full 1000 on Xbox at the time.

I platinum-ed the Remaster.

No. 9: Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

For someone that loves JRPGs, I have an uncommon experience with DQ games in that I’ve never really liked any of the ones I’ve played. The last one I tried was VIII back upon its release over here, due to the huge critical reception and for some reason I found it mind-numbingly slow and put it down pretty quickly.

Dragon Quest XI is slightly less mind-numbingly slow and I think it’s pretty good!

The visuals are a great representation of the Toriyama-aesthetic, I’ve enjoyed the voicework and general whimsy of a super traditional JRPG and it has kept my interest enough to keep going along to see where the story goes.

As it is, I’m 30 hours in and (apparently) nowhere near finishing it, but I was really itching for an RPG towards the end of the year and this worked well.

No. 8: Monster Hunter: World

There’s something very neat about being into games and watching a long-running niche series suddenly explode in popularity and hit the mainstream, and that’s coming from someone who had only heard about the…intricacies of MH while never actually playing one.

I can’t imagine what this has been like for series’ vets to see this game become Capcom’s best-selling game ever.

MHW is still full of weird quirks and bizarre menus, but some smart quality of life changes, satisfying skill-based combat, equipment crafting loop and just enough accessibility to bring you into its gorgeous world of giant creatures really hooked me for my 50ish hours playing it.

Like Burnout, it’s another of those rare games that got me playing with people from work because we really wanted to take down that Nergigante jerk!

To summarise, the Meowscular Chef is a treasure in both name and soul, and any game that lets me listen to Jamieson Price in any capacity gets props from me.

No. 7: Into the Breach

Sometimes I will watch a Quick Look of a game and stop the video 5 minutes in to immediately go buy it, which is exactly what happened with Into the Breach.

While it didn’t keep me hooked as long-term as it has for others, it’s a very smart tactics game with a great aesthetic and another stellar soundtrack by Ben Prunty. Although there isn’t a huge amount of ‘content’, the variety of each of the different squads did a great job making replays feel very different. In addition, having a tactics game where you got all the information up-front about your potential moves (how much damage you would do, where the enemy would get knocked back to, which tiles enemy will attack) sometimes had me taking 10 minutes trying all different permutations to come up with just the right moves to stop my citizens dying.

If I had waited for the Switch release it would’ve probably still been my mainstay for travel, but as it is it gave me a very satisfying time on PC.

No. 6: Valkyria Chronicles 4

Between this, Into the Breach, Fire Emblem and Radiant Historia (kinda) I ended up playing a lot of tactics games this year! This was one I was looking forward to, as it has been long enough since I played (and loved) VC1 and hearing the vibe of this game was much more similar to that than it was the two sequels.

VC4 gave me exactly what I was expecting and in turn I had a lot of fun with it. The gameplay is still solid and they made some clever improvements to make the game less reliant on the scout-rush strategy of the original. The Grenadier class was well designed and they finally made Tanks more viable by lowering their cost to use.

The story is, typically for VC, all over the place but overall enjoyable. There are hard swings from uplifting team camaraderie, to emotional death scenes and the horrors of war, to one of the cast sexually harassing another (and getting punched for it), to having a mock battle in a town immediately after you’ve literally just liberated it because your army is arguing about bread.

All-in-all it kept me going through a fairly lengthy campaign (30+ hours) and despite some difficulty spikes, I had fun and got attached to my ragtag bunch of anime characters. There’s some great voice acting in there, Erica Mendez as Kai specifically, and the watercolour/drawn/comic design looks great on modern consoles.

No. 5: Return of the Obra Dinn

Where the heck did the idea for this one come from?

A 1-bit monochrome, “Murder Mystery Sudoku”-game where you hop back in time ala Ghost Trick by examining corpses. Also you’re an insurance assessor.

Obra Dinn is above all, really clever and effective. Trying to determine exactly who everyone is and what happened to them initially feels a bit daunting, but the more you play you realise there’s so many subtle clues in the environment to help you along – most of which I missed initially because of how fascinating the story was as it was slowly revealed.

The ‘audio only, then cut to freeze frame visual’ was not only a cool artistic choice but both added to the complication of identifying everyone and also the drama of the story by encouraging you to imagine what’s happening before suddenly flashing on screen what’s actually happening – and that story goes places I didn’t expect.

The sound design is on point, the voice acting feels genuine & faithful and when you manage to confirm a batch of correct answers the game makes you feel like an absolute genius.

There are minor gameplay annoyances like having to traverse back to specific corpses to rewatch scenes, which can get tiresome when you’re at the end of the game trying to work out the final few characters, and a lack of direct explanation (or one that’s easily missed) for some of the quirks of the log book, like knowing specific lines in the audio cue have a mark next to them if it’s the deceased talking.

Other than those slight negatives, Return of the Obra Dinn is super cool and I couldn’t put it down after I started, finishing my 10 hours with it in about 3 sittings.

No. 4: God of War

I wasn’t really fussed about buying God of War initially, having only played 1 entry in The Adventures of Angry Man™ back on the PS2, and I thought they’d probably do a good job with a reboot and let that be that.

Then that all changed as soon as the review embargoes lifted and I figured I should probably give it a look.

After playing GoW2 way back when, I never thought I’d be saying this but God of War does a fantastic job with its characters, bolstered by the fact there’s not really very many, where they and the story benefit by being much more at the forefront compared to the combat.

Kratos and the dynamic with Atreus is very compelling, despite a slow and fairly cliché start, and they’ve managed to turn him into a much more interesting character than before. Brok and Sindri are delightful and Mimir is a solid ‘sarcastic narrator’ character without ever delving too far into that stereotype.

Alongside the characters, the world as a whole is very well realised and they did a great job building their version of Norse mythology and integrating Kratos into it. It was refreshing to see the assertion that all Gods are dicks, rather than some benevolent saviours of mankind and piecing together tales of terrible stuff they’ve done in the past – leaving the world in the state that it’s in today – was made more effective when you do finally meet one or two of them.

For me, the overall mood of the game was its greatest strength, with the high point being the amazing riverboat sequence about halfway through the game. The storm, the music and the eternally slow-spinning camera on Kratos made that whole sequence very impactful and it gave me a real “ohhh shiiiit” moment that doesn’t happen too often in AAA games.

It’s a shame the very end of the game dampened my enjoyment of it a little, one of the main characters ends up being tragically wasted and the story doesn’t quite stick the emotional landing that I had admittedly been a bit hyped up for thanks to reviews, but the end sequence into credits is genuinely touching.

As a whole though, it’s got an impressive bunch of characters, an enjoyable story and the combat is solid (bringing the axe back is oddly satisfying). Also it’s very, very pretty. Some of the lighting in Alfheim is astonishing in HDR.

No. 3: Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology

This was something that flew under a lot of radars this year, being a remaster of Radiant Historia, which came out in 2010 in the US (but never in Europe) and even though I imported it at the time, I dropped off it and never finished it.

I’m glad I grabbed this and finished it, because it really is an inventive and original JRPG.

The combat setup is clever, setting up enemies on a grid where you can then manipulate their positions using your attacks. This lets you send enemies to the backrow where they do less damage, bunch them together in order to hit many foes at once or even deploy traps to the field to knock them into.

On top of that you can freely swap your parties turn order, even with the enemies, to set up a sequence of attacks that can end up moving 5 or 6 enemies around to the board to all align in one square where they’re promptly nuked by your spellcaster. Setting up those attack chains is especially satisfying throughout most of the game, outside of a few boss fights that don’t play nice.

Although the combat is great, the premise and story is very well done. The world is a very grounded version of the tech+magic fantasy scenario and never flies off the deep end. In fact there’s a very sullen tone to a lot of the proceedings, helped along by one of the more maturely-written protagonists I’ve played in a JRPG (voiced amazingly by Xander Mobus).

The time-travel aspect isn’t over the top and fits in with the narrative very effectively, letting you jump between timelines for information and/or items, and the conclusion to the whole thing is a very solid finale.

The soundtrack helps the tone and story immensely as well, though unsurprising being composed by Yoko Shimomura.

I ended up finishing all the sidequests and timelines, got the True Ending and then spent a few days afterwards looking up fan-art. Definitely one of the better JRPGs I’ve played.

No. 2: Celeste

Celeste came almost at the perfect moment for me, when work was getting quite stressful and needing a Switch title to play over a few long upcoming trips. That combined with a strong recommendation of tough platforming got me to purchase it on release, staving off the allure of Monster Hunter for a week or two longer than most of my friends group.

Despite expecting to enjoy this in the same vein I did with Super Meat Boy, Celeste surprised me how really touching it is, and it hit me a little more than I expected. To cover the platforming part first, it’s challenging, controls well and encourages a good amount of exploration on Madeline’s journey up the mountain, urging you to look around the environment a lot instead of just going screen-to-screen, left-to-right.

And while the platforming has great design and difficulty, and really pushed my video-gaming buttons, I found myself mostly remembering the story and moments more than anything else.

The interactions with Theo are very heartfelt and all of the writing felt very genuine, and following the journey of Madeline with her inner struggle really resonated with me. The micro-stories on the way are also really moving, dealing with a number of topics from anxiety & depression, to what it feels like trying to help someone that doesn’t want help (and your own selfish reasoning for it). The game deals with mental health in a very dignified way, and it made the payoff at the end a very personal, happy moment.

With all that said, none of the above is ever handled bluntly or put directly in your face. You can approach it as a difficult platformer have a lot of fun trying to beat it + grab the collectables, and come away content. If you identify with the additional themes as well as I did, you come out with a really heartfelt experience.

Before wrapping this up I’d be remiss not to talk about the soundtrack, which is easily my favourite of the year. Lena Raine does a wonderful job expressing the mood of traversing the mountain and all the various places in-between.

My pick of the OST is Scattered and Lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0etenwnI1wo

No. 1: Hitman 2

It sometimes feels like a bit of a cheat putting this at the top of my list, as it’s not doing anything spectacularly different to Hitman (2016) and is a fairly known quantity, but I’ve had so much pure fun sauntering my way through this theatrical, ludicrous, juxtaposition of a Rube Goldberg video game.

Hitman is one of those titles that can be described to someone who doesn’t play games as “you go around killing people”, and it will immediately bring forward that conversation-stopping face and a swift “oh. ok.” However, despite just looking like a flashy murder simulator there’s so much going on underneath in terms of systems and quirks it’s just enjoyable to mess around in its world.

The combination of goofy, self-aware humour, mechanical systems + AI logic to manipulate, and run-based attempts really appeals to me and turns this bunch of sometimes clunky parts into a very cool whole.

The main story is complete over-the-top nonsense, but almost in a way where I’m writing my own Jason Bourne fanfiction and know fine well its cheesy but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to enjoy myself. The writing in the middle of the levels though is no-joke wonderful, the areas are filled with so much incidental dialogue and smart conversations I spent a lot of time just hanging around listening to it instead of actually doing my job and…hitmanning people. And when you do get around to hitmanning people, the targets are so cartoonishly evil it’s pleasing to take them out in sometimes the most ridiculous way. (Taking out the business guy who refuses to pay an artist in anything but ‘exposure’ was great).

You can tell the staff developing Hitman are having fun coming up with these caricatures of life, such as American Suburbia with its friendly cupcake-baking neighbour, open house BBQ party and citizens filing lawsuits on each other. While the level design in Hitman 2 is fantastic, with lots of creative opportunities and big, dense areas to investigate, the small touches and environmental details really make them gratifying to play.

I could go on for ages about all the small things that keep me coming back to the game. The Elusive Targets being great, one-chance events, all the different challenges and opportunities, discovering the secret exits and gimmicks and finding something I’d never seen before nearly every time I start up a level.

Hitman 2 is a really dumb, fun video game that I like a lot.