If that title sounds like a lot, don’t worry—this is a two-part list (nine and nine), and if you’re pressed for time, either half should be an enjoyable respite from the apocalyptic rain of acid and flames that, if anything, should bring 2018 to a close. In the grand tradition of Mario Kart’s Nitro and Retro halves (well, since Mario Kart DS at least), I’ll be listing the best games I’ve played this year in two halves—first, games released in 2018; second, games released elsewhere (well, mainly in the past) that I first played this year. And maybe the sum of the two will be a bit long, but hey, there’s a really awful pun near the end of this one (can you spot it?), and you can go grab some popcorn at the intermission. Maybe use the bathroom. My point—any movie longer than two-and-a-half hours should be legally obligated to include an intermission. Especially considering the gargantuan size of a small soda at your local movie theater.
Oh, and as a last note, this list is full of impeccable soundtracks—so instead of screenshots, I’ll be including some songs to go along with each entry. Give them a listen!
9. Deltarune
Among the few games on this list that I’ve written about separately, Deltarune may at some point be a masterpiece. Right now, it’s compelling but unfinished—and my ranking of it here, at the edge of my conscience as 2018 draws to a close, is a fitting representation of that potential. That is to say, Deltarune is an excellent game—one that, even in its brief, incomplete state, uncovers a new and interesting reading from beneath Undertale’s well-traveled ground. Its story of loneliness and loss and its eerie callbacks to its predecessor’s characters lends it a gloriously Majora’s Mask-y vibe. And as with Majora’s Mask, it’s at its best when it twists those familiarities into something novel, strange, and far riskier than why came before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnLQnX7BPeU
8. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
I am not a Melee truther. I’m not even a huge Smash Bros. fan. I only bought Smash Ultimate as the eventual party game I assumed it would be—by no means did I expect to spend the last two weeks doggedly chipping away at its surprisingly deep campaign, and nor did I expect to be actually moved by some pieces of its world (the Legend of Zelda dungeon in particular was impeccable). World of Light is a far more creative, engaging, and substantial project than I expected from its original pitch, and its internal worlds and battles are Nintendo at its best—not mere nostalgia-bait (though they do that well), but creative tributes to the Big N’s extensive canon and style.
7. God of War
God of War may not have stuck with me in the way the games higher up this list have, but considering my piece on it earlier this year, I can’t omit it from this list. It produced “feel” so incredibly well—epitomized by the sound of the Leviathan Axe whipping back into Kratos’s hand like the mythical hammer it’s based on—that even its huge, scripted setpieces felt novel and climactic. Moreover, its Metroidvania-lite structure was a welcome surprise for me, as a player who loves that type of slowly expanding, unfolding game world, and has grown a bit tired of vast open vistas with only waypoint clusters to guide the way. It has its flaws—most of them ones it carried over from The Last of Us: its own gruff, emotionally-distant father figure—but those are matched by moments of incredible scale and power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoT2MgT2LVI
6. The Messenger
Despite having been born almost a decade after the 8-bit era came to a close, I have an incredible affinity for NES-styled platformers. This comes mostly from the special place Shovel Knight holds in my heart (something else I wrote about this year), but it goes beyond that—I adore the feel of Contra and Ninja Gaiden, despite my inevitable failure in completing them. And in that vein, The Messenger is the closest a retro platformer has come to both capturing the feel—the crispness yet slight imprecision—of those NES-style platformers, and still making itself enjoyable to play. Beyond that, it features a special twist: a mid-game change that transforms its 8-bit world into a 16-bit Metroidvania, and portals that allow you to switch between those two worlds. This leads to not only the game’s excellently doubled soundtrack, but to a variety of platforming puzzles and tricks that lend it surprising mechanical depth.
2018 was a banner year for platformers, as you’ll see from the rest of this list, but The Messenger—with its unique core conceit, fantastic art and design, and snarky writing (perhaps a guilty pleasure of mine)—deserves to be experienced. It’s still a game I jump into here and there, just because I want to enjoy its crisp movement and earwormy tunes one more time.
5. Iconoclasts
Put simply, Iconoclasts may be the high-water mark of narrative platformers (a genre that, before this year, was heavily underpopulated). Its moment-to-moment gameplay is sometimes hit-or-miss, and its second half is much stronger than its first. But when it fires on all cylinders—mechanically, musically, and narratively—it morphs from an enjoyable aside in a year of excellent platformers to a game that provides a salient, engaging, and surprisngly nuanced story about theocracy and the power (and danger) of belief. Put simply, it goes places—takes some ridiculous risks and moonshots (literally) in its attempt at religious allegory. Meanwhile, its characters are among the most humanly flawed I’ve seen in a game—a sentence that, when I’ve used it in the past, has been more a criticism of games than an elevation of a certain one’s art. Here though, it’s a testament to Iconoclasts‘ writing, and its willingness to swing for the absolute fences while not forgetting its characters along the way.
4. Dead Cells
I can hear the music now—the pounding drums that open Dead Cells‘ first area, followed by the gentle strumming of the guitar omnipresent in its soundtrack’s strongest songs. In short, Dead Cells is a masterpiece of feel and flow—a game that would constantly drag me into an almost trancelike state while playing. Its movements and attacks are engineered to mesh seamlessly, to slip effortlessly from one to the next, only broken by its Souls-meets-Castlevania difficulty. And that that rollercoaster of perfectly-engineered flow blankets depths of mechanical nuance and design excellence only vaults it higher up my list. Every component of this game, from its movement to its sound design (among if not the best I’ve ever experienced in a game), is engineered to fleeting precision. Dead Cells is a speedy, scintillating dream, with only death at the end of a long run to wake you up.
3. Into the Breach
The top three games on this list are, in a way, interchangeable. I’ve been debating their order for months, and all three—despite their extreme differences in genre, mechanics, and narrative, have helped me through the difficult patches of 2018. So, essentially, don’t let its spot at #3 take anything away from the love I’m about to express for every single part of Into the Breach.
I’ve seen this game called a tactics game, puzzle game, and roguelike—and all of those have kernels of truth. It is run-based, and the player carries over little after dying: just one pilot and their learned abilities to help continue the game’s never-ending war against the insectile Vek. Though accessible, its islands and zones require deep commitment to a couple of core mechanics: positioning, movement, and the order in which a given turn’s events will play out. In many ways, Into the Breach’s moment-to-moment gameplay is less about clearing its board yourself and more about tricking your enemies into clearing it for you. That takes many forms—tricking the Vek into standing near environmental hazards, or into attacking each other, or into setting themselves up for a chain reaction of metal, lightning, smoke, and fire. Each of its squads provides a different playstyle—a different mode in which to experience its perfectly-tuned and balanced 8×8 warzones. Stategically, it’s deeper than its sprites and simple grid imply.
But Into the Breach is deeper in other ways as well—it was only when I came close to fully completing the game that I stopped to consider its scale. The buildings that line its maps are tiny… obscuring, to an extent, the massiveness of both your mechs and the enemy bugs. But once that curtain fell away, I couldn’t unsee the game’s horrifying scale, nor could I ignore the narrative about an world overrun by disasters—both natural and human—to the point where a time loop and an endless war were its only salvation. Into the Breach is, at its all-time best, an engine of creativity, where wild solutions, beautiful in their almost paradoxical simplicity, come alongside a view of the future far deeper than its flavor text and pixel art first betrays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYfqH97b-sY
2. Forza Horizon 4
The last single-player driving game that I did anything more than dip my toes into was Need for Speed: Undercover—a mess of hilariously over-the-top FMV story sequences that I played almost a decade ago. Forza Horizon 4 was thus bought on something I could call either whim or instinct, depending on how much credit I want to give myself.
It turned out to be one of the most transcendent gaming experiences I’ve ever had.
Forza Horizon 4 is a joy machine—a celebration of motion that pays equal attention to both the cars doing the moving and the world they’re moving through. Its rendition of the British countryside, movingly discussed here in this article over on Waypoint, is filled with effervescent life. For nearly three months now, I’ve kept coming back—and every time I’ve tried to put my feelings for this game into words, they’ve failed. Until last night, as I raced through flare-lit checkpoints on an autumn night, under a sky both cloudy and pinpricked with stars.
I’ve you’ve been around me in the latter half of this year, you’ll be familiar with how much I miss Ithaca, my home for the past four years. And while Forza’s countryside is not quite that strange, inexplicably beautiful zone in the frozen wasteland that is upstate New York, its sensation of racing through an inexplicably beautiful environment made me miss it all a little bit less. Or, in another sense, it made me feel that maybe I’m not along in missing that particular kind of beauty—that maybe this game was an attempt to recreate it as well, and one that succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.
If you have a minute, give this song a listen. It’s my favorite from the game’s long and excellent soundtrack, and it might give you a sense of what I’m talking about.
1. Celeste
Celeste was one of the first games I played this year, and, in that sense, it had the hardest mountain to climb. Every game I played this year was measured against this little pixel art indie platformer—against the forty hours I spent scaling its titular peak and the 13,000 deaths I experienced along the way. And in the end, it won out—both as a tough-as-nails platformer that epitomizes everything I love about the genre, and as a moving narrative about mental health, self-care, and recovery.
In case you haven’t heard, Celeste is about a girl trying to climb a mountain. She wants to do this because—well, it’s a long story, but it involves a lot of anxiety and depression and things that game is much better suited to tell you about than I am. But in a year where I wrote about my own experience with games and mental illness, Celeste provided both a welcome feeling of companionship and an experience that I could master while dealing with some failures of my own. As a game, it is singularly excellent—the time I spent in its B and C-sides convinced me of that—but as a narrative it is something rare in games: a work that takes on its subject matter with respect and nuance, carefully weaves it into some surprisingly fitting mechanics, and accompanies it with some of the best art and music in the medium. Celeste is a masterpiece of both mechanical and narrative design. Beyond that, there’s nothing left to say.
Sunset Over Ithaca 