Perhaps that title is a bit paradoxical, since this is, by definition, no longer a list of the best games of 2018. But I’m of the opinion that recency bias has a bit too much leverage in our blink-and-you’ll-miss-it world, so let’s start 2019 right by rolling that back juuuust a bit. Last year, a “best games not from this year” list would have been impossible—I spent just under a month at a video game archive doing work for my thesis, and while I was there I played around 40. But this year, without such opportunities, I can distill the non-2018 games I experienced (for the first time, and only for the first time) into their own well-deserved list. So, if you survived the intermission and came back for seconds, welcome back. Or if for some reason you’re reading Part II before Part I, welcome! Let’s get started.
9. NO THING
The phrase “weirdly compelling” has never felt more accurate than when describing the strange psychedelic-horror endless-runner that is NO THING. NO THING is simple, short, and nail-bitingly hard. It requires only two buttons—one to turn right, and the other to turn left as you navigate through an accelerating world of eerie bodies and objects and faces, synth-heavy music tracks, a soulless, neverending road, and a narrator who seems to be recounting, for your… pleasure? a dystopian version of white-collar suburban life.
Like I said, weirdly-compelling.
8. West of Loathing
West of Loathing is the rare comedic game that understands the line between irreverent and tasteless, clever and crass. Rather than take toothless jabs at modern issues (looking at you, South Park: The Fractured But Whole), or repeatedly sledgehammer the fourth wall (I love you, Sunset Overdrive, but enough is enough), its humor relies on legitimately smart writing that subverts and pokes fun at the tropes of both Westerns and turn-based RPGs. And beyond that, it’s also the rare RPG that makes its core systems accessible to non-genre fans, with the option to auto-spend XP and build a well-rounded character. In a year where RPG elements kept me away from several games I might have otherwise enjoyed (sorry, Salt and Sanctuary), I fondly remember the adventures of my intrepid Beanslinger, Orson Carp, and his trusty steed Remora, travelin’ the land, solvin’ crimes, rightin’ wrongs, slingin’ absolute heaps of dynamite at unruly skeletons, and maybe learnin’ a little black magic along the way. All in a rough, cartoony art style that, despite how it might first appear, overflows with character and verve.
7. 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
I am not, and have never been, someone who seeks out visual novels. I kinda sorta like Doki Doki Literature Club, more for its authentic portrayal of depression than for any of its metanarrative twists. Otherwise, I’ve bounced off of pretty much every VN I’ve ever tried—whether it’s too much text, certain tropes that get under my skin, or the feeling that I’d rather be reading a book, I can never quite hang with them.
This now excludes 999, which I somehow poured fifteen hours into over one weekend back in May. One potential explanation: the first Zero Escape game caters to pretty much every single one of my (sometimes guilty) pleasures in fiction: time loops; locked-room mysteries; a plot that takes the most convoluted route possible to a fantastic, revelatory climax; creative use of its console’s unique control scheme (here, the DS—and yes, there is thus something lost in the PS4 remaster); and just a few strains of monster-in-the-attic Gothic fiction spliced in along the way. 999 reminds me of the stories I used to dream up as a kid—except, like a puzzle box that only grows more intricate as it sheds layer after layer, its wild twists and turns still deliver a powerful payoff by grounding themselves in well-realized characters.
In the end, I’ll likely never play the rest of the series—not because 999 itself wasn’t good enough, but because it was so skillfully resolved that, for me, I want to keep it that way. To me, that feels like one of the highest compliments I can give any piece of media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvHx3SFy70I
6. The Final Station
In the same way that 999 delivered on my love of narrative twists, lingering ghosts, and a bit of ludonarrative synchronicity, The Final Station pulled me in with its simple premise of rail travel in a mysterious post-apocalypse. But while 999 was an almost Inception-like wormhole of developments and revelations, The Final Station delivered again and again on a simple yet effective narrative technique—levels that, as I wrote about this summer, used their specific geography to encode both narrative beats and convey a constant sense of facade and revelation. On the surface, its art style and flash-game combat might look simple; in a way, that’s entirely the point. In this world with tighter and tigher security, an apocalypse inexorably sweeping the land, and a secret totalitarian bureaucracy that may just be pulling all those strings, such facades are often hard to spot. At its core, The Final Station is a game about that duality—about finding the truth behind the lies… and learning that you’re powerless to stop them.
5. The Last of Us
Yes. I know. In my defense, I did not own a Playstation until about a year-and-a-half ago. Also in my defense, the entire gaming community has done an incredibly, astronomically terrible job in recognizing what’s special about The Last of Us. It’s a bit sad to me that its legacy may end up being the so-called “dadification” of games, because, while mimicking its mood and themes, its copycats come nowhere close to matching the sheer mechanical creativity and tension that certain sections of The Last of Us achieve. Sequences like Joel’s upside-down shooting gallery and the stealth boss fight in David’s lodge—and, hell, let’s just say everything Ellie fucking goes through in the winter—remain some of my past year’s most vivid gaming memories, and example of just how gripping the medium can be when all of its composite elements work in harmony. In the end, maybe it’ll be a bit like Watchmen in the late-80s and 90s: some blemishes and some brilliance, all a bit obscured by an industry-wide misinterpretation of exactly what made it good. In any case, The Last of Us holds up. If it’s been a while since you’ve played it, give it another try.
4. Stardew Valley
When I decided to give Stardew Valley a go back in January, I didn’t expect it to take over my life. I’d heard the warnings, listened to tales about just how addicting its simple loop ends up being, but I thought I’d be immune. After all, it had been a long time since I’d fallen in love with a Harvest Moon-style game, and I hadn’t realized just how much of an itch I still had for its Rune Factory-like blend of farming, fishing, dungeon-crawling, and, yes, romancing. Needless to say, once I put it down at the start of my semester, I’d spent about two in-game years building both my farm and my street cred on that plot of land next to the lovely environs of Pelican Town.
But while that core loop may be addicting, it isn’t the reason Stardew Valley comes in this high on my list. For all its cheeriness and life, he game begins with a scene of the player-character as an overworked office drone in a faceless cubicle. And later on, it gives the player a choice: you can restore Pelican Town’s derelict community center by painstakingly fishing, mining, building, and farming convoluted sets of items for these little forest spirits, or you can sell the vacant building to the game’s equivalent of Walmart or Amazon, and reap the profits as this little town in the countryside is dragged, helpless, into the world of late capitalism.
It often feels cheap to call a game, or any piece of media for that matter, “deeper than it seems,” but Stardew Valley is. Rather than subsist as a stylish and competent Harvest Moon clone, it pushes its premise just a little bit farther, and in the end creeps up against the forces that have made its depicted way of life a wistful fantasy for our world. And ultimately, that never-ending cheerfulness in the face of the melancholy at its core might even provide a little bit of relief—a brief analgesic in the form of some good, gamified, honest work.
3. What Remains of Edith Finch
I would call What Remains of Edith Finch a game about dying, but in a sense that actually misses the point. Most games, from Space Invaders to Smash Bros., are about dying; they revolve around it, and, in the long run, around learning how avoid it. Conspicuously, that loop finds itself absent here.
No—What Remains of Edith Finch is not a game about dying. What Remains of Edith Finch is a game about deaths you can’t respawn from, and characters that you embody but never save. And that distinction matters; it transforms Edith Finch from a fairly typical first-person adventure game into a meditation on why death matters in a medium that, at least superficially, sometimes cheapens its impact. Each life that Edith lives through, up to and including her own, ends the same way. As do ours.
In that sense, while it lacks the metanarrative tricks of The Stanley Parable or Undertale, What Remains of Edith Finch leverages its existence as a video game better than maybe any I’ve ever played. It doesn’t do so by breaking the fourth wall, or snatching control from the player by surprise; it doesn’t need those flashy magic tricks. It does so in the simplest possible way: it retains dying, but removes the act of respawning, and in doing so makes dying consequential once again.
2. Horizon Zero Dawn
I spent quite a lot of time and effort over the past year trying to convince a few distinct groups of English majors and literature academics that games are, inherently, about trauma. My playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn came largely after most of that writing took place, and I’m glad it did, because I don’t think I’d have appreciated its intricately-woven narrative nearly as much without that work to background the experience.
In short, Horizon Zero Dawn is a post-apocalyptic game about generational trauma—both in the sense of bloodline and species. It explores a version of humanity that, we discover throughout the game, was rebuilt and reengineered from the ashes of our own. And while this new version of humanity has created its own traumas and evils, many of them carry an eerie likeness to those of our past and present (a coliseum we encounter in the game’s second act really hammers this point home). In that sense, HZD turns one of the core problems of fantastical fiction—in which we only tend to dream up the systems we already know—into one of its foundational thematic tenets. No matter how extensive the fantasy, or how substantial the rebuilding process, humanity will be reborn with the same problems, the same evils, the same traumas repeating themselves over and over again. No longer is the problem a lack of imagination; instead, it’s the desire to forget the past and doom the future, and that paradigm underpins HZD‘s every narrative beat.
Oh, and of course, there’s also the robot dinosaurs, and beautiful art design, and one of the best combat systems I’ve played with in an open-world RPG. If the narrative side doesn’t particularly appeal to you, HZD still has plenty of brilliance to offer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD0DByDxJBA
1. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
I have very little to say about XCOM 2: War of the Chosen that I haven’t already said. It’s a beautiful puzzle box of interwoven skills and moves and strategies. With its alternating missions and resource management structure, it’s got one of the most addictive core gameplay loops I’ve ever experienced. It’s currently the second most-played game on a Steam account I’ve had since 2011 (I bought it in July). I finished it twice in the span of four months this year; I don’t think there’s another game I as much as opened again in 2018 after watching its credits roll. It’s part of the reason I split my lists—so I could recognize some smaller games on the main one, while still giving it its due here.
But above all else, what kept me enraptured by War of the Chosen this year was not its strategies nor its gameplay loop, but its potential to generate story. Through their travails and exploits, its characters, procedurally-generated though they might be, became more memorable for me than most of the hand-crafted characters I’ve played with or as this year. Both of my runs were unique, with their own squads and legends, and the many I’m sure I’ll have in the future will undoubtedly produce their own tales. And as long as that potential remains, I’ll keep coming back to XCOM 2. Rare as it may be, I may have found one of my forever games.
…
Well that’s it. That’s all, folks. Nothing to see past here. Just some dirt, some grass, some bugs… wait, that’s a lot of bugs. And a hole. And a whole lot else—
0. Hollow Knight
To be clear, yes, I am cheating. As some previous posts would indicate, I played Hollow Knight for the first time in 2017—100% completed it, actually. But I did that all over again when its Switch version came out in the summer, and not including it here, as not only one of the best games I played in 2018 but one of the best I’ve ever played, would feel like an omission of monumental magnitude. In a fitting ode to this year and a trepidatious welcome to the next, the bugs are here to stay.
Sunset Over Ithaca 