The Best/Worst Games of 2015

[IMPress Polly]

So we're now approaching the end of the year. Although, as always, I'll continue to play more games from this year, I believe at this point I've got a tentative line-up of greats to recommend and one game to simply lament. I wanted to just briefly go into what I liked best about each of these. I'll list these in countdown form, from fifth best to absolute favorite, followed by my pick for absolute worst game of the year, and include a trailer for each to give you just a brief glimpse of what the games look like.

(Incidentally, save for my top recommended title (which I'll explain how to acquire when I get to that one), all these games are available for home computer and most are also multi-platform games that are available for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well.)

5) PILLARS OF ETERNITY

This I felt was the best role-playing game of the year. I would compare it favorably not only to the likes of Fallout 4 (...pfff :laugh:), but also to the likes of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The Witcher 3, unlike Fallout 4, manages to provide a narrative justification for most of its vast landscape...but the narrative justifications are, for the most part, pretty contrived; they're really just excuses to make the player explore the game's unnecessarily large world. What I mean is that most of The Witcher 3's storyline is just a series of damsel in distress mini-narratives connected by a separate damsel in distress meta-narrative, with the meta-narrative being that you'll spend most of the game searching for a woman named Ciri, who is being chased by the malicious Wild Hunt, which works sort of like this: You learn that Ciri is in Location A, so you go to Location A only to find out that she's fled to Location B. You go to Location B, do whatever needs to be done there, then learn that she's fled to Location C. Then you go to Location C only to learn that she's now in Location D, so you go there. Etc. It all begs the question of why the hell you couldn't just find Ciri in Location A and have the storyline progress from there.

The simple fact of the matter is that more linear play structures still work better than giant sandboxes when it comes to telling long stories. Massive doses of nonlinearity can make for wonderful storytelling (as you'll see with my next recommended game), but only for shorter stories. Massive games require more direction to really work well narratively, I find. Pillars of Eternity is a rare modern-day RPG that has this on offer. It offers the player narrative freedom (i.e. lots of choices to make that the game respects), but within a traditional framework of stage progression, and you know what, the quality of storytelling is better off as a result. Gloriously free of Fallout 4's and The Witcher 3's lazy tropes, this retro-style, isometric perspective RPG funded via Kickstarter tells a powerful and poignant 70-hour story about slavery, racial, sexual, religious, and other hostile prejudices, drug issues and trade (the sort of issues the developer said that a traditional developer-publisher relationship would have prevented them from taking on) without ever feeling half-hearted or arbitrary. It feels like a serious allegory, wherein each element has a real-world meaning. There are also side quests to delve into, but, as in other authentically story-driven RPGs, they are exactly that: options available on the side, not the game's main attraction. As for battling, it's mostly turn-based and strategic, as in older RPGs, rather than twitchy and reflexive, as has become fashionable in the last decade.

The trailer below gives you a taste not only of what the game looks like in action, but also a feel for the game's impressive writing quality.

Pillars of Eternity is an excellent case for revisiting some older, neglected approaches to this genre, really showing many aspects of traditional, narrative-driven RPGs to be superior to their contemporary, flashier, sandbox-style counterparts. It's also the latest proof that video games don't need the world's biggest budgets to be excellent. I'd recommend this game to anyone, but to kilgram in particular, knowing how much he loves RPGs that offer socially relevant and compelling stories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAw4v6JbCBI

[IMPress Polly]

4) HER STORY

This is a game I would recommend to everyone, but to The Xl in particular due to his love of the classic Phoenix Wright games, as this is the best detective game I've ever played. Her Story is a highly nonlinear interactive movie (by far the most nonlinear interactive movie I've ever played, in fact) that, in a welcome change of pace for video games, revisits the use of live acting instead of computer animation. The game is about a set of fictional police interviews from 1994[/URL]. By searching the database of an old computer, the player sorts through video clips from these interviews, which contain answers to questions asked to a British woman about her missing husband. Her words are transcribed and the player then seeks out new clips by searching these transcriptions in the database, and repeat, in an effort to solve the case by piecing the information contained therein together.

Thematically speaking, Her Story explores the topic of duality, as (minor spoiler alert) the player learns that the woman you're interviewing may or may not have an identical twin sister working with her, among other things. I won't disclose who the player character turns out to be though, as that's a mystery too important to this game's story and impact and is revealed only at the end.

The most innovative quality of this game is the amount of freedom it gives the player to solve the case themselves. This could be contrasted with the play format of games and franchises like Phoenix Wright that are ultimately very rigid and simply make the player feel smart. The degree of freedom that Her Story offers the player works well because the story is the sole focus of game play, which makes things feel far less "gamey" and more authentic than usual. In grand total, there's about three hours' worth of footage to view, and that's more than enough to keep you thinking about what you've seen for an exponentially longer period of time. You'll want to take notes. The game's creator has said that the play format he invented was inspired by heavily publicized real-life murder trials, including those of Amanda Knox and Jodi Arias in particular. The trailer below will show you what the game play looks like.

[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaHw97l7-Lc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Story_%28video_game%29#cite_note-ignrelease-1)

[IMPress Polly]

3) LIFE IS STRANGE

This is a game I think I'd recommend to Chloe in particular, as I suspect that both the subject matter and the general way in which the game is played may be especially to her liking (though I'm just guessing on that).

Life is Strange is an episodic interactive teen drama inspired by the classic teen novel Catcher in the Rye and which also shares a number of thematic and game play elements in common with such story-driven adventure games as Heavy Rain, The Walking Dead, and Gone Home. Interactive teen dramas have traditionally been considered a sub-category of adventure games, but are quickly earning a separate genre categorization of their own. I'm glad of that because, well, as I suspect you may have guessed based on my career path, I have particular sympathy for the general age group this genre focuses on.

The game's story follows a photography student named Max (whose name isn't coincidental, for those familiar with Catcher in the Rye) as she builds an intimate (platonic) connection with schoolmate and childhood best friend Chloe over the course of investigating dramatic, sometimes supernatural events that start happening in their fictional town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon. (No Chloe, I'm not recommending this game to you simply because you share a name with an important character therein or because it takes place in a fictional town in Oregon, but more substantial reasons, I promise!) The two begin the game as archetypes, but the archetypes are gradually subverted over the course of the game.

Thematically, Life is Strange is a wonderful exercise in self-exploration above all that, to its credit, sensitively addresses many subjects normally considered taboo for video games, including parental conflict, online bullying, social class, and suicide, among others. It's moreover in excellent taste that the game's supernatural elements are not simply gimmicks, but rather serve a real narrative purpose as metaphors for the characters' internal conflicts. These supernatural elements also add to the quality of game play, particularly in the form of the main protagonist's ability to rewind time. Since the game, to its credit, and much unlike many other games with strong mystery elements, primarily revolves around its narrative choices and their consequences rather than arbitrary, "gamey" point-and-click puzzles, the ability to rewind time further serves the game's main purpose in allowing the player the opportunity to experience most all narrative choices available to them in one playthrough. Atmospherically, Life is Strange captures a nostalgic, autumnal look and feel, with beautifully unique, entirely hand-painted textures and a soundtrack inspired by indy folk music.

The use of a female protagonist was another positive developmental choice, and it wasn't one that developer Dontnod found it easy to win approval for, as all interested publishers but Square Enix (with whom they went) insisted that the game should have a male lead instead in order to maximize its audience. Some games definitely need to have a female lead and this is one of them. If the developers had made this same game with a male protagonist, then its occasional rescue plots would have morphed into gendered damsel in distress tropes and the player character's relationship to Chloe would almost inescapably have taken on a romantic feel. In other words, it would've changed the whole feel of the game in a negative way.

Life is Strange does have some shortcomings though, among the biggest of which is the fact that the developers try a little too hard, particularly early on, to sound like millennials in their writing, with the particularly infamous expression "Go fuck your selfie!" serving as a perfect illustration of this point. Fortunately though, the game's episodic release format enabled them to respond to player feedback on these and other issues in the course of the game's development, so the writing improves significantly in this area over the course of the game, particularly from the third of its five episodes on.

The game also stumbles a little in its fifth and final episode, relying too much on lengthy exposition to fill in missing plot pieces and replacing the occasional puzzle minigames of the previous episodes with a poorly-constructed stealth sequence that feels far more out of place. The player's final decision is also annoyingly predictable and unimaginative: it's one of those "Who do you kill off?" choices that triggers one of two ending cut scenes. I don't think I'm spoiling anything in revealing that here, as you'll see it coming from the first episode. I will concede that, given the amount of character development that Chloe undergoes over the course of the game, said decision here feels a lot more genuinely difficult and potentially heartbreaking than oh say Fallout 4's version. For example, I'd grown too attached to just casually kill Chloe off after everything we'd been through together, so I did what the game clearly didn't want me to do and opted to let the whole town of Arcadia Bay be destroyed in order to save her. On my first playthrough anyway. I guess that shows you how effective the game is at getting you to empathize with her. Still, I can't help but feel that the developers could have been a lot more creative with the game's ending. Not to worry though, as this game is every bit as much about its journey as it is about its destination and the journey more than compensates.

If I had to score the overall quality of this game episode-by-episode, here's how it would go:

Episodes 1 & 2: 85%
Episodes 3 & 4: 90%
Episode 5: 75%

The occasional puzzle elements and stealth sequence are the main factors preventing this game from being another Gone Home, in my opinion, because, while certainly secondary features, these "gamey" elements disrupt the story rather than contributing to it, thus lessening the holistic feel of the experience a little. Nevertheless, Life is Strange a highly introspective game whose atmosphere, play mechanics, and thematic focus on self-discovery, along with its rare willingness to take on difficult social issues, more than sustains one's interest throughout and offers one of the overall freshest and most satisfying gaming experiences of the year. The trailer below will help you discern the general tone of the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhzFSu7MAqI

[IMPress Polly]

2) BEYOND EYES

This simple, Kickstarter-funded indy is the first and only blindness simulation I've ever played. The game showcases how a ten-year-old girl named Rae who has lost her sight due to an accident with fireworks interacts with the world around her. The world initially appears to be all white, but certain objects are highlighted when Rae touches them, simulating memorization. Sound is an important factor in the game, giving the player an idea of where certain objects are located. Challenges include such things as deciding if the sound of cars is distant enough to safely cross the road, discerning whether a dog is barking a friendly or threatening way, etc. It's all very effective at helping you get the idea of what navigation is like without sight; how the blind must learn to compensate for their lack of vision by carefully mastering the art of listening and memorizing the feel and location of objects.

In contrast to every other game on this list, this title's plot is paper thin,and not really even worth mentioning because it's simply not important to what this game seeks to accomplish. (The trailer for the Xbox One version below explains all you need to know about it.) The purpose of Beyond Eyes is to cultivate empathy for people with a certain type of disability by developing a participatory understanding of how their daily lives differ from yours and, over the course of your three hours of play or so, it absolutely succeeds at that goal.

The main and most common thing we hear about video games on the news concerns how popular games and game franchises like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto objectify human existence and thus tend to decrease our ability to feel compassion for others. Here is a not-so-mainstream game that revolves entirely around doing just the opposite! It goes to show what video games could potentially be for society instead if banks, venture capitalists, and hedge fund managers would but step aside and let them rather than seeking to control their contents in order to guarantee a return on investment. The world needs many, many more games like this one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce3DazCFPDM

[IMPress Polly]

1) CLOUDS OVER SIDRA

Given its brevity, you might think it silly to recommend such a game as Clouds Over Sidra so highly, but this is a game that goes to prove that a game doesn't at all have to be long to be a truly potent, heart-wrenching experience!

Created by the United Nations, Clouds Over Sidra is the first ever interactive documentary. It's about a 12-year-old Syrian-born girl named Sidra and her experience living in a refugee camp in Jordan for a year and a half. In view of the world's mounting suspicion of, hostility toward, and intolerance for refugees from war-torn Syria (which we are bombing right now, thus actively contributing to said situation), I don't think one could pick a more timely subject matter, especially in the wake of the Paris attacks and the world's resultant hostile reaction to everyone from Syria. Everyone needs to know what life is like for these people and that half of them are children. Most of what was previously Syria's population has fled their homeland since the fighting began four years ago.

Clouds Over Sidra is as much a movie as it is a game and people refer to it both ways: as a film and as a game. The player does not control anyone on-screen, but rather uses their virtual reality headset to control the camera. In this sense, it's not at all a convention game in that there's no "winning" because there are no challenges. The purpose of this game, rather, is to build empathy and motivate the viewer/player to do something to help these people. The VR interactive component greatly adds to its ability to do so because, trust me, it really does make it FEEL real. You can forget that you're not actually there sometimes. If this is a glimpse of what VR technology has to offer humanity, then frankly I think it's one of the greatest inventions in human history. No game has ever sucked me in like this one or made me feel quite so strongly about anything before. It's something EVERYONE should experience!

It's simply not the same as actually using a VR headset (because actually using a headset gives you control over the camera and a much more up close and personal vantage point than passively looking at your computer screen from several inches back), but below you will find the material shown in both the Video 360 VR format that's currently available (which, as you can see, is very good, but still imperfect) that you can currently access through your Samsung Galaxy phone via purchase of Gear VR for $100 and the version that will be available for the Oculus Rift when it comes out next year at a staggering price of $1,500. Let me suggest that, for the time being, you should just go ahead and get Gear VR, as it's available now and priced for the working class. Again, this is something that you really need to experience with a virtual reality headset to get the full import of, but the video below will give you some idea of what its like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFnhMX6oR1Q

To add to this, here are some brief comments made by people who have experienced Clouds Over Sidra using a simple virtual reality headset:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMRhWJPv38s

I consider this the most revolutionary game of the year and perhaps the most innovative film of the year as well!

[IMPress Polly]

WORST GAME: HATRED

...I'll just let the trailer below explain this game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3PhvCf_Jg

Given the increasing frequency of mass shootings in this country, a game wherein one plays as a psychotic mass shooter out to kill as many innocent people as possible seemed like a rather insensitive and untimely release to me. And I'm being polite.

So anyway, how about you? What do you so far think have been the best and worst games of the year?

[Matty]

I am certainly glad I do not have children buying this crap.

[PolWatch]

Beyond Eyes sounds like something I would like to try....even though I never play video games. I have participated in exercises designed to give people an idea of how the blind function. Even limited experiences help us to understand what some deal with.

[IMPress Polly]

PolWatch wrote:
Beyond Eyes sounds like something I would like to try....even though I never play video games. I have participated in exercises designed to give people an idea of how the blind function. Even limited experiences help us to understand what some deal with.

I'd highly recommend it! No need to own a game console either, as it's available for home computer.

[The Xl]

That game looks quite interesting. I might check it out, thanks for letting me know.

[IMPress Polly]

It looks like The New Yorker's Simon Parkin has recently crafted a list of his own game recommendations from the 2015 sample pool (http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/best-video-games-2015). Of course lots of people have done that, but Mr. Parkin's I wanted to share because, unlike the ones you'll find on your typical "hardcore gamer" site, this one was actually quite thoughtful all in all! I like his foundational observation and approach, which he explains thus:

"...video games remain, principally, conservative and iterative. They advance mainly along the narrow axes of graphics and technology, rarely in theme. Expanding bulk has not been matched with expanding variety. Critics and players, in the main, go along with the pretense of progress. Here, instead, are what I consider the year’s truly inventive offerings."

Dear IGN, Game Spot, Destructoid, Polygon, etc., take notes: THIS is how you craft a list of interesting recommendations: with a lack of pretension and an eye for the genuinely new and thoughtful!

Although I haven't played every game on this list, I am at least basically familiar with the majority and can vouch for the quality and creativity of Her Story (see post #2 of this thread for what I liked about that game!) and also that of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, which I'm playing right now. Both of those recommendations I would strongly echo! I can also recommend The Beginner's Guide and Splatoon, though not quite as highly as the first two. I haven't played either Kerbal Space Program or Sunless Sea, but Parkin at least makes them sound genuinely interesting to me; interesting enough that I may have to check them out at some point this year. I like the idea of multi-generational play and of crafting a space ship both!

On the other hand though, Parkin seems morally compelled to include at least some popular games on his list in order to avoid the controversy involved with a wholesale rejection of that world, and the justifications he provides for those selections are frankly very poor. One example suffices to make this point. Here is explanation Parkin provides as to why Metal Gear Solid V totally deserves to be on this list:

"The arc of big-budget game-making has, in the past few years, bent toward uniformity of design—an open world, freely explored and filled with busywork (collect five of these, kill ten of those, etc.). Metal Gear Solid V, perhaps the last game in the series that Hideo Kojima established, in 1987, is no different. This is still a game about sneaking through the tall grass and rendering armed guards unconscious with a tranquilizer dart to the neck, still a game punctuated with ludicrous boss fights featuring quipping maniacs who pilot bipedal robots. But the structure is new and exhilarating, allowing you to flit between core and supplementary missions. It is, at times, a tonal mélange, and clearly the game has been affected by publisher politics: it ends abruptly and incompletely. Nevertheless, this is the final and full realization of a vision, if not a story, that Kojima has been working toward for decades."

...Yeah that sounds to me a whole lot like the "conservative...iterative" logic of merely technical, rather than thematic, progress that the author decried in his opening paragraphs to me. Parkin's justification for including Xenoblade Chronicles X feels equally arbitrary and superficial, riddled with absurd arguments like "The blend of clichés...creates novelty...". Face it, people, commercial games, and especially commercial hits, are basically all the same game at this point and don't deserve recommendation.

Overall though, this feels like a much more fully thought-out list of game recommendations of 2015 creations than the others I've seen so far, and it's to that end I wanted to share the linked article. I do find it kind of a sad statement about the present state of affairs that what comes off to me as the most genuinely considered and intelligent list of 2015 game recommendations I've seen in publication so far comes not from a gaming publication, but from The New Yorker. Perhaps the New Yorker's comparative objectivity on this subject reflects who pays their bills versus who advertises on those game review sites.

[Ethereal]

I just bought Destiny: The Taken King.

I am really impressed with this game. And I thought I was totally burned out on FPS games.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpDLxs8z08A

Would highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a solid FPS.

[IMPress Polly]

I haven't played it yet! What would say the merits of the game are?

[Peter1469]

Of course Rome Total War is over 10 years old- it doesn't work now that I upgraded to Windows 10.

[Ethereal]

I haven't played it yet! What would say the merits of the game are?

Put me on the spot, why don't ya!

1. The game mechanics (moving, shooting, interacting, etc.) are very smooth and intuitive.
2. The graphics are very impressive.
3. The format of the game is pretty novel (to me, at least) because the campaigns take place within the context of an online universe. I'll be doing a campaign mission and random players will be gallivanting around in the same location. On one occasion, I was doing a mission and one of my online friends joined me randomly in the middle of the mission and we completed it together. That was pretty fun.
4. The writing and voice acting are very strong. The characters are varied, interesting, and compelling. The story is also well conceived and executed.
5. The environments are extremely detailed and atmospheric. The first mission I played my heart was racing a little bit because of how ominous the setting was.
6. There is huge amount of customization available for characters. Weapons, armor, gear, special attacks, perks, items, color schemes, etc.
7. The online nature of the game means there is a large social component, if that's what one is looking for.

Those are the strongest aspects of the game in my opinion.

[Ethereal]

If you want to get the game for a good price, just go to Walmart and do a price match. The game costs $59.99 on PS4's online store. But it only cost about $38.00 on Amazon. Walmart will price match Amazon, so you can get it for only $38.00.