The Games I Played [2016]: The Best of the Year
My favorite games of 2016, ordered arbitrarily by gut feelings.
To me, the best games aren’t the ones that are the most meticulously constructed, nor the ones with the biggest first impressions or even the ones you keep returning to. They’re the ones that linger in your thoughts long after they’re finished. The ones that are in the right place and time for the person you are now. And with that metric in mind, these are my favorite games of 2016.
2013’s Tomb Raider reboot was one of mixed emotions for me. It was a deeply flawed game that I didn’t warm to until its last third, one that eventually began to feel like more a proof of concept that a complete thought. Regardless, it inadvertently had me thinking about my own heritage, the process of archaeology, and the ways that we get to define our own histories.
Rise of the Tomb Raider inspired none of that. It was content to let me sneak around, raid historical sites and poison and immolate men while continuing to pretend Lara isn’t a horrible, selfish murderer. It’s well acted though, and has nice snow and shooting.
Part personality test, part personal myth maker, Moon Hunters allows you to cooperate with friends in search of the Moon Goddess, attempting to restore order and understand the calamity that’s befallen the world. It’s at its best when it allows you choices that progress both the state of the world and your personal characterization, at its weakest when it relies on combat to fill the spaces in between. Still, it’s an accessible adventure generator with a distinct arc that wraps up in 40 minutes sessions, giving you the feeling of collaborating over a short story during camping.
Harmonix are one of the few studios that can create music games that feel both challenging and accessible. As someone terminally off beat, most games in the genre feel more like being asked to parse and transcribe a second language in real time. Amplitude, however, quickly clicked, especially after I changed to a controller that better let me map the lanes on screen to its face buttons. It doesn’t hurt that Amplitude is largely formed around a sci-fi concept album involving the use of synaesthesia to bring upon transhuman awareness. I’m a sucker for that stuff.
I can’t say I enjoyed RIVE’s wisecracking, game referencing protagonist. He felt an anachronism that belonged somewhere in the set of games coming out in 2008 when games suddenly learned what the fourth wall was. What I did enjoy was the perfect feedback and gunplay of Two Tribes’ final effort, a lavishly painted combination of twin-stick shooting and platforming. It’s entirely straightforward, but it does everything it sets out to do with excellence and one of my favorite entries in a very crowded genre.
It’s like Kirby Triple Deluxe, but Kirby has a transforming robot that you can decorate with the stickers you collect. I really don’t know what else you’d want from a game.
By using devices of distance, isolation, and imperfect communication, Firewatch was able to not only sidestep the problems of videogame conversations, but create a convincing naturalistic dialogue. Strong writing, pacing, and editing carry it the rest of the way. Beyond that is a well laid wilderness to trek through, which turns the environment into as integral a character as its two leads.
A remake of the original One Way Heroics by the people who created Dragon Quest and the Mystery Dungeon. One Way Heroics refreshes the roguelike genre’s often meandering pace by forcing you to perpetually move in one direction. It also gives you enough starting options so you always feel prepared for the unexpected situations that arise in. Its avoids the oppressive feelings built into the genre, and brings plenty of charm in its writing and framing devices. In a year where I felt a lot of fatigue for roguelikes, it’s amazing how much it won me over.
The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human seemed to stick to me all year. Despite, or maybe because of, the frustrations I had while playing it, the memory of its winding caverns and derelict human outposts keep drifting into my idle thoughts. There’s plenty of games on this list that I’ve enjoyed playing more, or returned to more often, but Aquatic Adventure’s particular recipe of melancholy won’t leave me. A lot of that is in the art in music, which convey a ocean extending far beyond reach. It’s the sense of comfort and disquiet that comes from knowing how small you are in the scale of things. It’s a feeling that you push against with the violence you inflict on its sea life, learning the destruction a single human can inflict with a desire to learn more.
A Normal Lost Phone fits alongside Cibele and Emily is Away as a story concerned not only with our interpersonal interactions, but the ways technology shapes them. It brings in several conceits to set up a mystery that takes place entirely in the space of a stranger’s lost phone. Along the way it manages to inspire thoughts about the portraits our devices paint of us, privacy, and our desire to learn about others, perhaps to the point of invasion. The original game is currently down, but I’m looking forward to the expanded version coming this year to mobile devices, to see how it feels with an even thinner separation of interface.
If Anodyne was a companion to Link’s Awakening, then Even the Ocean is the the complement to Terranigma and Soul Blazer. It’s concerned with the rituals of bureaucracy, personal culpability in a modern industrial world, and the cycles of history we perpetuate. In a year where of heated arguments over the bare representation of games like Overwatch, Even the Ocean manages to have a diverse cast of several races, genders, sexualities and even relationship styles. It weaves an understanding of social issues into text and subtext, and plays on the structures of its contemporaries in ways that paint a world with more volume.
Alongside that is a core system of balancing vertical and lateral energies that ties into the puzzle platforming and themes of the story, complementing the narrative with play. Developers Sean Han-Tani-Chen-Hogan and Joni Kittaka even built in several alternate play modes and accessibility features, including modes that allow you to play only the story or platforming sections alone. It’s a thoughtful game on all accounts, one that wrapped itself into my thoughts long after I’d seen it to the end.
Rez almost didn’t make it onto this list at all. Between personal anxieties and an overwhelming fear of missing out on new releases, I found it hard to return to Rez and give it the attention I had before. Those personal anxieties found themselves at a peak on New Year’s Eve, and I found myself trying to return to familiar things for comfort. Rez proved more frustrating than fruitful, and after a long session I found myself close to finally completing Area 5, only to fail close to the end. It was now New Year’s Day.
Frustrations with both my situation and Rez mounted, but after recomposing myself a few times I had finally reached the ending that had evaded me for five years. It was a victory, for myself, if for nothing else. It felt as if I’d overcome a part of me that had yet to mature. It was a bittersweet victory. It was of course, not the “true” ending, and there was a melancholy to it denied my complete satisfaction.
Then came Area X. After hours of restriction, trial and frustration, Area X was a light return to a familiar place. Light and sound moved around me. It moved me. It was the link between the transhuman aspirations of both Rez and Child of Eden. It ended, and I wanted more. I wanted to keep feeling this way. But, if nothing else, it felt as if something had been finally resolved.
OTHER WORTHWHILE GAMES OF THE YEAR FEATURES:
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Clickbliss: The Games We Played
Abnormal Mapping’s First Annual Soundtrack Showcase
Warp Door’s Year End Round Up
Brandon Boyer’s 20 Games You Shouldn’t Miss in 2016
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