Everybody needs to know, IT'S THE YEAR OF THE CAPS

It seems appropriate that after over-ambitiously taking months to (mostly) get around to writing individual reviews of my top 10 games for 2015, I would nearly skip it entirely this time around. So without any ado, my top 10 picks for 2016 in short form.


10. Devil Daggers
Devil Daggers was a tough one to review for its bite-sized brevity. But that’s OK - I enjoyed my (very brief) time with Devil Daggers more than the many hours I spent trying to love could-have-been’s like Civilization VI and Dishonored 2.

9. XCOM 2
I’ve warmed up to this one significantly in the months since they started ironing out its rampant bugs. Yes, it’s more XCOM, but it’s more XCOM and a better helping of it at that.

8. Total WARHAMMER
The Total War that totally got me. Turns out I really am just a sucker for smashing demon hordes as a dwarf lord. Whether it’s that or the streamlined strategy layer, there’s a certain something in the flavor and variety of Total Warhammer’s factions that lured me in in a way the historical entries of the series never quite did. Shame on them for having the guts to charge DLC money for the game’s blood and guts graphical setting.

7. Titanfall 2
I feel a bit bad for Titanfall 2. In a year without Overwatch, this would have been the multiplayer shooter extravaganza. It’s still a thrilling and unique FPS in a year where the genre really made a comeback, and its freerunning, robot-quipping campaign is a blast in its own right.

6. Sorcery!
The same folks at Inkle who gave us last year’s singular 80 Days have managed to take the best of the 80s gamebook genre and turn it into an epic RPG with an old-school sense of danger and a new-school layer of mechanical polish. Sorcery’s ever-unfolding world of weirdness and wonder sets it apart from the increasingly stale “narrative” RPGs of today, which (Witcher 3 notwithstanding) have a tendency to promise player choice and consequence but rarely deliver it on this level.

5. SUPERHOT
Oh look, another stylish short-form shooter evoking the thrill of the genre’s bullet hell roots with the style and innovation of a 2016 showstopper. This is the best of them. Play SUPERHOT.

4. Firewatch
A poignant, breathtakingly beautiful story game that has stuck with me over the year even more than I expected it to.

3. INSIDE
It really was the year of the CAPS LOCK key, wasn’t it? I held off on INSIDE much longer than I should have because at a glance it looked like just another Limbo (which I loved). It kind of is, but it’s such an improvement on its predecessor’s mechanics and such a brilliant piece of world-building that no degree of familiarity is an excuse to pass over this one.

2. Dark Souls 3
There’s not much more to say about this one except that I’m surprised it’s not my #1. It sure was close, but there are four (OK, five) Souls games now and only one Overwatch.

1. Overwatch
Overwatch is what happens when you throw Blizzard science at all the best elements of a genre, polish them to perfection, then layer on top of them a series of innovations so elegant in their simplicity that they set the new standards for multiplayer gaming overnight. Overwatch is more than just Team Fortress 3 or first-person Dota. Overwatch is lightning in a bottle. Overwatch is the future. A vibrant, frenetic, candy-colored future of boundless joy and infinite addiction.

Honorable Mentions:

• The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine 
• I’m still playing the third-best RPG of 2015, which also happens to be the second-best RPG of 2016. I just haven’t even finished the Hearts of Stone expansion yet, let alone Blood and Wine. This game’s scale is goddamn ridiculous.
• Oxenfree
• A particularly pretty piece of interactive storytelling more than a bit undone by its overwrought ending and underdeveloped characters.
• Stardew Valley
• I didn’t play it, but I watched my partner play it. I spent enough years adoring Harvest Moon to recognize very quickly that Stardew Valley is the definitive version of that formula and could only be improved a mobile edition.
• BioShock 2
• Obviously this didn't come out last year, but its remaster did, and I finally got around to giving this formerly underappreciated sequel a go (albeit on the non-remastered version). BioShock 2 really is quite good, mechanically perhaps the best of the trilogy. I'm not sure I buy the revisionist hype that it tells a better story than the first or Infinite, but I quite enjoyed a familiar foray back into Rapture nonetheless.

Top 10 Games of the Past Generation: Faster than Light

10. FTL: Faster Than Light

Shields are failing. All but one weapons system are down. Multiple hull breaches have taken the lives of crew members in engineering and the command deck, leaving only the captain, the chief combat officer, and a newly rescued young psychic locked in hand to hand combat with invading enemy Mantises in the medbay of the Aegis. While his two crewmates buy precious seconds, The captain struggles through burning corridors in a last ditch attempt to repair the door control subsystem before the flames consume the ship’s dwindling oxygen supply. All seems lost. 

Suddenly, an opening. An errant asteroid strikes the enemy vessel precisely as the combat officer unleashes the last of the Aegis’s missile reserves. A single missile penetrates the shield opening left by the asteroid, smashing into the enemy’s own weapon’s bay and setting nearby systems ablaze. The interruption in the barrage buys the Captain enough time to repair the Aegis’s door controls, sealing the enemy invaders in the Aegis’s own burning corridors before venting their air into the void of space. 

The tides quickly turn. With the fires and invaders under control, the weapons officer and psychic are able to being the weapons system back alone while the captain restores full power to shields. The enemy ship, now themselves nearly devoid of crew members and quickly losing hull integrity, attempt to jump to light speed and make their escape. No such luck. Another asteroids cripples their FTL drive, and a final missile seals their fate. The Aegis lives to fight another day. 

If you could point to one defining trait of this past gaming gen, it might to be the arrival - or, arguably, revival - of widespread emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay, loosely put, refers to those “unprogrammed” moments when a game’s open design allows the player to witness something wildly unexpected and unique to their own gaming experience. While for the most part this trend has been associated with free-roaming sandbox games in the vein of Rockstar or Bethesda’s work, the mostly linear FTL: Faster Than Light features perhaps the most stunning emergent moments you’ll find anywhere. That sense of possibility, the chance that something new and unexpected could happen at any moment, that there might be any number of previously undiscovered solutions to any given problem - that’s what emergent gameplay is all about.

You could argue that this has always been the biggest draw of the Roguelike genre, but FTL stands out in particular for its accessibility. It’s by no means an easy game - brutally difficult, on the contrary - but it overcomes the massive barrier to entry in otherwise phenomenal titles like Nethack and Dwarf Fortress:  the user interface. While hewing to Roguelike tradition in using only the most rudimentary 2D graphics, FTL’s clean and intuitive control menus put those other titles and the byzantine Star Trek: Starfleet Command GUIs to shame.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the tropes of TV space combat can pick up FTL and instantly understand what it means to divert power from engines to shields, represented here by simple icons and energy bars and accompanied by sound effects that always signal exactly what even a casual SciFi film viewer would expect them to. The pew-pew of incoming laser fire, the shhhck of a pressure-sealing door, the humming decrescendo of a failing power supply - nothing could make more sense or communicate the complex turns of space combat so easily. Even my boyfriend, who has no patience for punishing gameplay difficulty, abandoned Dark Souls in less than hour, and categorically refuses to play anything he doesn’t find superior to Civ V as a baseline, took to FTL immediately and has come back to it regularly for years without fail. Which says more than you might think about the game’s staying power.

True, the “losing is fun” philosophy turns a lot of people off by default. And yes, even after the (free) additions of the Advanced Edition, FTL is a little sparse in the variety of unique encounters, most of which you’re likely to see repeating after a handful of playthroughs. But the beauty of FTL is that the impact of those encounters is utterly unique every time. The individual narrative of your ship, your choices, and your crew alter the meaning and outcome of those encounters with infinite variation. FTL, in other words, though always new, is always familiar. In all the right ways. And that’s only one part of what makes it my tenth best game of the past generation.