Game of the Year #4: About a Girl

4. Her Story
Sam Barlow, 2015 (PC and iOS versions reviewed)

It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #5 title on my personal countdown: Sam Barlow’s Her Story.

I don’t suppose there’s much left to say about Sam Barlow’s breakout FMV hit that hasn’t been said, so I’ll keep it brief and reflect on my more recent follow-up experiences with the game as opposed to my original playthrough. For those who missed this high-profile indie gem or the months of heated discussion around it, Her Story is a digital detective simulator wherein you sift through an aging computer database of interrogative police video clips from 1994. Only the interviewee tapes are preserved - nothing of the detective’s (or detectives’) questions can be heard - and the archaic metadata transcription system means that, while you use simple word searches to sift through these videos for content, you are limited to viewing the top five results for any given term. Other than clicking around the virtual desktop and tagging videos with your own notes, this search bar is basically the game’s sole mechanic, but boy does it get a lot of mileage out of it.

Her Story unfolds in completely unique ways for every player due to this open-ended progression system and the near infinite number of possible search sequences that can be entered. I didn’t realize just how uniquely, however, until I began introducing the game to friends and discovering how utterly distinct the narrative can be depending on your pace and path of the discovery, the preconceptions individual players bring to the table, and sheer luck. As rich as these individual experiences can be, Her Story’s true potential shines nowhere more brightly than in a group setting. It’s engrossing to play the detective on your own and let yourself sink into the flow of your personal investigative narrative; it’s downright enthralling to do it as a party, feeding off one another’s speculative energy and bouncing your crazy theories and stratagems off one another like a bunch of drunken McNulties playing-acting couch Poirot. Pencils fly off of notepads, suspect profile are spouted, and the gaps between searches are filled with impassioned attacks or defenses on a particular character’s honesty or dishonesty, innocence or guilt, as all the strands of your thoughts and impressions begin to form the web that is your group’s Her Story narrative.

Sure, the FMV search mechanic is an “novelty,” but Her Story is so much more than the disposable diversion that label has come to represent re gaming mechanics. It’s a meticulously crafted, one-of-a-kind experience representing no technological evolution beyond a mid-90s adventure game but glowing with ingenuity in the way that simple tech is used to create something intellectually and emotionally investing.

Game of the Year #5: Which Witcher Whipped Which Witch Hunter?

5. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
CD Projekt Red, 2015 (PC version reviewed)

It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #5 title on my personal countdown: CDPR’s The Witcher 3.

I have a strong bias in favor of interesting games. Not just good games, but games that push or break boundaries in novel ways. Games that take risks and diverge from formula. Games that aren’t afraid to be weird or to flout conventional design wisdom if it makes for a more uniquely engaging experience.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is none of these things. There’s hardly a piece of it we haven’t seen a hundred times before. It’s an iterative evolution on The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, mostly in that it follows the trend of trading discrete levels or load areas in favor of an almost completely open-world map design - sometimes at the expense of detail and intentionality in the design of individual areas. The combat has been modified from an awkward hybrid of point-and-click MMORPG combat and a Diablo-style action RPG to an awkward hybrid of Arkham-style rhythm combat and direct input Souls combat. The interface and menus are are only slightly less byzantine and unwieldy than before, or just as unwieldy in different ways, an RPG vice we’ve less gotten used to than just learned to accept. The basic open-world RPG formula of “follow map to quest giver, follow map to quest cutscene, kill/gather quest MacGuffin, follow map back to quest giver” remains the sole script in play.

So why is something as uninteresting The Witcher 3 one of my favorite games of 2015? Because it knows what it is, it knows its strengths, and it throws money and manpower and talent at those strengths until they’re stronger than anything else like it. This is most immediately apparent in the production values: The Witcher 3 is a gorgeous game, not only in its breathtaking technical facsimile of real cities and real people, nor in its colorful art design and sense of haute-renaissance-meets-high-fantasy style, but in the sheer awe it generates through combination of these elements in a gigantic, vividly lifelike world. This fidelity constantly tempts you to stand in the middle of a city watching the crowds mill by with purpose that would put Assassin’s Creed to shame, or to stop and stare at a tangerine sunset at the end of a long day’s journey and enjoy the best melancholic orchestration a big studio budget can buy.

You might stop and take a moment to enjoy the view. Probably many moments.

The Witcher 3 finally delivers on the promise Oblivion made and broke a decade ago when it introduced us to a superficially huge and beautiful world that then immediately fell apart at the seams when we met its dead-eyed robot residents, mechanical encounters, and suffocating lack of personality or variety. The Witcher 3’s residents not only appear alive but act alive, both in their mundane habits and reactions and in their shockingly human expressions and dialogue when interacting with one another or with Geralt, our titular Witcher. The writing and acting aren’t themselves groundbreaking - we’ve seen similarly high quality in BioWare and Obsidian’s work for some time now - but combined with such stunning graphical fidelity and animation it all makes for an extraordinarily engaging experience in CDPR’s environments and with their characters.

You don’t need Ciri to solemnly swear she’s up to no good.

Geralt himself is transformed from the unrelatable, emotionless cypher he was in the previous titles to a genuine human being  (albeit a mutant one) simply through the subtleties of his expressions. A slight grimace at his mouth’s edges here, a glint in his eye or raised eyebrow there - each reveal something of the inner life of a person who’s not so devoid of feeling as he’d like the world to think. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in Geralt’s relationship with and search for his adopted daughter Ciri, the driving central quest of the narrative as she flees from the Ringwraith-like Wild Hunt. We can speculate some meta reasons why fathers seem to have become the de facto protagonist of AAA games, but there’s no denying it carries tremendous emotional heft for a leading man as detached as Geralt had always been, and that it grounds the narrative in intimate realities in a way I wish more fantasy games would.

(Secretly a huge softie.)

That’s the Witcher 3’s core strength, really. It’s this vast and sprawling and epic thing, a dauntingly realized universe filled with more quests and characters than you could start or meet in a hundred hours. Yet for all that the game never loses sight of its humanity, even in its monsters. It’s as much the little things - the tiny touches of life - as the big ones that make The Witcher 3 great.

Game of the Year #9: In Defense of Defense (of the Ancients)

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9. Dota 2

Valve, 2015

It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #9 title on my personal countdown: Valve’s Dota 2 Reborn.

It’s hard to know how to begin to talk about Dota. Though you wouldn’t know it from my current MMR score, I’ve been an alternately avid and casual player since its earliest days as a Warcraft 3 map, when I somehow managed to claw my way up the clan rankings on a 2001 Compaq laptop connecting to Blizzard’s US East servers over a 28.8k modem connection. At least on days when the power wasn’t out for our half of southern Thailand. Best of times, worst of times, etc.

A little-known passage from Sun Tzu’s Art of Controlled Chaos.

A lot’s changed since then. A little-known subset of mods once called Aeon of Strife clones (after an old Starcraft map) have risen to become the billion dollar e-sport industry known as “MOBAs,” an acronym for the stupefyingly vague label “Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas.” Dota was not the first of these, nor is it the most widely played. The younger, pay-to-play League of Legends - founded by a former Dota co-developer - rose up to swallow the largest market share while Dota was still struggling with matchmaking as a Warcraft mod and while its clone Heroes of Newerth failed to pull the playerbase to a commercial standalone client. But despite a delayed entry, the Valve-backed Dota 2 client has rapidly shot to prominence as the world’s most “serious” e-sport this side of Starcraft. Or, at the very least, the one with the most serious level of competitive play and earnings prospects for professional gamers. Seasons of Dota now involve dozens of annual tournaments on a global scale, culminating in a once-a-year blowout tournament known as The International that has now surpassed the Masters golf tour in prize pool totals, the winning team of which received twice as large a prize as the Wimbledon men and women singles champions.

One of the few surviving screenshots of Aeon of Strife.

Yet for all the pomp and ludicrous piles of cash now involved in professional Dota, the game itself has retained the same core characteristics across its decade-long lifespan and has codified these basic elements for the genre. While this year saw a massive update to the underlying engine and the user interface components of the out-of-game menu in Dota 2 Reborn (which also reintroduced a version of the Warcraft World Editor that made mods like Dota possible in the first place), those basic elements have barely been touched even as new playable heroes are introduced and balance is altered.

Pick your poison. Don’t worry, there are 112 flavors of death to sample.

For anyone who’s missed this boat entirely, it’s helpful to know that “Dota,” lack of caps notwithstanding, is an acronym for Defense of the Ancients. Because that’s what the game basically boils down to: defending your Ancient, either the Radiant World Tree or the Dire Throne, with a team of five player-controlled heroes attempting to destroy the other’s. The player (usually) only has control of their personal hero (selected from a pool of over a hundred), while a rudimentary AI controls the waves of “creep” troops laying siege to the enemy tower defenses across a central dividing river. On either side of the river is “the jungle,” a series of locations populated by neutral creeps and secret shops, the control and “farming” of which can turn the tide in the overall battle. In a cave at the end of the river waits Roshan, an enormous draconic boss who typically requires an entire team to defeat but who drops tide-turning gold, experience, and items.

With years of careful study and experience,
you too can understand what the hell’s going on here!

And that’s basically it. Matches play out along this basic formula for anywhere from 20-60 minutes, but the actual course of each battle is utterly unique to the heroes and players involved. For the most part, players will fall into a series of loosely defined roles like “carries” (who require huge amounts of gold and experience to become useful but who ultimately carry the team to victory), “supports” (who typically possess the most spell power early on and can dedicate their gold to buying helpful items for the rest of the team), “cores” (a dependable hero something like a carry who requires less babysitting but doesn’t scale as well in the late game), and “tanks” (especially in the early years of Dota, a hefty damage sponge in the vein of a World of Warcraft tank, but typically with a strong disabling spell or two). Victory requires not only strong performance in each of these roles but constant, constructive communication among team members. There are no lone wolves in Dota, other than dead ones. The team that trusts and cooperates with one another more cohesively is almost always the team who will win.

Trust me, something really cool just happened in this one.

It’s difficult to describe in writing - hell, in anything less than many hours of firsthand experience - exactly what makes this formula so compelling, or why Dota does it so well. For one thing, it can be almost incomparably frustrating. A game that requires you to invest as much as an hour of uninterrupted time, the fun of which is wholly contingent on you and four other (often anonymous) teammates getting along in the midst of a struggle, leads either to tremendous thrill and satisfaction or to outrage rage and irritation. Small wonder that the lower ranks of Dota’s public matchmaking have a (partly deserved) reputation for housing some of the most toxic human interactions on the internet.

Jakiro is a two-headed fire-and-ice-breathing dragon. Yes, he cracks lots of silly temperature-related puns.
Everyone cracks puns.

But when everything goes right - when you find yourself matched with friends or friendly strangers, when you’re each giving your all and playing your part, and when you find yourself learning and improving not only in victory but from defeat - when all those stars align, you discover in Dota the most transcendent moments in multiplayer gaming. The learning curve is brutal, and even with Reborn’s much-improved tutorials Dota often requires an investment of dozens of hours before the fun sets in and hundreds before a player reaches basic competency with a handful of heroes. As with Dark Souls, the fact that so many of us endured through that and have remained loyal players for years is a testament to just how worthwhile the journey can be.

“Undying” is more or less always a misnomer in Dota.

Dota’s community at their best moments are what elevate the meta experience of the game to those heights. The game’s history as a community mod with sequential authorship and just goes to show how tightly jolly cooperation is wound in its DNA. That legacy received new life in this year’s Reborn update, which in addition to numerous client improvements reintroduced a version of the Warcraft World Editor that made mods like Dota possible in the first place. In just the few short months since its arrival, the modding community has used the Reborn editor to recreate hundreds of classic Dota 1 mods and game modes as well as dozens of entertaining new ones. Now after ending a particularly draining match players can jump into a far more casual round of co-op Spin Tower Defense, a chaotic 3-team king of the hill game of Overthrow, a zany 10 vs. 10 variant of Dota itself, or any endless number of mini (and not so mini) games created by the community using the Reborn toolset. If this is what the community could accomplish in just half a year with Valve’s new toy of, and if the old Warcraft mod scene that spawned Dota itself is any guide, then we can probably expect even greater things to grow out of Reborn in the coming years.

And to think in a few moments they’ll be screaming racial epithets at each other.

So, there you have it. It’s a touch odd to be discussing Dota 2 as a 2015 game of the year, given its decade of life. But between the Reborn reboot, the unparalleled spectacle of the International 5, and the big return of the Dota mod scene, this is Dota’s year in a lot of ways, and as appropriate a time as ever to give it its due. It may not be for everyone, but for those who know Dota and love it, there’s nothing else quite like it.

Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

Don’t worry, there are plenty of ludicrous hats to buy.

Game of the Year #10: A Garbage Land of Sand and Sadness

10. Tales from the Borderlands

Telltale Games, 2015 (PC version reviewed)

It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #10 title on my personal countdown: Telltale’s Tales from the Borderlands. 

It can seem impossible to talk about a Telltale title without landing yourself in a preliminary debate about What It Means to Be a Video Game. On PC and consoles, anyway, Telltales’ particular brand of Adventure Lite has, rightly or wrongly, come to symbolize the extreme edge of what constitutes a “casual” game or - somewhat absurdly - something not a game at all. Phrases like “interactive television” get thrown around as if they were pejoratives, and self-styled “hardcore” gamers feel seemingly compelled to let you know that, however much they might enjoy the occasional Telltale, they ordinarily only ever play “real” games.

If this all sounds a little ridiculous, that’s possibly because it is, and I promise won’t spend much more time on it. In a medium as fluid and expansive as games, the notion of policing titles for purity feels as absurd as it is restrictive. At the end of day, all I know is that my experience with Tales from the Borderlands was wholly different from any I’ve had in other media - tv, books, or otherwise - or any I can imagine having elsewhere. It’s a game about choice above all else - genuinely moreso than any previous Telltales - and the player’s ability to mould the characters and narrative into a version of the story they’d like to tell. And if that doesn’t get at the heart of what makes games unique, I don’t know what does.

In some ways, Tales from the Borderlands is the most Telltale game out there. We’ve clearly reached some critical point where they’ve ceased to be adventure titles in the oldschool sense, for starters. There are exactly two moments in all of Tales where you’re required to rub an item on something to advance, and if you blink you might miss them. Inventory, consequently, feels almost vestigial, with the exception of a couple key items that will automatically be available to you in relevant story moments. Exploratory free movement sections are few and far between, to the point that it feels almost strange whenever the cinematic camera cuts to the flat, classic adventure perspective. The only major element that still clearly hearkens to the genre of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle is the EchoEye™, a cybernetic eye implant that allows Rhys (protagonist #1 of 2) to scan objects and characters for no reason except to read some of the most hilarious faux-corporate-wiki captions ever written into a game. It’s a cute excuse to get some Hitchhiker’s Guide color commentary layered into the whole thing, and it never fails to amuse.

The vast majority of the game, however, is spent in a cinematic mode that feels closer to the story beats of modern BioWare than anything in the adventure genre, peppered with thousands of dialogue options and quicktime event-like action controls. So, the usual Telltale stuff, but more of it than ever before. Unlike most previous Telltales, however - and unlike BioWare’s recent titles - the choices present a lot more variety than the “Good Guy, Bad Guy, Sarcastic Asshole” selection we’ve all come to roll our eyes at. Perhaps partly because *everyone* in the Borderlands universe is a sarcastic asshole, the choices in Tales typically reflect four or so distinct varieties in approaches to a conversation or decision that could *reasonably be outgrowths of that character’s personality*, allowing the player to decide who Rhys and Fiona will gradually become in the course of their adventure. I don’t know how better to describe the improvements here than to say that this is the first Telltale game I have a strong desire to replay, and that nearly every available option was so interesting, funny, and dynamic that I almost immediately wanted to rewind each chapter to try different routes.

Did I mention this game is funny? Well it’s not. It’s the funniest. No, really, it is. Even in a year boasting Undertale, this may be the most consistently drop-dead hilarious writing in a game since the point-and-click Lucasarts heyday. The vocal performances are spectacular, with voice-over veterans from Troy Baker to Patrick Wharburton to Laura Bailey giving 110% over the most cartoonishly expressive comic book facial animations this side of Venture Bros. The script itself feels like the kind of story that Borderlands was always meant to tell but never had a chance to within the confines of a first-person loot-em-up. The series’ signature ultraviolence serves here not only as a source of clever commentary but as a legitimate key ingredient of the narrative and its broader themes.

And that, more than anywhere else, is where we begin to get at what makes Tales special. Telltale has told rich, mature stories before; A Wolf Among Us took all the most interesting character elements of the Fables comics and actually brought them a layer deeper. But in Tales they’ve managed something even more impressive. Every character is a source not only of their own unique punchlines but of genuine human feeling and conflict, even at their most caricatured. Your average Great Game is lucky if it can give us even one, maybe two lasting, memorable characters who stand out in our thoughts of the game long after we’ve finished it. Not so with Tales from the Borderlands. Like Undertale, there’s not a single damn one of the cast I don’t already want to spend more time with or have the opportunity to see another side of on replay. Even the many antagonists - only one of whom is a genuine villain and murderous psychopath - are either downright likable or at least empathetic personalities in the mad, mad world that is Pandora. I spent most of my time with Tales (literally) laughing out loud, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I shed more than a couple tears at the more somber moments.

So call it a “casual” game, call it interactive tv - I don’t give a damn. Tales is among the best examples of what big budget storytelling has to offer this medium, and I for one love that that medium affords us narrative experiences as diverse in one year as The Witcher 3, Dark Souls II, Her Story, and Tales from the Borderlands. It’s a big tent, and there’s room for everyone who brings something to the show.

If Caleb Picked the Oscars and Made Up His Own Categories, 2013 Edition

Best Picture If It Weren't for the Blasted HandyCam: Beasts of the Southern Wilds (Special Mention: Les Miserables)
Best Film No One Saw: The Queen of Versailles
Most Surprisingly Awesome Film: ParaNorman
Most Surprisingly Awful Film / Biggest Disappointment: Prometheus (Special Mentions: The Dark Knight Rises, Brave)
Best Body Horror Moment Since Cronenberg Quit Horror: Looper
Best Superhero Film: The Avengers (Well, no shit)
Most Useless, Underbaked, Unwanted Film: The Amazing Spider-Man
Best Wes Anderson Film: Moonrise Kingdom
Best Propaganda Piece: Zero Dark Thirty
Best What the Fuck Did I Just Watch: The Cabin in the Woods (Special Mention: Safety Not Guaranteed)
Most Overrated Sequel That Is Actually Good But Not Nearly As Good As Everyone Says: Skyfall
Best Piece of Overrated Oscar-Bait: Lincoln
Best Forgettable Mediocrity No One Would Be Talking About If Pixar Hadn't Dropped the Ball This Year: Wreck-It Ralph
Weirdest Off-Beat Comedy That I Have No Idea What to Do With: Bernie (Special Mention: Safety Not Guaranteed)
Most Surprisingly Hilarious Comedy: 21 Jump Street
Most Chronologically Unfortunate Subject Matter for a Superhero Film: Chronicle
Best Picture I Expected to Hate But Actually Kinda Liked In Total Spite of myself: The Perks of Being a Wallflower