Top 10 Favorite Video Games of 2018
I had a very strange year when it comes to video games.
In a weird way, my attitude about movies in 2018 also applies to its video games: I couldn’t summon as much passion for what I played this year as I did last year. How could I? Last year was an unusually strong one for games, what with Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild and Edith Finch and Night in the Woods and so on and so forth. In a year that burns that hot, a comedown should not only be expected, but also understood.
But I also spent a lot of 2018 feeling left out.
I’m not into massive online games, so no Destiny 2 or Monster Hunter for me. I’m not into fighting games or anime IPs, so no Dragon Ball FighterZ or BlazBlue either. And I’m not into RTS games so no Into the Breach (although I understand that it’s really more of a puzzle game, so I will get to it) and I’m not into this and I’m not into that and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, the types of games that typically do it for me weren’t firing on all cylinders, and it was hard not to feel like everyone was having a big party with my best friend without me.
Not to say that there wasn’t great stuff. On the contrary, there were plenty of fantastic games. But I couldn’t help but feel like video games were a bummer in 2018.
Then in late November, I bought a PSVR set. Now video games are the greatest fucking thing on the planet.
We’ll be getting into VR in the body of this list, but I want to leave this intro with one more thought: I might not be as passionate about the games of 2018, but I still found it an incredibly rewarding year. As I thought about what I put on this list and why I put it there, a certain word kept emerging: “First.” This was a year defined by my first experiences with certain franchises and my first time enjoying certain genres and certain play styles and my first time with certain technologies and new ideas.
And you know what? Despite my lukewarm thoughts on the year as a whole, that’s awesome, and I left this list feeling way more positive about games in 2018.
So let’s talk about them!
HEAVY SPOILERS BELOW!
Runner-Up: Donut County
Donut County is the first time I’ve ever played a Katamari style game. You control a hole in the ground, and the more stuff you put in the hole, the bigger the hole gets.
Let me get my gripes with Donut County out of the way so I can get to the part where I’m fawning all over it: I think it was a mistake for me to play it all in one sitting. Of course, Donut County is charming. And of course it’s fun. And of course I paused it at some point so I could buy the soundtrack. But the loop began to wear on me. Have a conversation at camp, play a level, read Trashopedia. Conversation, level, trash. Over and over.
Now, Donut County isn’t a long game and it never loses its charm, so in the end, this isn’t a big deal. But I don’t think it would’ve stuck out to me if I felt the gameplay and the levels iterated a little more. I wanted more puzzles and hole filling. Or to put it another way, my problem with Donut County was that there wasn’t enough Donut County. Depriving me of any amount of Donut County is a crime.
Now, it’s time for some fawning. First of all:
Second of all:
Third of all:
(Yes, I do realize I was just critical of the game for feeling repetitious. Shut up.)
Jokes aside, Donut County has sense of identity and authorship to it that makes it stand out in an industry of band wagon hopping and clones. (Including a literal clone of this game that I was happy not to support.) Specifically, it has the feel of being made by an actual human being (his name is Ben Esposito), and this games exudes that person’s sense of humor and worldview in a way most games don’t. I laughed every time I saw “LOL” as written dialogue, partially because it’s dumb, but mostly because this feels like the kind fo world where the author understands the irony. I like that the game has a perspective on internet culture and gadget addiction that isn’t just, “Hey isn’t the internet fucking dumb and shallow!?!?!” I like that the game is an incredibly subtle story about gentrification.
Okay, maybe it’s not that subtle. But the point is that I didn’t remember that until it came time to write this. What stands out to me is the personality and charm. It’s not without it’s problems for me, but I’ll play anything Ben Esposito’s involved in, and I hope we hear more from him in the future.
10. Florence
Florence is the first time a mobile game truly won me over with its narrative.
It also made me realize that I still had a bias against mobile games.
To a certain degree, that bias is justified. Pull out your phone, take a look at whatever app store you have, and bear witness to a ruinous wasteland of free-to-play bullshit. On the other hand, however, mobile games have proven over and over again that they can be incredibly engaging and, at times, meaningful. There’s the obvious examples of both the Monument Valley games, as well as Flow Free (a game I have a personal love for), Lara Croft Go, Alto’s Odyssey, and at the moment, I’m really into this game called supertype. You should check it out.
I have a fondness for the platform. But to put it in a needlessly reductive manner, there’s a certain checklist I have in my head: Playability, aesthetic, and narrative. Mobile games have never checked that third box for me. Some have come close. Particularly the Monument Valley stories. But I respect those stories more than I feel anything when I think about them. It’s an intellectual appreciation, but not an emotional one. I realize this has more to do with the mobile games I’ve played, and I’m sure there’s something out there that has an incredible story. But the narrative triumph of mobile games have always eluded me.
Then I played all of Florence, a game where you mini-game your way through the evolution of a relationship, it’s eventual end, and how that relationship reawakened the titular Florence’s true passion, in my car in a parking lot because I accidentally showed up an hour early to a movie.
Most of my thoughts while playing were on the game’s aesthetics and how effective each of the mini-games were at not only conveying whatever was literally happening in the story, but also at presenting a metaphor for what happens in most relationships. On the first date, you have to create speech bubbles out of puzzle pieces, the idea being that conversation on first dates is hard and awkward. But as the date progresses, the puzzle pieces become easier to put together as the two become more comfortable around each other. The game is made entirely of moments like these, and all of them are just as clever.
I finished the game and I sat there for a few minutes thinking about the story. On one hand, it had the intended impact on me. I found endless amounts of empathy for both Florence and Krish, and when their relationship went south, I was flooded with nervousness and dread in a way I haven’t been with mobile games before. Or at least on the narrative end.
However, I also thought about (what I think are) the story’s flaws. I thought about how it spent so much time trying to be relatable with its story beats that it forgot to be unique. Florence the character’s story being told through this medium was fresh and I understand that the relatability of her story is part of the point. But I wanted more. I wanted a closer examination of the cultural differences between Florence or Krish. Or something on how Florence’s experience informs her art in the end. Or something that gives us insight into who Florence is as a person and the reasons why Florence and Krish eventually drifted apart other than mundanity.
Then I stopped and realized something: I was having these thoughts about a mobile game.
When I said “Florence is the first time a mobile game truly won me over with its narrative”, what I really meant was that Florence was the first time where I thought primarily about the story and not the novelty of playing it on my phone. That the phrase “for a mobile game” didn’t enter the conversation of how great I thought the story was despite a problem or two I had with how it plays out.
I know that’s a bit of a condescending point. But I think Florence is finally the game that knocked down the final barrier separating “proper” video games from mobile games. I won’t be making that distinction again.
9. Astro Bot Rescue Mission
Astro Bot Rescue Mission is the first fully VR game I’ve ever played.
As I said, I bought my headset in the end of November. Up until that point, I had never experienced proper VR. One time, someone in this screenwriting workshop I was in at UCLA brought in a cardboard headset and we all took turns watching a VR animated short film with his phone. But I hadn’t seen the real shit until my headset arrived. The first game I actually played on it is one we’ll be talking about further down in the list, but that game is playable without the headset. (And it’s arguably better without it.) Astro Bot Rescue Mission, on the other hand, is a VR only experience.
I’m making a point of mentioning all this because I might still be in the throes. At this point, I’ve played four games in VR, and I’m still in the phase where I can’t discuss it with people in a rational or calm manner. Whenever I talk about it with a friend or a family member, it’s usually something along the lines of, “HOLY SHIT, VR IS FUCKING INCREDIBLE!!!”
I’m sure I’ll eventually reach the point where I became bored and cynical with VR games. I’m sure everything I’m excited about will seem mundane and stupid to the more experienced VR players. But at this particular moment in time, I see vast amounts of potential in what it can accomplish.
Let’s take Astro Bot Rescue Mission. On the surface, it’s a simple platformer with a simple story premise: A mean squishy green alien attacks a spaceship filled with adorable robots, all the robots except for one scatter across five planets, and you control the lone robot as you go to each planet’s five levels to rescue them all and defeat the bosses who have different parts of your broken ship.
Sure, it’s not emotionally enriching. (Except for one aspect that we’ll get to in a second.) But the first time a level loaded, my brain broke. Because here’s the thing that’s hard to explain to someone who’s never tried VR before. I wasn’t in my apartment looking at a screen with the space on it. I was in the space, so I had to change my gaming logic accordingly. If I wanted to see something higher up, I didn’t have to turn the camera. I had to either turn my head or physically stand up. Sometimes things were below me and sometimes I had to physically adjust to see some new detail.
And if it weren’t enough that I could interact with a game in this manner, the game also has an endlessly enchanting art style and little charming details that always put a big dumb smile on my face. If you look at your little robot, it will wave at you. If you look at certain flowers, they’ll bloom and start dancing. Later, you unlock different tools you can use to help guide your robot pal along, and some of the interactions with those are not only unique for platformers, but delightful in their own way as well. It finds endless way to introduce new ideas and stay fresh.
I played a few other VR games after I defeated the final boss in Astro Bot, and some of those blew my mind as well. (Holy shit Superhot VR.) But Astro Bot Rescue Mission is the high I’ll be chasing from now on. In a way, this game redefined what a video game space could be and how I could interact with it. Maybe in a few years I’ll be saying that this game wasn’t that special, and some of you have probably already reached that point. But for now, the love is strong.
8. Gris
Gris is the first time I’ve ever fallen for a game based on pure sensory overload.
Most of the non-aesthetic aspects of Gris are, for the most part, just fine. It plays in a perfectly sensible manner. The level design can be a little frustrating here and there, but otherwise works. The story, while told abstractly, is affective enough not just because of the themes of grief and loss it explores, but how it expands on those themes with the mechanics and abilities the titular Gris learns on the way. For example, in the first chapter, Gris is constantly being knocked down, so she learns to turn herself into stone. You understand the metaphor.
Without the aesthetics, it would’ve been fine. But holy shit, look at this game.
Understand that usually I’m not the kind of person who can be sucked into just the aesthetics of a game. I’ve played plenty of very pretty games that control like garbage that try to skate by on their art style alone.
But Gris does it for me. The aesthetic. The music. The way everything animates. All of it. It does it so much that I failed to really register any other part of it until after I finished it. I couldn’t remember the actual playing of it well enough to comment on them, so I had to look them up on Youtube as a reminder.
Somebody is probably bummed out by Gris. They’re not wrong. And maybe this game should be a little lower on this list. But I have nothing else to offer you other than more screenshots. Just play Gris yourself, or type “Gris” into Google Images and that’s pretty much all that needs to be said.
7. Dead Cells
Dead Cells is the first time I’ve ever truly loved a roguelike. Or a roguelite. Or whatever.
The first roguelike I ever played was 2012’s FTL: Faster Than Light. I bought it in 2015 during one of the Steam sales, played it intensely for a few weeks, then dropped it once I realized that I wasn’t going to get any better and I wasn’t interested enough to try. But it’s still a game I think fondly on, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could learn to love this genre.
The next roguelike I picked up was Rogue Legacy. I bounced off that one even quicker. It’s a perfectly fine game, and you should give it a shot if you think it would interest you. But for me, it was a ton of function with not enough form, whereas FTL had an aesthetic and an atmosphere that won me over. Over the next few years, I tried a few more. Spelunky and Downwell and a few others that are escaping me at the moment. I liked some of these games a lot, but I never finished one, and I’ve never really wanted to.
I understand why people like roguelikes. They can be a lot of fun, and if you’re the kind of player who focuses more on mechanics and how a game’s systems interact with one another, then roguelikes are for you, and I’m not here to rain on your parade. However, for me personally, I don’t play games to become better at the act of playing them. I play them in order to complete them. I play them because I want an experience that feels like it’s building to something, and maybe the direction of where it goes changes, but in the end, I want the reason I stop playing to be because the experience is over. Not because I hit a wall in a feedback loop.
I realize that roguelikes provide what I’m talking about for plenty of people. And yes, I care about the narrative elements more than most roguelikes tend to emphasize them. I’m trying to say that roguelikes are, by nature, at odds with what I tend to want out of a gaming experience. They're just not for me, as I could’ve said many sentences ago.
Then, and I wish I could remember who wrote it or where it was written, somebody said, “Dead Cells is a roguelike for people who don’t like roguelikes.” This, combined with the overwhelming critical praise for it, convinced me to pick it up. Dead Cells became the game I probably spent the most time playing in 2018.
By now, if you’re the kind of person who reads stuff, you’ve probably read your fair share of “Dead Cells is the best playing game of 2018” or some sort of praise about how well the mechanics work. And those people are right. Dead Cells is, in fact, one beautifully playing game. But usually that’s not enough for me. Many games, including many roguelikes, play beautifully. And sure, Dead Cells looks fantastic and an interesting lore if you connect some of the dots. But, again, a lot of other roguelikes have this in common.
What sets Dead Cells apart for me is that it makes me feel welcome to the roguelike party.
A lot of roguelikes feel a bit cliquish to me. Every time I die in one, it feels like the game is judging me from the cool kid’s table. “Well, if you can’t beat me, it’s because you’re not good enough. You can’t sit with us. Fuck you.” Dead Cells, on the other hand, is the kid that gets along with everyone. “Hey,” the kid says, “I’m throwing a party. Stay as long as you want, and it doesn’t matter if you’re good enough or not because it’s about having fun.”
I never finished Dead Cells. I probably never will. But unlike many roguelikes, it never made me feel like it was keeping me at arm’s length. And for that I’m grateful.
6. God of War
God of War is the first time I’ve ever played a game in the God of War franchise.
I wish I had a good or even a specific reason for not playing any of the earlier games. But I don’t. I was tempted to play the third one once or twice, but that would’ve meant blowing the dust off my PS3 and futzing around with all the wires, which I never felt like doing except for the occasional console exclusive. But more importantly, I remember watching trailers for them and seeing posters and reading reviews and whatever and thinking, “I don’t know. This looks kind of stupid.”
Why the newly pubescent version of myself thought this, I don’t know. What with all the promises of gratuitous violence and sex, it should’ve been right up my alley. But later, I thought it looked stupid not in a fun self-aware way, but stupid in a “this is beneath me” way. Whether or not they actually are, I don’t know. I still haven’t played them. But by the time remastered editions were coming out and I had the means to play these early games, I knew the franchise by reputation, and I wasn’t interested.
Then I saw the E3 reveal trailer.
I remember thinking a few things. “That’s not how God of War games look!” “That’s not how they play!” “Hey, that’s norse mythology stuff, not Greek mythology!” And many more thoughts like that, all revolving around the same thing: It appears that they’ve changed everything about what this franchise is. For a AAA game, that’s incredible.
I told myself that this is the one I’m finally going to play. I bought it on opening day. It took me a while to get used to the combat. But once I did, I was in lockstep with basically every moment of this game until the very end.
You’ve read enough about how this game looks and how it sounds and how it plays. You’ve also read enough about the writing, whether it be critical pieces on its treatment of women and mothers or praising it for how it critiques bad fatherhood and toxic masculinity.
(Personally, I fall somewhere in between. On one hand, I think the lack of women and mothers is absolutely a problem, but on the other hand, I think part of the point is that this world is shittier and worse off because all that’s left are these horrible men but then that’s also a problem in its own right and so on and so forth. We may talk about this some other time.)
So the part I’ll talk about is Atreus.
At some point, you realize that your parents are just people. They aren’t mystical super people who can make everything better and solve all your problems. Rather, they’re just like everybody else. They’ve made mistakes, sometimes they’re unhappy, sometimes they’re not. They don’t have everything figured out, and they probably did some embarrassing shit when they were young that they’d rather you not know. (Unless you have a dad like mine, who will happily tell you about all the dumb shit he did in his youth.)
As I said before, I only knew the original trilogy by reputation. But I came into the God of War franchise with Kratos as a father, not Kratos as the rage addicted murder god. I don’t know that guy, so like Atreus, I knew only what Kratos presented in this particular game and I learned about him as I went. I wanted to figure him out and his past just as much as Atreus did, so I felt all of Atreus’s frustrations. Even during the parts where Atreus becomes an insufferable nightmare. (Which I didn’t mind. Tell a young frustrated grief stricken boy that he’s a god and he’ll behave like one.)
But, again, we all learn that our parents are flawed, and I like how this game treats its past incarnations as a hazy embarrassing blur our older, more responsibility minded Kratos would rather forget. He can’t. So the next best move is something Kratos says to Atreus in that trailer. “Don’t be sorry. Be better.”
Well, okay… maybe he should do both.
5. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is the first time I’ve had faith that a video game could approach the portrayal of abusive parents in a tasteful and nuanced manner.
Or at least it’s the first game I’ve played that’s given me that faith. It’s safe to say that eventually, someone was going to do it right, and thankfully, for me at least, that game’s finally come.
So… how should we portray abuse? Actually, let’s narrow that down a bit, as “abuse” can unfortunately cover so much behavior that there’s never going to be one clear answer that covers everything. (Not that narrowing it down would help much in that regard either.)
How should we portray parental abuse?
It’s a little hard for me to think about that question, as I’m lucky enough to be able to say that my parents never hurt me on a physical or emotional level, and they’ve been nothing but supportive my whole life. There will always be holes in my judgement on the portrayal of this stuff. But one thing I can do is follow my empathy, and some portrayals feel caring and thought out and some don’t.
I think the impulse most people would have is to portray an abusive parent as an outright monster. It’s an understandable instinct, and a more than justified one as well. However, I’ve always had a hard time believing that all abusive parents are always abusive assholes all the time. No human being is that simple. However, I don’t think that humanizing someone is the same thing as empathizing with them. Human behavior is driven by a wide number of complex factors. Someone might do something horrible for reasons that are similar to why you do things that are compassionate and caring. That doesn’t mean you have to feel anything for that person, and just because something is understandable or explainable doesn’t make it justifiable.
It’s even arguable that a humanized monster is worse. It’s one thing to not even pretend to think about right and wrong and the effects your actions have on your child. It’s another to be able to show love and compassion, and choose not to. To show your children that you’re capable of basic decency, but constantly deny them that basic human need.
I think Charles Eriksen loves his son Chris, and it’s obvious that he’s in a dark place thanks to the death of his wife. Moreover, he proves that he’s capable of showing affection to Chris. He plays along with some of his superhero fantasies and sometimes he makes the effort to make him happy. Of course, his situation is tragic, and under healthy circumstances, worthy of our empathy.
He knows better. But he hurts his son physically and emotionally anyway. And he doesn’t seem to have any desire to change. So fuck him.
But here’s the thing: It’s easy for me to say that. For Chris, who has to rely on this person for basic necessities, it’s not that simple. It can’t be. So it’s perfectly understandable that Chris may still have some faith in him, even if I don’t.
There are games this year that I found more affecting, but this might be the game I thought about the most this year. This level of caring is why.
4. Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2 is the first AAA game in recent memory that breaks traditional story structure and makes it work.
Video game stories, particularly in the AAA space, usually rely on the same structure that drives most Hollywood films: The three act hero’s journey. Character wants something so they venture out in unknown territory and get it, but pay the price for doing so, so instead they learn what they actually need as opposed to what they want and so on and so forth.
If we follow this structure to the letter, there should be a big grand moment where Arthur Morgan loses all faith in Dutch van der Linde. A moment big enough that it turns the tide of the entire story. And one could argue that this moment is there, specifically when Dutch leaves Arthur to die at the hands of the army before luckily being rescued. But at that point in the story, Arthur’s already lost his trust in the man who essentially saved his life. He’s urging John to leave with his family, and if Arthur, who was to this point the most loyal member of the Van der Linde gang, is telling others to leave, you know this gang is done.
So what is the moment? When was that faith shattered? Traditional structure demands the crossing of a threshold, so obviously, there’s going to be a big dramatic and probably bloody betrayal, right?
Not really, no.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is not the story of Arthur losing faith in a man who slowly loses his mind. It’s the story of Arthur slowly losing faith in a man because he finally realizes that this person lost his mind a long time ago. But what caused the unraveling of Dutch? Was Dutch always like this? Did Dutch ever have principles to begin with, or was that something he concocted in order to hide the fact that all he really had was charisma and some finely tuned oratorical skills?
If there’s a sentiment that comes out of Dutch’s mouth more than any other, it’s that he has plan. Some of you probably remember that one of the last things John says to Dutch in the first game before Dutch leaps to his death is “You always got a plan, Dutch.” Did he? Ever?
We could ask these questions, but the deeper I got into the game, a more important question wormed its way to the front of my mind: Why can’t Arthur see it? Arthur is far from perfect, but he seems to be, for the most part, a pretty decent judge of character with a good head on his shoulders. Why can’t he see who Dutch really is? True, we the audience have the benefit of the first Red Dead Redemption, and we have a clearer view of the board than Arthur can ever really have.
But Dutch does some horrible deeds to some people. Granted, some of those people may have deserved it on some level. (Looking at you, Catherine Braithwaite.) But quite a few didn’t, and Arthur should’ve seen it sooner. So why didn’t he?
I think it’s because, in the end, they’re really one and the same. They both cling to the same sinking ship: The dream that they can be lawless free men and go about life as they please. It’s not “the American dream.” To pursue “the American dream” implies that you give a shit about the concept of “America” and its institutions. Dutch and Arthur don’t. The freedom they chase is more abstract, but they’ll spend their lives chasing it, no matter what it costs innocent people or those they care about or how far down the dream drags them.
The only difference is that Arthur finally wakes up. Dutch never will.
I’m not going to defend the gameplay. I myself have quite a few gripes on that front. I’m also not going to defend certain storytelling decisions. The Guarma section lasts way too long and certain parts with the Native Americans aren’t handled as deftly as they should’ve been.
But in many ways Red Dead Redemption 2 is the finest distillation of Rockstar’s vision. I don’t know where they go from here, but hopefully it’s in new creative and thematic direction. For better or for worse, what else needs to be said by them about America?
3. Tetris Effect
Tetris Effect is the first time I ever fully bought the argument that Tetris is the greatest game ever made.
I’ve always loved Tetris. I love it in a more casual way than many a “serious” Tetris player, which is to say that I’ve never had any desire to learn how to do “T-spins” or any of the famous Tetris tricks. I just like to clear lines until I can’t. That said, I’m more than happy to load up a browser version of the game and play it for hours and hours and hours on end.
But I’ve never fully bought into the idea of Tetris being the canonical “greatest game of all time.” Maybe on a mechanical level, but I’ve never imbued it with the emotional depth that I do for many narrative driven games that also play well. Tetris conquered my mind, but it never captured my heart.
After about twenty minutes with Tetris Effect, I knew two things.
The first was that I needed a VR set just to see this game. Yup, I bought VR for one game. Thank god for Amazon gift card money.
The other thought was that Tetris might be the greatest game of all time. I just needed a Tetris game to come and frame the argument differently. Most Tetris games have a simple goal in mind: Play Tetris. Come here, sit down, play Tetris. What else do you need to do? And to a certain extent, those games were right. Tetris is, after all, Tetris, and it’s hard to fuck up Tetris. (Though plenty have found a way to do so.)
The message of Tetris Effect is, “Hey, how awesome is Tetris!?! How awesome is it that you’re playing Tetris right now!?! How awesome is it that we’re all playing Tetris together!?! These fire monks? They’re going to literally worship your Tetris board and there’s going to be a space whale!!! How fucking cool is that!?! And also you’re playing Tetris!?!”
To which I respond, “You know what Tetris Effect? You’re right! It is fucking cool!” And then I enthusiastically play more and more and more until my eyes bleed.
I haven’t gotten a Perfectris yet, but I’ve come close, and I will if it kills me. I write this sentence on the east coast. My PS4 is one the west. Every minute I’m apart from Tetris Effect sucks.
My time with Tetris Effect so far hasn’t been as emotionally deep as my time with Red Dead or some other games. But it’s just as enthusiastic. It’s the best version of Tetris. What else needs to be said? Here’s some video.
2. Return of the Obra Dinn
Return of the Obra Dinn is the first game I’ve ever played that truly, with barely any equivocation or addendums, made me feel like a detective.
A few games have come close. L.A. Noire let me interrogate suspects and find clues and drive around late 1940s Los Angeles with my sirens blasting when I wanted to speed past an intersection without getting into an accident. But playing the role of a detective is not the same thing as doing the actual work of one, and each case has a fairly linear path towards resolution.
Her Story also came close. In that game, you watch videos of a suspect, and based on what she says, you type in words on a fake old computer interface to find new videos and hopefully put the story together. (In other words, you notice that she says “mirror” a lot, so you type in “mirror” and you’ll get more videos where she talks about mirrors.) It allows for the deductive reasoning that being a detective requires, but all your interactions and problem solving are limited to just the computer interface. The detecting core is there, but not the full monty.
Return of the Obra Dinn takes place in the early 19th century. The titular Obra Dinn is a ship belonging to the East India Trading Company that’s been missing for several years, and has finally returned with the full crew either dead or missing. You’re an insurance adjuster for the company. Your job is to board the ship and investigate each body using a pocket watch that allows the user to see the final moments of someone’s death. Using this watch, you put together who each member of the crew was, how they died, and in a bigger picture sense, the many tragedies the Obra Dinn befalls.
So no, you’re not a literal detective, and there are several key differences between what a detective does and what you’re doing. Most detectives don’t, in fact, have a supernatural watch that allows them to see how people died.
But the main difference between Return of the Obra Dinn and the other games is the sequence of events that lead to you solving a problem.
In L.A. Noire and Her Story, you’re primarily using the mechanics and relying on the internal rules and logic of the game. In L.A. Noire, you go to a crime scene, you gather clues, you interrogate people, you get into an occasional shootout or chase, and you arrest a suspect. In Her Story, you watch some videos, you do some word searches, you fill out as much of the timeline as you want, and then you leave. Both games present you with information, but what you do with it falls within the confines of the gameplay.
In Return of the Obra Dinn, you find the bodies, you’re presented with information, and that’s it. There’s no sequence of mechanics other than filling out information that will help you. The problem solving happens entirely in your head. So no, this isn’t the part where you interrogate people and get into exciting car chases. This is the part where all the evidence has been gathered, and now you have to put it all together.
As I said, you’re not only putting together who each member of the crew is and how they died and, in some cases, who killed them. You’re also putting together the whole story, and since we’re seeing events out of order, the game is able to provide narrative surprises on a near constant basis.
There’s a specific story I’d like to tell you. I’m sure you’ve heard some version of it before if you’ve read anything about this game.
The first death you witness is a standard style of death for a story like this: A group of men attacks the captain and the captain shoots one of them dead. “Okay.” I thought. The next few deaths follow this sequence of events. More men attack the captain and the captain kills them. “Cool.” I thought. Then you discover the captain’s wife’s body and you see how she died, and her death is the first one that breaks the sequence of events with the captain. Upon seeing how she died, I exclaimed, “UHHHH… WHAT THE FUCK!?! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!?! HOLY SHIT!!!”
A similar moment happened at least two or three more times.
What I hope to convey with this story is this: At some point, you find all the bodies, and at that point, it becomes a bit of a pain in the ass to have to trudge back through the ship to revisit certain deaths. Without that obstacle, this might’ve been my number one pick.
1. Celeste
One night, somewhere in the eight o’clock arena, I was playing Celeste and I received a knock on my door. I paused the game, opened the door, and found the kind woman who I shared a wall with laughing at me. She said, “You must be playing a really hard game!”
It took me a second or two to realize what she was trying to communicate: I was swearing too loudly at my TV and she was asking me, in the friendliest way imaginable, to please stop.
I apologized, we laughed, then I went back to the game. But something struck me. Something that I was sort of surprised I hadn’t realized yet. At this point, I was about halfway through the game. By now, I would’ve given up on most games like this.
Celeste is a platformer. It’s an incredibly difficult one, even by the standards of most famously difficult platforming games. I’ve talked about my thoughts on difficult games before, but I’ll spare you the read: They’re usually not for me. It’s not that I’m philosophically against a game being hard. I just want the level of challenge to be fair. To me, there’s a massive difference between creating a genuinely hard game and just turning up some numbers in the coding and creating a contrived obstacle or injecting something for the sole purpose of fucking with you.
To pretty much copy and paste something I said earlier, you know that feeling of accomplishment that filled your heart with joy when you defeated that hard boss or beat that incredibly arduous game? I’ve never felt that. Even when I have defeated tough bosses or levels, my personality is such that I go from screaming “This is bullshit” to “That was bullshit.” There is no moment of joy or relief in between. I don’t know why.
And on top of that, my frustration with the difficulty of Celeste was beginning to unfairly bleed into the other aspects of the game as well. I was swearing at the pixel art, not because the art looks bad. In fact, I think the art in Celeste is stunning. But I was mad, and it felt good to yell, “Of course fucking pixel art! GET OVER THE PIXEL ART NOSTALGIA YOU PRETENTIOUS INDIE FUCKS!!!” And I made similar comments about the game’s (occasionally) retro sounding score, even though I knew I didn’t mean it. In fact, I purchased the soundtrack after the first level.
But I kept playing because Celeste added a new angle to the question of hard games: What is the purpose of difficulty? Or more specifically, what are you using difficulty to accomplish?
Celeste, as you may have read, is about depression. In it, you play as a young woman named Madeline. Madeline’s life hasn’t been going great, so for fulfillment’s sake, she decides to climb the mysterious Celeste mountain. Along the way, she starts suffering the wrath and obstacles of her shadow self, the embodiment of all her self-loathing, fears, insecurities, and every part of one’s personality that most people would probably get rid of if they had the choice.
But the message of Celeste is simple: You can’t. You don’t “get over” or “conquer” depression. That’s not how it works. Instead, you learn to live with it, and learning how to do that is supposed to be hard. But it’s worth doing.
Madeline doesn’t vanquish her shadow self. Instead, she learns the truth that her shadow self is just scared and insecure. So she befriends it and they learn to live with each other. And even then, the game doesn’t stop being hard. But after many many many many deaths, I finally beat Celeste.
So here’s my glib “first” statement: You know that feeling of accomplishment that filled your heart with joy when you defeated that hard boss or beat that incredibly arduous game? Celeste was the first time I ever felt that joy.
Honorable Mentions
Alto’s Odyssey
Batman: The Enemy Within
Burnout: Paradise Remastered
Deltarune
Far: Lone Sails
The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game
Iconoclasts
Marvel’s Spider-Man
Minit
My Child Lebensborn
Semblance
Will Play Someday
All Our Asias
Dandara
Heaven Will Be Mine
The Hex
Hitman 2
Into the Breach
Life is Strange 2 (I will play it as soon as the last episode is out.)
Moss
I’m sure there’s more. (I’ve already purchased all but one of these games, so I’m good on this front.)
