Coming as no surprise to gamers, the world didn’t end this year. We’ve been staving off such disaster for decades now in the arcade and at home, so here are a few of the best titles of this otherwise apocalypse-free year.
Game: Hotline Miami
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Developer: Dennaton Games
Release Date: 2011-10-23
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Hotline Miami
Dark, brooding, and violent, violent, violent, Hotline Miami is off putting and hard to put away at the same time. Combat plays out like a series of “murder puzzles” that the player has to solve efficiently and at ferocious speed.
The game may be best experienced without seeing its “secret ending,” as the crass meaninglessness of it all seems more appropriate in matching the tone of the game on the whole, especially more than anything like a plot-based explanation of the harrowing events of the game are capable of evoking. The game is not for the faint of heart or for those who give up easily. Hotline Miami will make you pay in order to master its toughest challenges. Each success, though, will leave you pondering the central question of the game. Might it be true that you really just like hurting other people? G. Christopher Williams
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games
Release Date: 2011-10-09
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Turn-based strategy games are generally thought to be pretty slow paced, but XCOM: Enemy Unknown utterly destroys that assumption. Its turn-based combat is so streamlined and intuitive that it feels like a fast paced shooter while you’re playing. Off the battlefield, back at your base, things still don’t slow down. You have to manage funding, panic levels, and equipment, all of which affect your ability to do battle. At any moment, there are a dozen things to consider, so every action feels like it could result in total disaster. When things work out, even just barely, you’ll be ecstatic.
Despite all this, XCOM never feels overwhelming: It teaches you everything you need to know and ramps up the difficulty at just the right angle. It may be the most stressful and intense game of the year, but it’s also accessible to players of all skill levels. Nick Dinicola
Game: Dishonored
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Arkane Studios
Release Date: 2011-10-09
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Dishonored
Arkane Studio’s Dishonored is the love child of Thief and Bioshock, set in the decaying and fully realized city of Dunholme. For many, it was a dream come true, a first-person stealth-action game that put enough faith in player ingenuity to hand them the reigns and let them forge their own path of destruction or pacifism, stealth, or brutal warfare.
Of course such freedom can also be overwhelming. For many, including myself, Dishonored takes time to love. Its subdued, largely optional background stories are mostly read in in-game texts, and options are not always made abundantly clear. Even deciding whether to invest in improved Blink, allowing you to leap across the environment with a beautiful artistry, or summon hordes of rat to devour your foes can be an overwhelming, and permanent decision. However, Faith, investment, and experimentation are rewarded handsomely with an unforgettable experience shaped almost entirely by your hands. Jorge Albor
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Polytron Corporation
Release Date: 2012-04-13
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Fez
Fez is a beautiful, maddening, and beautifully maddening game. Its soothing world of colorful pixel art and chiptune music belies a rabbit hole of mysteries. Your ability to “turn” the 2D world makes even the most basic exploration exciting as you discover mysterious door after mysterious door, each one leading to a new visually unique area.
But its mysteries go far, far deeper than simply locating hidden doors. Fez is filled with unexpected puzzles that force you to reconsider how you interpret the world. In lesser hands, this kind of ambitious world-building-through-puzzles could have been disastrous, but there’s a strict logic behind everything in Fez that keeps it from going off the rails. Right from the start the game speaks to you in a foreign visual language, and learning that new language is one of the most rewarding experiences of the year. Nick Dinicola
Game: Assassin’s Creed III
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Release Date: 2011-10-30
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Assassin’s Creed III
Even the most ardent Assassin’s Creed fans will admit that the series has become bloated and nonsensical as the franchise continues to pump out an entry every year. Assassin’s Creed III was a return to form for the series. It trimmed much of its fat, including the terrible tower-defense and trap-making systems — for the most part. Even the apprentice assassin system is heavily reigned back in the game’s latest entry. The game does feature a slew of secondary objectives, but for the most part, they fit right in with the world, particularly the world-building frontier quests and the thrilling naval battles. Of course, it is Connor Kenway that stands at the heart of this game, and it is Connor’s story that caps off the series better than Desmond ever could.
Assassin’s Creed III is more than a personal story with a revolutionary backdrop, it actually carries themes of freedom and histories of violence throughout the narrative. It might surprise you, but despite its adherence to established combat and movement systems, Assassin’s Creed III is actually a daring game. Jorge Albor
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Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Vander Caballero
Release Date: 2011-08-14
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Papo & Yo
Power is usually a pretty literal concept in video games. You start off relatively weak, and as the game goes on, your abilities improve until you can take down the big bad guy who is threatening the world. Papo & Yo takes a different approach to exploring power dynamics by telling the story of a young boy’s relationship with his alcoholic father.
The metaphor is straightforward, but powerful. Quico’s ability to navigate platforming challenges and solve basic puzzles is both aided and hampered by his relationship to a hulking monster who flies into a blind rage when he eats poisonous frogs. What the game lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up in honesty. It’s not about “winning” or “beating” the game; it’s about learning to survive and grow within circumstances beyond your control. It’s about gaining the power to let go of loved lines, painful as that may be. Papo & Yo deals with issues few other games touch. It’s unflinching, candid, poignant, and it actively involves the player every step of the way. Very powerful stuff. Scott Juster
Game: Max Payne 3
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar Vancouver
Release Date: 2012-05-15
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Max Payne 3
Nearly 10 years after our last glimpse of the tortured soul known as Max Payne, Max is back, heavier, more drug and alcohol addled, and just as grimly hard-boiled. While the game moves away from its nearly exclusive focus on bullet-time-style combat towards a more modern cover-based approach to its shooting, the tone and mood of Remedy’s classics are retained. The darkness of Max’s previous urban American landscapes have given way to his relocation to a sun drenched Brazil, but it is a place just as vile and corrupt as his home shores.
Max is still bad at protecting families, too, and this tale of a less-than-perfect redemption for Max manages to avoid retreading old ground by actually advancing and re-framing the franchise’s themes of failing those closest to us and the psychic battles that such failure leads a man like Max to only narrowly survive. G. Christopher Williams
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Klei Entertainment
Release Date: 2012-09-07
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Mark of the Ninja
At first Mark of the Ninja is obscure with regards to anything but the basics, but slowly your mind opens up to the game’s operations. The levels are filled with intricately disguised puzzles in the form of guards, traps, and buildings. In a brilliant move by Klei Entertainment, all the information needed to be a stealthy assassin is visually displayed on screen. Sound waves become expanding blue ripples, and cones of lights show the difference between seen and unseen. The player has to learn what is around every corner before entering because they are not a nigh unstoppable basdass, but a human being whose greatest shield is the shadows. You are no longer a man in black pajamas, but a stalker of the shadows, a true ninja.
Mark of the Ninja is a game of shadows. You hide in them. You live in them. The shadows are your safeguard but soon become the source of treachery. The player loves the shadows and uses them to hide from and strike at enemies unseen, but the longer that we become accustomed to them, the longer we lose sight of the light. You are the best ninja in the clan because of a mystical tattoo that grants you special abilities, but soon that same mark will cause madness and death. Mark of the Ninja presents all of this up front and yet its truth is veiled in shadows. Eric Swain
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: thatgamecompany
Release Date: 2012-03-12
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Journey
You are a pilgrim on a rite of passage leading towards spiritual enlightenment. You will meet other travelers on the road. And in the end, you will be sent back to begin anew. Such is the nature of thatgamecompany’s latest outing. There is no conflict, and there are no puzzles needing to be solved. Journey is about the journey. Each traveler you meet along the path is a real person met over PSN, and you are simply companions. Your avatar will continue on in an endless cycle. The moment-to-moment traveling coordinates with the visuals and music to create an emotional resonance within the player. The very steps of our avatar travelers mirror the emotional engagement of the players. Journey is crafted within a framework of sublime minimalism that is directed at the very soul of its subject.
From the first tentative steps across the dunes to the exhilarating slide down the sands to the dark depths of the undercity to the final ascent and walk into the light, Journey creates a primal connection with us. It is a vicarious ride upon the emotional spectrum of spiritual enlightenment. We don’t leave our chair, but our spirit is taken along for a ride. The details of who this character is is left unspoken, and we are left with only the raw emotional beats of the pilgrim’s story that we inhabit. We are left only feeling the journey without any filters. Eric Swain
Publisher: Telltale Games
Developer: Telltale Games
Release Date: 2011-04-24
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The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead succeeds at so many things. It’s dialogue and characters are outstanding and stand without the “for a game” qualifier often appended to such statements. Characters and their actions feel authentic. Their emotions are relatable and understandable in the face of the danger, tense social dynamics, victories, and tragedies that they face. The game doesn’t hold anything back, as situations ranging from mercy killings to small talk are presented as interactive decisions. The game succeeds in conveying the sense that your choices as Lee (the game’s protagonist) truly matter. The catch is, sometimes they don’t.
The game careens towards a specific, unavoidable conclusion while still feeling deeply interactive. Everyone who plays it simultaneously embarks on an individual journey while also taking part in a collective experience. Ultimately, The Walking Dead succeeds because it’s more than a zombie killing game or a puzzle-solving adventure game; it’s a story about morality and human relationships, one whose emotional intensity could only be conveyed interactively. Scott Juster