The Best Games of 2017 (That Aren't Super Mario Odyssey)

I'm going to start my discussion of the best games of 2017 by talking about a game that isn't on the list. It's a game that never really got close to being on the list. In fact it's a game I still have not finished despite three or four serious attempts to get invested in it. And that game is Guerilla Games' open world post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur adventure, Horizon Zero Dawn. Horizon Zero Dawn is not a bad game. In other years this completely solid, very competent title easily fits in a top ten. In a bad year, Horizon Zero Dawn might be Game of the Year. But in 2017, Horizon Zero Dawn is mediocre. I love that Horizon Zero Dawn was forgettable this year.

In 2017 real progress happened in the games industry. I don't mean the usual standards of progress such as frame rates or how many triangles an engine can shove into a single frame. 4K doesn't impress me and I don't believe in VR yet. I mean games have never been better than they were in 2017. Most years have maybe four or five truly great video games in them. 2017 had probably close to twenty. A few games disappointed like Star Wars Battlefront II or truly sucked like Sonic Forces. But for the most part last year, every game was good. Look at the disposable drivel that comes to your local movie theater every week. 2017's gaming didn't have its equivalent of Pitch Perfect 3 or that Jumanji sequel that nobody wanted. It only had Baby Driver. Every single day, more Baby Driver. Masterpiece after masterpiece.

I feel bad for 2018. I don't know when I'm ever going to find the time to play "new" games. It will take me a whole year just to catch up with all the great 2017 games I didn't play. Not least of which because I never managed to accrue enough capital to buy a Switch (besides video games 2017 sucked). I still want to play about a dozen games: Resident Evil VII, Gravity Rush 2, Snipperclips, Yakuza 0, Nioh, Hellblade, Mario + Rabbids, Rime... and of course, Super Mario Odyssey. And because Super Mario Odyssey is absent, this list is completely worthless and I don't know why you're reading. Maybe you just like me.

Anyway, here's a meaningless and incomplete list of twelve truly great games from the best year in gaming history:

12. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

I did not expect much from Uncharted 4's DLC. But I like to be wrong, being right all the time is boring. Naughty Dog doesn't leave anything half-finished. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy could have been an easy cash-in that lasted two hours. Instead it was a fully-realized stand-alone Uncharted game, and a damn good one. If you want stunning South Asian vistas, ancient cities with outlandish puzzles, a huge train chase, and everything else that makes Uncharted so great, here is a solid swan song for the series.

Since Nathan Drake's story was definitively ended in Uncharted 4, The Lost Legacy instead stars series side-characters Nadine Ross and Chloe Frazier in a sisters are doin' it for themselves story. Turns out Uncharted never actually needed the chucklefuck antics of Mr. Drake. Thanks to cast alone, The Lost Legacy might actually be better than Uncharted 4. Yeah, this game is definitely just "more Uncharted 4", but it's doing enough new things to justify its existence.

My hope is that the developments in The Lost Legacy are a tech demo for Naughty Dog's upcoming - and deeply anticipated - The Last of Us 2. This game is a long conversation between two characters that starts and stops seamlessly with your actions. A lot of complex systems are running under the hood which you wouldn't notice unless you're looking for them. It all simply seems like a natural interaction between a couple of three-dimensional characters. The first half of The Lost Legacy is a non-linear valley where you can visit gorgeous Indian temples in whatever order you prefer. That makes Chloe and Nadine's interaction feel like a rambling road trip, complete with bored pauses and meanders back to previous unresolved topics.

So thanks to being a better Final Fantasy XV than Final Fantasy XV, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy sneaks onto the list.

11. What Remains of Edith Finch

What Remains of Edith Finch has been labeled a Walking Simulator, but it really isn't. The game has all the general tropes of a Gone Home. You play a first-person narrator wandering the chaotic rooms of their childhood home finding secrets about their family members. But really, What Remains of Edith Finch is a more like going to a festival of gaming experiments. Not every experiment works. A few are dead-ends for the medium. However there are a lot of great ideas hiding inside this game.

The frame story of What Remains of Edith Finch involves exploring your bizarre abandoned home. The Finch house is like a cross between the Winchester Mystery House and Grey Gardens. It's full of spiraling additions and eldritch towers twisting out in every which way. Along the way you get to see into the lives of your deceased family members, who lived lives as eccentric as the house itself. Each short in Edith Finch is its own minigame. These tales go from a little girl who transforms into animals then eats herself to a preteen's horrible hunting accident with her father. The Finches have a fairy tale way of looking at the world that makes their lives whimsical but inevitably tragic.

As I said, some of these are all experiments and some don't work at all. There's a Tales from the Crypt-style horror story that frankly looks horrible. (They tried to "cel-shade" the regular graphics by adding thick black lines over everything, but in the ends up looking like a cheap Steam piece of shoveltrash called Guise of the Wolf.) But a few truly land, especially the cannery short. In this one, you chop fish with one joystick while daydreaming a fantasy adventure with the other joystick. It is a captivating transition from boring work to a colorful journey into a young man's imagination... and his descent into madness. Edith Finch won its place on the list with that minigame alone, but the rest of the game should not be ignored.

10. Doki Doki Literature Club

If you're anything like me, the veneer of Doki Doki Literature Club probably doesn't interest you at all. I only like visual novels when they're accompanied by dungeon crawling and robot waifus. Dating sims actually creep me out on some level. And maybe I should explore why that is. I find it weird that these digital girls pretend to be my girlfriend but yet we have no problem with digital Nazis pretending to murder me? Why is simulating war so much easier for people than simulating romance? But beyond weird cultural hang-ups, I just generally don't want to be a Japanese high schooler. I hated high school, I don't want to go back.

But with Doki Doki Literature Club, all that visual novel veneer is again, veneer. Or put more precisely, all this is the skin. The real game behind Doki Doki Literature Club murdered the game you think you're getting, mutilated its corpse, and is now wearing its skin like Buffalo Bill dancing in front of a mirror to the song "Goodbye Horses". The facade unravels slowly, revealing more and more of the nightmare hiding at the center of this cute poetry game. While you continue to write up poems in a simple minigame and romance one of your clubmates, remember that you are not alone. Something is watching you behind the blushing eyes of your teenage conquest. And it is jealous.

Also before Doki Doki Literature Club goes off the rails (and oh boy does it ever), the game is actually a well-researched and fairly deep exploration of different kinds of poetry and writing styles. Even before the madness sets in the characters are likable and engrossing. Just try to read the subtext of your waifu's poems. There are many sides to all four girls in Doki Doki Literature Club. There's a reason they're hiding so much of their personality. Few games pull off detailed psychologies as well as this.

Just... be ready for what's to come, if you can.

9. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus played on Medium difficulty is a frustrating piece of pure aggravation. MachineGames have some weird obsession with making old-school hard-as-nails FPS games. They keep flirting with stealth mechanics and ammo counts and rationing health and respawning enemies. All this just gets in the way. Maybe some of you want a serious stealthy hardcore FPS. But I don't.

Here's how you fix Wolfenstein II: set the game to Easy. Actually set it to super easy - the baby setting. When super easy I could mindlessly splatter the walls with Nazi guts from beginning to end. On Medium I died a dozen times in one encounter. Which do you prefer in your silly Nazi B-movie? Failure and struggle for every inch or breezing through the game shotgunning all your frustrations away? I say I made the right choice. I made beautiful artworks with enemy corpses in corridors. I filled rooms with the smell of gunsmoke and the filled trousers of dead White Supremacists. More importantly, I made the game fun. Wolfenstein II will never be last year's DOOM, but it can still be a gas.

Wolfenstein II is not a hardcore slog in its heart of hearts. It's a cheesy Nazisploitation feel-good romp of dumb thrills and spills. This game has an adorably insane Fuhrer on a SciFi base on Venus. Your very pregnant girlfriend murders Nazis while naked and painted in Master Race blood. A pair of fascists sit around in one level parroting Alt-Right tweets about the "so-called tolerant left". Your head gets chopped off! Amazingly MachineGames takes this absurd collection of ideas and tells a weirdly adult and serious story with it. But the gameplay is a power fantasy. And in a year as fucked-up as 2017, where every day brought more bad news, sometimes you need a power fantasy. Sometimes you just need to murder Nazis.

8. Sonic Mania

2017 might have seemed like a bad year to you, but it was a really bad year for Sonic Team. Not because they made another horrible game in Sonic Forces. They're as worried about making a bad game as Mitch McConnell is worried about passing a bad law. No, 2017 was the year that Sonic Team was utterly crushed by a much smaller, much more loving, and much better game called Sonic Mania. If they were capable of the emotion, they would be ashamed they were beaten this badly at this own franchise.

Sonic has been so bad for so long that people actually forgot if Sonic ever was good in the first place. If you played the original 2D games on the Genesis (or their billion ports) you'd know better. Before Sonic decided to open his mouth and start yelling cringy lines, before he tried to chase down Final Fantasy for pointlessly complicated storylines, and before the games tried to be 3D, Sonic was great. Sonic Mania came here to remind us of the good days. The Sonic 3 and Knuckles days. That is one of my favorite platformers of all time. With Sonic Mania I finally got a game that surpassed it.

Well, almost surpassed it. Sonic Mania doesn't have Hyper Sonic so it's only 99% of the way to perfection. But 99% perfection is a million times better than crap like Sonic Boom. This game probably made me as happy as any title on the list. Out of everything in 2017, Sonic Mania is the only one I worked to completely 100%. Most games here I only beat once, this one I've beaten about ten times. I beat the game with Sonic, I beat the game with Knuckles, I even beat the game with Tails.

When Sonic is at his best you have huge crazy levels spiraling into every direction. You have dizzying set pieces and great platforming. Sonic Mania is Sonic at his best again. Hopefully Sega keeps making games like this and never lets Sonic Team touch the franchise ever again.

7. Cuphead

I beat Cuphead just this past weekend. And since I've spent the last few days being weirdly proud about this and telling just about everybody. I don't get to brag much, but I'll do it this time: I beat Cuphead, guys! Somehow I pulled it off. 461 deaths across thirteen hours and I bested this monster. Forget the cool Silly Symphonies art style, Cuphead is a spiritual journey between and your controller. It is a battle with your own soul to defeat each and every new cartoon monster in your way. Do you have the inner strength to learn the patterns, hold down the fire button, and be the best gamer you can be?

But now to remember the cool Silly Symphonies art style: Games look better and better year after year, yet you might notice that there really aren't "show piece" games anymore. The best games of the PlayStation 4 don't look that much better than the best games of the PlayStation 3. Back in the day we could all stare at things like Final Fantasy X or Crysis and go "wow, look at the graphics". Today 4K looks amazing but it's such a small incremental change. I've seen Horizon Zero Dawn running at max settings, it's quite a thing. But just like the latest billion dollar blockbuster at the cinema, are you really impressed anymore?

Cuphead however was the game to show off in 2017. Even people who don't care about games were impressed by this. I wanted everybody to look at Cuphead because it is a truly beautiful thing. Other games had more horse power, but Cuphead was the game that really pushed the medium forward and gave us a new vision of what gaming could achieve.

Cuphead however loses two spots because the King Dice battle was bullshit. I kept missing the dice roll and had to start all over. So thanks to pettiness, Pyre comes next.

6. Pyre

I said I didn't like visual novels five games ago, but I think that might be a lie. There's actually three visual novels on this list. (And to ruin the suspense, the third one is Persona 5 and it's the very next entry). I might even enjoy Dream Daddy if I were able to work up the heterosexual courage to play something that proudly gay. However, Pyre is doing deeper things than any other party-based game in 2017.

Pyre is a mixture of a sports game and a strategy RPG. The main action is a fast-paced NBA Jam-style match of sick dunks and epic dodges. But behind those dunks is complex tactics of controlling lanes, defeating opponents, and even letting the other team score to weaken their defense for the next set. Every one of your nine characters plays uniquely, with advantages and drawbacks. The little serpent knight, Sir Gilman is super fast so can score easily. But if you get slow lumbering Jodariel to the goal post she scores for more points. All this makes for a rich and entertaining sport. It's a shame that Pyre doesn't have online multiplayer, because I'm fascinated to see how Tizo would fair in the meta scene.

But what I think pushes Pyre from being a good game to a great game is two things. First off the game is oozing with style and is utterly gorgeous, but that's true for every game on this list basically. Secondly, it is a very bittersweet experience. As you continue your journey, if you win your matches, you will lose party members. You have to cut players for their own good. But that also means you lose friends with whom you've gained a real bond. Cutting Jodariel was possibly the hardest thing I had to do in all of 2017. She had been my main field-clearer from the very beginning. But if you really love your friends in Pyre, you have to let them go. That makes your journey with them feel all the more important.

5. Persona 5

Persona 5's first major villain is a male in a position of power using his authority to rape women. If that isn't the most 2017 thing in all of 2017, I don't know what 2017 even was. Wolfenstein II let you burn off some rage by slaying a few National Socialists for fun. But Persona 5 was the game that actually seemed to want to fight back against 2017-ness. (And in case you haven't noticed: when these Best Games of the Year lists say "2017", it's code for "Donald Trump".) In a year where all semblance of reality was openly mocked as "fake news" and any standard of morality was ignored, Persona 5 asked your characters to stand up for truth and justice. And sadly in today's times, "truth and justice" are things you actually need to fight for.

The people of Persona 5's Japan have all collectively bought into a lie. They all choose some reality that is better than the one they actually inhabit. Because they need the fictions to hide their own deep corruption. All through the game you and your band of plucky high schoolers beat up rapists and crooked industrialists and a Donald Trump stand-in. But those villains aren't the problem. It's the culture itself. It's the decision that life is a zero sum game, and winning is all that matters. The winners rewrite history and rewrite reality. Your heroes are the losers who want to shine light on the truth.

...And also there's some wacky Shin Megami Tensei stuff about a Gnostic deity trying to take over the world. But the social commentary is what really matters.

Also while Persona 5 might be the best possible JRPG for its time and moment, it's also a really good game. The game is soaked with style in every detail. Classic turn-based JRPG combat is made exciting and more fluid thanks to art direction. Persona 5 isn't chasing Western trends, it's proudly  idiosyncratic and proudly a JRPG. With Persona 5, it is clear that Atlus has overtaken Square Enix as the best developer in RPGs today. If you want a flat boring AAA game that has nothing to say, there's Final Fantasy XV. But if you instead want something topical, vibrant, fashionable, and exciting, play Persona 5.

4. Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight might be the best Metroidvania game I've ever played. I know I have something of a hyperbole addiction, but that isn't something I say easily. The competition is fierce, especially today when Metroidvania-style games have become inexplicably hip. A new game trying to be Axiom Verge or Ori and the Blind Forest comes out on Steam all the time. By the time you finish reading this paragraph, a new Symphony of the Night wanna-be will be released by some indie developer and probably will be forgotten. Hollow Knight was simply being that damned good.

What makes Hollow Knight so good isn't in what is does that's new but by how it does everything so well. Right from the start your little hand-drawn bug character has tight controls and fluid motion. There's no clear path forward, so you try to explore in every possible direction to see what's out there. The bosses aren't as tough as Cuphead but they'll still squash you like a... you-know-what. The world is a typically 2017 somber setting in the echoing ruins of a world that's already moved on. Since Dark Souls is as hot as Metroidvanias, Hollow Knight borrows its style. This game uses tone and backgrounds to tell most of the story. The little details of lore are generally secondary and best left for fan theories.

I think Hollow Knight might be the only Dark Souls-ish game I can get into. I've never really liked Dark Souls' aesthetic. Too miserable for me. Hollow Knight is a sad game but it's balanced by also being a cute bug world. Sure everybody is dead or insane, but it is cartoony enough that I'm not actively depressed by looking at it. Dark Souls and Bloodborne seem to be as much fun as funerals. If there has to be Armageddon, I'd rather my successors be itsy-bitsy and rolly-polly rather than dull shades of gray and brown.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I hope kids in a decade are unable to appreciate The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I hope they play this game, don't see what the big freaking deal is, wonder what we old people were so excited about, and laugh at us for being old. What should happen is that Breath of the Wild becomes the new template for open world games. Everything this game does will become as cliche and old news as Ocarina of Time has become in the last twenty years. Climbing mechanics, easy movement, complex systems that offer intricate battle options, and using lines of sight to inspire exploration should be the industry standard.

Horizon Zero Dawn came out on February 28th, 2017. By March 3rd, Horizon Zero Dawn was already as much of an anachronism as light gun shooters or CD-ROM adventure games. I've tried again and again to go back to Horizon Zero Dawn and appreciate it on its own merits. But then immediately the little issues crop up. I can't climb this rock face. I can't glide down into that valley to see that cool thing. I have to balance like eighty crafting systems and all kinds of stupid vendor trash before I can fight anything. Going back to Horizon after playing Zelda is like going back to a crappy Hyundai after thrashing the road in a Pagani Huayra. You'll never be happy again with the old model.

Nintendo is my favorite game company and Zelda is my favorite series, so there are biases here. Yet every major game publication decided that Breath of the Wild would be Game of the Year and I'm only putting at third. I can see that Breath of the Wild is a stepping stone. The story isn't that hot, inventory management sucks, the sidequests aren't very good, the dungeons are repetitive, and you only get one really good look at Princess Zelda's booty. Breath of the Wild is a great game. But as for a masterpiece? That's still on the way, Nintendo isn't there yet. Still be excited though, because they're very close with this one.

2. NieR: Automata

While Breath of the Wild is a vision for gaming's bright future, NieR: Automata feels like a game from the past. The storytelling here is so bold and so baroque in its ideas and twists and shameless fetishes that it feels like a game from the late Nineties. Japanese games haven't been this cool since the Final Fantasy VII days. Remember Chrono Cross? That game has a dinosaur god that represents the will of nature out to destroy mankind right after a future AI gone rogue tries to take over the universe and all that is before a time demon eats reality. NieR: Automata is cut from that kind of cloth. You can't begin to describe a game like that. Then the world map feels straight out of the PlayStation 2 era, and the combat is modern Platinum Games quality. It's like you took the best of Japan from the Nineties, the 2000s, and our current decade and made one incredible package. In 2017 Japan is back, baby!

NieR: Automata features a war between unseen humans against unseen aliens. Your characters are humanoid androids serving the humans in a military structure, so must suppress their emotions. Your opponents are chubby robots that you're told are mindless killing machines, but seem to be very vocal, intelligent, and even quite sensitive. By the way, don't those transmissions you're getting from the humans seem rather... canned and repetitive? It is obvious right from the start what several of NieR: Automata's twists are. I can't spoil them because you already called them a minute ago. You should be wondering if the game is lying to you about those obvious things, what else is it lying about? Just how deep does this sexy android rabbit hole go?

I figured since Kojima was fired by Konami back in 2015 and Metal Gear Solid V was released unfinished (I give it a DNF out of 5) that we'd never again see a game with that Metal Gear punk mentality again. But NieR: Automata is the successor to that legacy. The game is willing to play with its mechanics and tear out the fourth wall. If you screw around in the menus and pull the chips out of your brain completely, you get a Game Over. It becomes intensely maudlin in some scenes, but occasionally a shopkeeper will break the drama by driving by and loudly playing his theme music. Sometimes you're weeping over dead comrades, sometimes you're going to Disneyland with death robots who are busy having fun to attack you.

A lot of what makes NieR: Automata so hard to explain is that it abandons the typical structure of a game story so early. There are three major chapters (which the game erroneously calls "routes" with "endings") but only the first has a proper villain. Once you're done with him there's so much more going on. This universe is not a battle between good and evil. It's a world of discarded automatons both humanoid and not struggling for meaning in repeating cycles. Existence itself is an unsolvable problem for these characters, so they cling to constructs like society, war, suicide religions, and Disneyland. You can't sum up NieR: Automata easily because the game doesn't write an easy morale of what to do. If you want to sum everything this game is in a simple pithy box, go ahead. But I don't think NieR: Automata is going to fit.

(Also this game has the best OST of the entire year.)

1. Night in the Woods

NieR: Automata was the game that was supposed to win Game of the Year. It was the game I was most looking forward to. It was the number one on this list right until a week ago. Then something happened. I screwed up and played a better game. Sorry, I failed you all.

Recently I got to wondering: why is it that games just can't seem to handle the real world? The answer is pretty obvious, we play games to escape the real world. In some way every single title here is a fantasy that takes us away from our mundane and incomplete lives. But truly great storytelling can't just be escapism. Plenty of fun movies came out last year but I would rather have something like Lady Bird than every Marvel film combined. Where is the game that can be a Lady Bird? Is there be a game small enough that it can take on subjects like youthful depression, coming of age, and clinging to a past that might not exist at all?

I don't know if Night in the Woods is the "Lady Bird of games" but it is at least the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World of video games. ...And actually that's really recursive description if you think about it. Anyway, Night in the Woods a game with a truly unique voice telling a story about a college drop-out, Mae Borowski coming home and struggling with the economics of the 21st century and her own terror at growing up. That plotline isn't slaying robots or Nazis, and maybe that doesn't interest you, but really it should.

Also Mae happens to be a cat person in a furry animal town called Possum Springs. There's no voice acting in the entire game, yet the characters are so well-written their voices came alive in my head. Everybody, from Mae herself to her parents to her awesome friends including Gregg (who rulz, ok?), all feel like real fleshed-out human beings. Just they happen to be animal people in a really striking simplified art style.

Games try so hard to immerse players by going for scale. They make their worlds real by making them massive and full of things. Night in the Woods isn't massive. It's set in one 2D town with maybe twenty or so characters with speaking roles. But it really aims to make what little it has rich and full of history. The boarded-up pizza shop in Possum Springs tells more of a story than a whole nation in Horizon Zero Dawn. You explore Possum Springs every day in your slacker post-college existence, aimlessly wandering the streets or platforming up onto the buildings. There's tons to explore and tons to learn. The town is dying but Mae (and thus the player) can still the see the beauty remaining. You run left day after day, hang out with your group of friends, then go to bed and have weird dreams. That's basically the whole game.

Along the way Night in the Woods keeps up gaming pleasure with a variety of WarioWare-style minigames. As Mae you can play bass guitar or beat a terrible video game that's like Hyper Light Drifter just... awful. (The conceit of playing a game character playing a video game hypnotized me into beating that awful minigame. I felt like Mae had earned beating that game and I helped her do it.) Or you can steal pretzels to feed to rats and then drown the world with your rat children. This game just connected to me and my humor in a way that almost nothing else does. I could finish Mae's sentences because she doesn't want to see the world as it is, she wants to twist every detail into something more exciting. You're either a failed twenty-something or an adventurer on an epic quest to beat ghosts. Which do you prefer?

By the end of Night in the Woods I'm not sure you've actually fixed Mae's depression or given her a clear route to the future. You do beat a murderous conspiracy of racist uncles, an evil so banal that even the main characters mock it, but that doesn't really solve her life. Mae's parents might still be losing their home, I don't know how if she can go back to college, and there might be a Goat God that will eat the world. However, you have gotten closer to a few awesome people in Mae's friends. You've lived two important weeks in this young lady's story. That isn't too small for me.

....

Anyway, 2018 is here. As we know, there is no point to playing games unless you can write up a massive list at the end of the year. 2017 gave me an awesome list. I don't think 2018 can match it, but I'm more than willing to see it try.