Instead 2018 was a year of going back to my bullshit. I bought a Switch this year, it made my life measurably better, and with it, I focused on my bullshit. I don't feel too much regret. I don't think this list is anywhere near as strong as the 2017 list, but 2018 wasn't nearly as strong of a year. 2017s don't happen every year. Maybe I indulged in too much comfort food last year and maybe I have a noticeable double-chin now and maybe I need to join a gym. It happens. 2018 was a stressful year for many people for many reasons, and you need a safety valve to find joy in your life. Maybe that safety valve is going back to your gaming bullshit and really enjoying a new Pokemon game. I can't help liking certain things.
What I do regret is the games I missed. This happens every year, inevitably. I was physically exhausted by the scale of most big AAA games like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. I was repulsed by everything I read about Far Cry 5. I actually never played the biggest game in the universe right now, Fortnite. Red Dead Redemption 2 just didn't seem like much fun. Other stuff like Monster Hunter World scared me by their size. Then there's other stuff I meant to play at some point and never found the time: Dragon Ball FighterZ, Ni No Kuni 2, Hitman 2, the new Gwent game, Donut County, BattleTech, and like a million other games. Finally there were a lot of other games that I've put off thanks to the convenient excuse of "I'm waiting for the Switch release". (See: Dragon Quest XI.) But let's not dwell on the regrets or the rationalizations, let's dwell on the good parts of last year.
So here's ten or eleven or thirteen really good games I really liked in 2018. Enjoy.
Honorable Mentions:
There were two video games that came out in 2018 that I can't in all honesty treat as full releases. As standalone products they are too good not to be off the list, but they aren't finished yet. They're promises of bigger full productions that may or may not ever happen. I won't dismiss them as mere demos, a demo can be a proper game as much as anything else. I'm instead leaving them off out of the hope that their final finished products are even better.
-2. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit
Currently only one episode of Life is Strange 2 is out. Like a million other things that came out in 2018, I didn't find the time to play it, but I did play the free demo. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is a side story using Life is Strange mechanics to show what seems to be a normal day for a little kid. I deeply enjoyed the two hour slice of gameplay here. I liked it so much that when the actual Life is Strange 2 turned out to star other characters that were not little Chris and his imagination, I hesitated to play the main product. From what I hear the story set up in the demo will continue in the upcoming Life is Strange 2 episode 2 when the stories so far will collide in some way.
On the surface Captain Spirit seems like a very twee precious game. You're a little boy at home wasting a December afternoon playing with your toys. Imagine a less acidic Calvin and Hobbes, complete with a blonde kid. But Captain Spirit was also the most terrifying game I played last year. (I played Resident Evil 7 and SOMA, so horror gaming wasn't really lacking in my life.) Very early on you'll pick up that something is wrong here in Chris' home. His father is a drinker and it's implied, an abusive one. There's an element of danger here in every interaction. I found myself doing the dishes for no reason other than to make Dad happy, and feeling very on edge when Chris microwaves food just in case he burnt it. The game turns you into a victim appeasing your tormentor, terrified you'll mess up somehow. The father isn't even a monster, he's just broken and out of control. It's terribly sad. Captain Spirit comes off intense and gripping even while there's no health bar and Chris is just playing with action figures.
If you do download this demo I recommend that you find every secret in Chris' house. Especially make sure to solve the maze. I won't spoil what's hiding there, but that moment touched me in a way gaming storytelling rarely does.
-1. Deltarune
I never wrote a Best Games of 2015 list, but if I had, Undertale would be number 1*. Undertale is so much my bullshit, and any sequel will easily also be my bullshit. The first chapter of this game surprised the world on Halloween, and it was awesome. Deltarune isn't precisely a sequel, it's more a re-imagining of the world of Undertale. The old cast of quirky monster people now live in an Earthbound-esque sleepy town and you, Kris, are living a normal life. That is until you fall into an alternate reality where the general plot of Undertale is played out again. Then after you get home you get blindsided by a crazy cliffhanger ending at the end of the demo. Wherever you thought this story was doing, it's going someplace else
Deltarune has two ideas that make it an interesting sequel. First off, it promises you from the start that "you have no choices". The developer, Toby Fox, gives you a whole character creation screen before dumping your Player Character into the trash and making you play as Kris. This doesn't seem too alarming when the game simply lets you play out a Pacifist Run as Undertale usual. But with that cliffhanger, it could be implying that very bad things are coming and you have no way around them.
The other idea to expand Undertale combat with party members. You have two playable characters besides the mute Kris. They are both hilarious and I love them both, best characters of 2018 gaming. However, having party members with their own ideas of how to fight (that oppose your own) makes for interesting puzzles in the middle of battles. It's a good system of layers of actually winning the fight, managing your rebellious heroes, and keeping things Pacifist.
That all said, Toby Fox is nowhere near finishing this thing. He told us that making even this slice was difficult. I can tell considering how much Deltarune relies upon doing Undertale's plot again. I don't know when Chapter 2 will come, and maybe it will never come. Either way, Deltarune is a fantastic RPG with great music and wonderful characters. Toby Fox is still the best thing happening in Japanese-style role playing games today.
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Anyway, now, the true list-list:
11. Return of the Obra Dinn
Remember, if you please, a scene from the otherwise terrible movie Boondocks Saints. Willem Dafoe wanders through a crime scene recounting the events as if he's actually seeing them in real time. Then he screams at the top of his lungs "THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!!" for no particular reason. Imagine a video game where you're Willem Dafoe. Sadly not the fun parts of being Willem Dafoe, but the part where you have his supernatural ability to see the past and rebuild complicated murder scenes. Now you're back in the 1800s, you're on a ghost ship, and you have to find out who murdered all 60 crew members.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a game I ended up respecting a bit more than I liked. The entire game is a huge puzzle with very few clues that requires you to think hard and map out what happened. The first scenes you see is a melee in the captain's quarters where a mustached man dispatches a few attackers. This is the end of the story. As you explore you see more and more of the failed adventure that was this ship's journey. This features crew rebellions and monsters and one poor bastard who dies while shitting. You aren't given many clues and it's a big long list of names to assign fates to. It definitely is a great feeling when you finally have organized enough fates correctly that you deduce that it was indeed Spoiler who killed Spoiler with a Spoiler. Elementary, my dear Watson.
If I have a complaint though, it is with the art style. Obra Dinn is produced with this old-timey computer pixel effect, that charmingly also looks like 19th century illustrations. However, the effect means that it is very hard to make our faces because almost everybody looks the same. Also the scenes are static, so you don't know who is speaking in the scenes, adding to confusion. Still, I love puzzles like this and Obra Dinn is a great simulation of being a master detective, even if about 70% of my progress was thanks to brute force guessing.
10. Octopath Traveler
I love JRPGs but I am terrible at actually finishing JRPGs. In the last few years I've started and failed to finish Final Fantasy XV, Bravely Second, SMT: Strange Journey, Dragon Quest VII, and World of Final Fantasy. Add Octopath Traveler to that list. I really liked this game, but after forty or fifty hours of it, I had had enough. Sadly this means I never saw the final-final boss and only completed half the storylines.
The thing with Octopath is that the overall gimmick doesn't actually work too well. Instead of one big epic storyline it is more like eight mini-JPRGs starring separate characters. The mixture of plots, tones, and styles creates an anarchic Cloud Atlas-like effect. However, none of the eight storylines are that strong. The character don't interact well, there's a very gross prostitution plotline, and none of the stories needed four chapters. What you play Octopath Traveler for isn't the story like most JRPGs, it's the gameplay. The combat is really solid and the boss fights are impressive. Plus you are not getting a better Final Fantasy any time soon, so you gotta learn to love what you have.
Octopath Traveler is a good repudiation for anybody who thinks that turn-based RPGs are a relic of the past. If you are one of those people, you haven't been paying attention. Plenty of games like this have come out in recent history and this is another good one. Octopath is not a better game than Bravely Default. I don't think it quite lives up to the classic 90s Final Fantasies it's emulating. But this game does show that turn-based combat can be a ton of fun and a lot of innovation can still be mined out of it. Mediocre characters and story can be overcome with solid gameplay and incredibly solid production. A good art style can go a long way.
9. GRIS
Speaking of good art styles going a long way, let me talk about GRIS, a game that proves that style can be a substance all on its own. GRIS is essentially the 2D Journey or Abzu. You're a stick-figure girl traveling a surrealist world without much story or context. At the start of the game your giant naked statue friend collapses, leaving you in a typically gray indie game world. But as you progress, you find the other colors in the rainbow, turning the game from a sullen Limbo experience to a ridiculously gorgeous series of watercolor effects.
GRIS is more painting than platformer. There is not a single frame of this thing that isn't in some way beautiful. Patrick Klepek on Waypoint compared it those foreign films that can nominated for but never win Best Animation Picture. The animation is somewhat similar to The Red Turtle, in fact. I say "animation" because GRIS follows up the footsteps of Cuphead and Hollow Knight by emulating a hand-drawn animated style. In this case it's an imposingly sublime series of paintings that only grow more and more beautiful as the game continues. GRIS is only a few hours long, and offers nothing in the way of challenge, but stunning visuals alone make it worth your money.
That said, the game's description claims GRIS represents mourning. Possibly the levels are meant to stand for the various stages of grief. I didn't catch that metaphor in any way while playing this game. For all I knew the monster bird and the little cube robot friends were just monster birds and little cube robot friends. As a metaphor I think this is a complete failure. The giant naked statutes could have just as easily represented gamer sexism or American Imperialism. But as a game, GRIS is the art project of the year.
8. Pokemon Let's Go Eevee
EEVEE IS SO FUCKING CUTE!! Can't stand it. He's my little buddy and I love hhim.
Pokemon Let's Go Eevee is one of my biggest surprises of this year. I haven't liked a Pokemon game since X and Y. I haven't talked much about Pokemon Moon because I forgot about it the moment I finished it. The series has gotten stale, it has gotten repetitive, and frankly I was totally bored of Pokemon. I tried Pokemon Go a bit and wasn't impressed. So when Nintendo announced a second remake for the original Kanto games, I wasn't sold. Neither was I sold on the idea of linking it to Pokemon Go, which I mistakenly viewed as a dead 2016 fad and nothing more. If I was bored of brand new Pokemon games, I was definitely going to be bored of the fifth visit to Kanto.
Instead Pokemon Let's Go wasn't a retread as much as a streamlining of the series. Pokemon has picked up a lot of bloat over the years, and most that comes to down to the Pokemon list. There's 800 Pokemon and I barely remember any of the new ones anymore. I can't even tell you what starter I picked in Pokemon Moon. Cutting things down to the original 150, cutting away most of cluttered mechanics, and more importantly - cutting out annoying random encounters, were smart moves. I think random encounters can work in some games, but when you're trying to catch a wild Squirtle outside Cerulean City, it's annoying to run into a thousand Pidgeys instead. Yes, I said wild Squirtle, nearly every Pokemon can now be encountered in the wild and caught with Pokeballs like our God Arceus intended. Losing random encounters makes the world feel open and free, and it makes Pokemon feel better than it has in five years.
One of my main complaints of Pokemon has not been answered though and that's the difficulty. Let's Go Eevee particularly makes it super easy to overlevel. Catching one particularly rare Pokemon can jump you five levels. I had to actively work to keep my party weak but it was worth it for a reasonable challenge.
Pokemon has never looked better than it does in Let's Go. It also has never played better. This wasn't a dramatic revolution - it is still a remake. But after Pokemon Moon was so dull, I had forgotten why I liked Pokemon in the first place. Pokemon Let's Go Eevee was a good reminder. If Ash Ketchum never has to grow up, neither do I.
7. Into the Breach
I really like chess even if I'm so terrible at it that my incompetence must be a sign of divine displeasure. I also really like chess puzzles and I'm even worse at them. Into the Breach is essentially a tactical RPG where every turn is a chess puzzle. The game shows you exactly what the enemy is targeting in their next turn, forcing you to either kill them, push them, or lacking the any better option, take the hit. Battles are about survival and triage. You might be able to genius your way through a battle without damage, but more likely you're gonna have to make some hard choices. Do you throw a unit in the way of a civilian structure to tank damage? Or do you let the innocents suffer and keep your pilot safe?
Into the Breach has a fun juxtaposition between the imagined scale of the battles and how it is presented. Supposedly these are titanic battles between monstrous kaijus and high-tech mechs fighting for the last surviving scraps of human civilization at the end of time. But actually what you're looking at it is a couple of a cute little bugs fighting action figures on a chess board with a few Lego buildings on it. There's this plot with environmental deviation and corporate greed and transhumanism, but really you're playing with toys. In full 3D Into the Breach would be this depressing Nier: Automata-like tale of the end of humanity. But instead it's squishing insects to save the microscopic masses.
I really loved the combat and the overall struggle with Into the Breach, it makes for one of the best tactical RPGs I've ever played. Sadly the roguelike structure of the game relies on replays and multiple runs. I found one team I really liked in the Rusting Hulks, saved all four islands, beat the game, and felt I was good. With a time travel storyline you could theoretically spend thousands of hours replaying the game to unlock all the teams and get all the achievements. I didn't do that. I'd rather have had a ten hour campaign than a dozen thirty-minute runs.
6. God of War
God of War (2018) is easily the highest-profile game on this list. It is only one of two 2018 titles here that you could call "AAA" releases. Sony went all out with God of War, creating a showstopping blockbuster to push their PlayStation 4 hardware to the very limit of graphics, gameplay, and storytelling. The presentation was top notch and every scene was clearly very expensive. I still think the story is badly flawed and Kratos is an awful shithead, but the new God of War worked well enough for me. I was very pleased with the gameplay and am interested to see where things go from here.
I also enjoyed God of War for being a relatively small game, despite its pedigree and budget. The entire world map is one large lake and a few mountain paths leading off from it. It isn't a continent full of endless quests you can spend an entire season grinding through. At no point during God of War did I feel daunted by the immense impossible cliff of content the game expected me to climb. Instead it felt reasonable and reserved, like a PS2 game. There's sidequests and challenge runs and a really really good superboss, but certainly not 800 hours of things to do like Ubisoft expects of me.
God of War is the kind of AAA game I want. I want something I can beat in a month. Something with enough care in the storyline that I actually can find something about it that's worth debating. I have to care about Kratos and BOY enough to care that their relationship is toxic. I like something that focuses on a few gameplay ideas and making them really good, instead of offering infinite options and making them all mediocre. Throwing the ax in God of War is satisfying. It feels deadly and you feel deadly. That makes it a great game.
5. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Switch Ver.)
Okay, technically Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker belongs on the unwritten 2015 list as No. 4, but I'm going to redact it. It came out on the WiiU in 2015, but I didn't own a WiiU and missed it. However, I'm instituting a New Rule for my Best Of lists. That is called Rule #453-C, "The Switch Re-Release Rule", which reads: "If a video game is re-released on the Switch and I have not played it before, it is eligible for the Best Of list in the year in which it was re-released." I'm not the only one using this rule, I saw more than one critic put Hollow Knight on their 2018 list. So if Polygon can have Fortnite on their list, I can have Captain Toad on mine. And actually Polygon put Captain Toad in their list too... and way too low in my opinion.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is an adorable little game that asks the question "what if Mario but you can't jump?" The usual Mario crew are missing this time, leaving the adventure up to Captain Toad and Peachette's pre-evolution, Toadette. You're dropped into small diorama levels with full 360 camera control. Your goal is just to walk across and collect treasure. There are enemies and even bosses, but your little Toads won't be hurried. You need to plan your movements out ahead of time to keep your innocent fungi friends safe. So levels are nice little puzzles that don't take too long to clean out.
Captain Toad isn't a long game by any means, maybe only about ten hours. It also is never terribly hard, Captain Toad would be great for little kids. But Nintendo finds every piece of meat on this bone. They're able to replicate the whole breath and diversity of my beloved Super Mario 3D World in this little experimental project. Captain Toad is pure joy the entire time. I first played this back in E3 2014 and after waiting four years to finally play the full release on a console I own, the wait was worth it.
4. Iconoclasts
2018 was a monster year for Metroidvanias. There was a period in August where I think a Metroidvania came out every single day. We had Hollow Knight on Switch, Guacamelee 2, The Messenger, Death's Gambit, Chasm, Bloodstained, and even Dead Cells is heavily Metroidvania-inspired. I ended up only playing three Metroidvanias in 2018. One was the painfully underrated Dandara, a Brazilian game featuring lightning fast zero gravity combat. Another was Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, a 2D Dark Souls game featuring anime girls for some reason. And while neither of those games are bad, they're actually both really good, the only truly great Metroidvania I played in 2018 was Iconoclasts.
Maybe it's due to the glut of Metroidvanias we got last year, but I feel like Iconoclasts was way underappreciated. This game is amazing, why isn't it getting more love? Typically Metroidvanias are light on plot and heavy on exploration. You're dumped into an environment and have to find your way through. Iconoclasts instead has a full storyline full of memorable characters and disturbing twists. The pixel art style is all bright popping colors and your hero, Robin, is a cheerful blonde mute. But then people start getting turned into flesh trees and the theocratic government collapses into an orgy of violence and the world is about to end and God is not listening to your prayers. This game goes to very dark places, and when you can't save your friends, Iconoclasts wants you to remember it.
Most of the gameplay is more Zelda-ish than Metroid. You do have your sidescrolling action and exploration. But the main meat of Iconoclasts is solving puzzles, not backtracking. There's also many impressive setpieces featuring a lot of gameplay variety. It isn't just the usual stealth section and escort mission. Iconoclasts at one point recreates The End boss fight from Metal Gear Solid 3. It is a big feast of a game, which is all the more impressive because this title was made by one guy, Joakim Sandberg, all on his own. Alone at work for seven years, Sandberg made in Iconoclasts a bigger and grander game than whole billion-dollar studios can sometimes produce.
3. Super Smash Bros: Ultimate
I love Smash Bros, so I was going to love Smash Ultimate. It was never not going to be on this list. I'm however surprised by how much I ended up loving this game. I've heard talk that Nintendo had a slow year in 2018, I disagree completely. Even the space-filling titles that should have been recycled leftovers like Pokemon and this were some of the best gaming experiences I had all year. Santa Claus brought me Smash Ultimate for Christmas (making this the fourth Smash game Santa has brought me), and in the few weeks since then, I've put in about 100 hours. And I've barely played this game with other human beings.
The tagline of "everybody is here" is impressive, but not too effective on me since I inevitably default back to playing Toon Link and Peach no matter what. I had fantasies about finally mastering Snake or giving Incineroar a proper try. But somehow or another I found myself playing as Peach most of the time. What was effective though is the pure addicting evil that is baked into the core of this machine of time devouring. See, Nintendo added this feature called "Spirits" which are 1300 (or so many to be effectively infinite) cameos of characters from across gaming history. When they said "everybody is here", they meant it literally cause there's cameos from things as obscure as Soma Bringer and Japan-only games that I never heard of like The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls. Each Spirit gives a small boost to the usual Smash combat. But it also is a gatchapon minigame that has stolen my life from me. I have 800 spirits now and unless I get professional help, I might get them all.
There's also the new World of Light mode, which is this game's answer to Brawl's Subspace Emissary. Every Spirit here is their own fight, which range from comically easy to impossibly hard. (I dare you to try to beat The Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3 as played by a galaxy brain AI Zero Suit Samus on a poisoned stage.) It looks like a huge grindy Dissidia-style board, and I figured I would only put a few hours in until returning to regular old Smash. Then... I beat the whole thing. I 100%-ed World of Light. I never 100% anything. Smash on the go is a strong narcotic and somebody should regulate this thing before it destroys lives.
Smash Ultimate would 2018's be No. 2. However, it loses points because there is no mention of StarTropics. If you can represent Teleroboxer, a damn Virtual Boy game, you can acknowledge StarTopics, okay? In its place we have some mobile phone game.
2. Florence
Florence is the first mobile phone game to make one of my Top 10 or 13 Lists. It's a $3.99 iOS and Android game that lasts about 90 minutes. It's a less game and more an interactive comic book. You see the story of Florence Yeoh, a twenty-something woman working a boring job that falls in love with a man and it doesn't work out. The story is told over six chapters of falling in love and then falling out of love. I particularly like that the problems Florence and her boyfriend Krish have aren't based on the typical RomCom complications. Nobody cheats, there's no big lie that's exposed, and nobody's family gets in the way. They're two people whose lives just go in different directions despite their best efforts otherwise.
Florence has no dialog, the dialog is the gameplay. Where Florence excels is how well it can drag you along with minigames representing the character's mood. At first with Miss Yeoh alone, you play dull minigames like matching numbers on a grid that represent her dull job. But later, when you meet Krish, you have to connect together puzzle pieces that make your word bubble. This starts out tough as the early conversation is awkward and forced. Then as talking to Krish clicks and becomes natural, the puzzles get easier and easier. Later when you're having an argument, solving the puzzles is this competitive battle to get your word in first. And eventually, the pieces just don't fit anymore no matter what you do.
I also love that Florence doesn't end with the breakup. It continues for another chapter to show that even a failed relationship can have value in your life and doesn't always need to be a regret. Florence is a small thing but certainly no less of a great thing. If you have a few bucks and the tiniest bit of free time and feel in any way some love for human beings, you'll find Florence to be worth it. There are not enough good love stories in video games.
1. Celeste
Usually my Game of the Year and my Movie of the Year are not settled until the very last minutes of writing these posts. In 2018, actually I had made my picks in February. I knew Annihilation would be the Best Movie of the Year, and I was pretty certain Celeste wasn't going to be defeated either. I always keep an open mind, there was always a chance that a Night in the Woods might come out of nowhere and leave Celeste in second place like Nier: Automata was last year. But no, Celeste is our Queen this year. All must love her and despair.
Celeste's is the hardest gaming thing I've ever done. The regular Celeste story-mode is a tough platformer but a fair one. You're Madeline, a red-haired girl with issues climbing a mountain. Unlike GRIS, the metaphor here actually fits. She's literally battling herself and her personified anxiety. Eventually Madeline makes friends, confronts what she's avoiding, and in a grand finale, climbs the mountain. It's a spiritual experience that feels like liberation and opportunity. The game makes you feel as light as a feather and that you can accomplish anything.
But that's just the A-sides. You can unlock even tougher remixes called "B-sides". These don't have floors. You're going to die a lot. Then you have C-sides which are sheer kaizo insanity. Celeste is a brutal platformer that also wants to be a therapy, but the C-sides are too fucking hard. They gave me anxiety by the end instead of curing it.
Still, I need to give props to any game that is so solidly built that it would drive me to such a place of darkness. Celeste is one of the greatest platformers ever made. It uses a very simple control scheme with just one jump and one dash, then pushes them to aerial dances of maneuvers and gymnastics. The game has 2D pixel graphics pushed to lush beauty. And the music is bonkers good. There is no element here that is a weakness of any kind, Celeste is a near-perfect video game, and it is proudly my Game of the Year.
ORB!!
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So with that, I must finally put 2018 away forever. In just under a week Kingdom Hearts III comes out. I will not dare consider the possibility that that game is anything other than a Top 5 Best Game of 2019. (And no matter how fucking lazy I am, Kingdom Hearts III will get a review here.) I work all year to write these lists, and it's too deep into January to not get cracking on the Best 10 or So Games of 2019.
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* If you are wondering, that Best Games of 2015 list is:
1. Undertale
2. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
3. Ori and the Blind Forest
4. [Redacted]
5. Life is Strange
6. The parts of Metal Gear Solid V that were finished.
7. Until Dawn
8. Batman Arkham Knight
9. SOMA
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