Perhaps my favorite anecdote from this past year was from the Steam discussion forums for Her Story, when a distraught user was attempting to figured out how to properly play the game. Her Story gives you a computer desktop full of video clips and lets you search through them via keywords — and it’s up to you to piece together the story from there. There’s no ending state. And that user posted a question that has stuck with me since I first heard it.
How do I know when I’m satisfied?
Perhaps it’s chuckle-worthy at first glance. But it has a certain stickiness to it. And I’d bet that you could spin this into a long piece about how games are spoonfed to people (a topic for another time), or hold their hand too much. “Hold their hand…” Maybe keep that phrase in the back of your mind as I continue. I think I have something that pairs nicely with that thought later.
The items I place on my “favorite media of 2015" list (which I guess is what this is, really) are vastly different from one another. And I’m thankful for that. If you look at my previous list there’s a bit more homogeneity. I would like to think that I’m constantly growing and expanding my horizons, but then again both of my favorite movies this year were sequels… Maybe some things you never outgrow.
I didn’t even see/watch/read that much this year. I was so frequently busy with work and making things work that at the end of the day I rarely sought out the latest games (I have neither of the newest consoles aside from a Wii U and a moderately-powered gaming PC) and I only went to the theater for marquee events that I was passionate about expending time and money on. Instead, smaller, more contained experiences caught my eye. 60-hour adventures like Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 I ran from, and instead I gravitated towards anything that offered bite-size playtimes, such as multiplayer games or short indie games. The two games I most enjoyed this year were:
Splatoon felt fresh (ha) in a way few other games did, mainly because of the low stress and low barrier to play. Sure, I’ve dabbled in ranked enough to get an -A rank, but I seem to be stuck there permanently. Mostly, though, I hopped into normal, unranked matches, and just had fun spraying ink and splatting the enemy team. I also am a firm convert to using the motion controls in conjunction with the right analog for aiming — it’s incredibly useful once you’ve mastered it.
I actually picked Splatoon up when it first came out, played it quite a bit, then dropped it for about two months, until I returned and now play about 2–3 times a week. It has filled a Team Fortress 2-shaped hole in my heart quite nicely and become my go-to “bored” game when I can’t decide what else to play. I hope that Nintendo learns from this game and turns Splatoon into a “game as a service” much like TF2. NX needs a version of this game on day one (whether it be a Splatoon port or Splatoon 2), and to be updated weekly much like this was. These squids have staying power!
On the complete other side of the spectrum, Undertale struck me in a way I hadn’t expected it to. I know that by the time you’re reading this Undertale has an enormous fanbase and is the new Homestuck and the new Bronies and the new Tumblr menace or whatever but a) please let people enjoy The Thing and b) when I first played it had only been out for a day. I went in untainted by spoilers or preconceptions. I got lucky!
And man, it kind of messed me up. There’s a lot of really impactful moments in that game. Like, characters hug in Undertale. It’s not frivolous, it feels… intentional. And saying “characters hug” is perhaps reductive but so unlike other games, I came away with the same feeling you get after a hug from someone you might not see for a while: happiness… melancholy, maybe…
Characters… touch each other. They’re goofy and say silly things, but they feel like they truly do care for one another. At one point a character holds your hand and leads you through a room full of traps and spikes, because, well, it’s dangerous! Oh, yes, hand-holding. That’s where I wanted to tie that thread.
Perhaps we could actually do with a little more hand-holding in games.
There’s so much heart in this game, it brought me to tears in certain moments. My thoughts often become jumbled up when talking about the game, as so many of my comments on it and its structure come from emotional places (definitely not a bad thing). It’s my favorite game I played this year and there’s a good chance I’ll never play it again.
Undertale, without going into spoilers, encourages you not to play it again. Not necessarily in an explicit way, mind you, but instead, I feel content with where I left these characters, and to pull them back in again, to force them to go through hell so you can play the game once more, (in a way) makes me the bad guy. An antithesis to most other games this year — open worlds packed with hundreds of icons, missions, and collectibles to find. So instead, rather than wring the game dry of all its content and various routes, I’ll leave them be, in the happiest place I can.
And I’m satisfied with that.
In regards to movies: I was delighted with Mad Max: Fury Road. It is the very essence of filmmaking, a distillation of the road trip movie, a film without any excess whatsoever. Every movement, prop, or solitary sentence in Fury Road serves to deliver vital information to the viewer or enrich the world. Nothing extraneous. This may sound clinical, but instead it results in one of the most exhilarating and thrilling movies I’ve seen in ages. Allow me to sound like a hackneyed movie critic desperate for a pullquote for a moment: it’s adrenaline pumped straight into your veins, and wholly satisfactory. Furiousa should join the halls of iconic women alongside characters like Ripley.
I’m not even a huge fan of the other Mad Max films, but I went back to the theater a second time because I needed to see this on a big screen again. I might even put it above the following film depending on the day.
That following film? Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I know, I know. But Star Wars was something I grew up on. I have a LEGO Millenium Falcon on my shelf that’s one of my favorite display pieces. As a kid I went out almost daily to hit my siblings with sticks colored to look like lightsabers. It’s in my DNA, for better or worse.
And it’s good. It’s a good Star Wars film. It’s cheesy, fun, and filled with life.
Thankfully, despite the rampant over-commercialization of the film, I still feel so good about it. I’m sure in a year or so I’ll pick apart little bits I didn’t like, and I bet that the Rathtar sequence will be one of my least-liked bits. Yet, yet! I’m happy to love Star Wars again, rather than feeling tethered by nostalgia. Rey, Finn, and Poe best the original cast (wonderfully so), standing on their own as new characters. I’m glad — excited, even — that we’ll be seeing their adventures over the next few years. I have watched it twice as of this writing, and I actually liked it more the second time (a rare occurrence). Many complain that it re-uses too many elements from the previous films, but that’s secondary to my reading, purely poetic backdrop, as instead I’m thrilled to be following characters that lead lives, rather than inhabiting cutouts of character traits that they have to squeeze into.
And most of all, I’m satisfied.
Both of my favorite films this year feature women as the leads, and both movies unquestioningly accept their role as such, which is perhaps the most delightful aspect of it all. May the “Mary Sue” gibberish die quickly and this sentence will appear unnecessary upon re-reads. Who else can I love on? John Boyega! He is a gift. Toby Fox’s love of dogs is adorable. I swear Oscar Isaac is plucked directly from the original trilogy. Woomy!
I don’t have a perfect anecdote to wrap this post up. I wish I could say 2015 “satisfied” me but instead it was a transitional year, personally. I am definitely in a better place now than when 2014 wrapped up, for sure. But maybe being satisfied isn’t the point, there. Don’t worry, I won’t get any more philosophical on you. In the end most of the stuff I enjoyed came out in the second half of the year — maybe I just had more time to enjoy things then — and the first half of the year was definitely the lesser of the two halves, life-wise. Hopefully 2016 can be a fresh start in more ways than one.
Oh yeah… Downwell was pretty good too…
