Everyone else on my Twitter feed is doing their best-of lists of 2017, and as a semi-demi-hemi-professional critic myself, it felt like time to weigh in with yet another listicle for you to briefly skim through and then forget forever. Of course, unlike all the other listicles, mine is objectively correct. I thought about doing a video or something more official, but I didn’t want this getting confused with Hey Poor Player’s official Game Of The Year deliberations (which will be posted sometime in the first two weeks of January.)
And if you’re interested in more non-official best-of lists from Hey Poor Player contributors, be sure to check out these threads from my wonderful colleagues Aimee Hart and Jay Petrequin. I’ll update with more as they’re posted.
And now, without further ado, the very best of 2017:
TOP 5 BEST GAMES
2017 was a bad year for international politics or not getting harassed by Nazis, but it was a great year for videogames. Like these:
#5 — The Crow’s Eye
I’m gonna keep talking about The Crow’s Eye until you bastards actually play it. As the kind of person who follows gaming media to an obsessive degree it’s rare that a game surprises me, but this bizarre and brilliant mix of Portal-style physics puzzles and survival horror came out of nowhere and delighted me at every turn. It‘s smart, scary, and sticks with you, and Crowswood University deserves to take its place amongst the all-time great game settings like Rapture, Dunwall, and the Spencer Mansion. If you haven’t picked this one up — and you probably haven’t — it’s only $3 in the Steam winter sale. Let the experiment begin anew.
#4 — Gunman Taco Truck
It took 13 years, but John Romero finally made a good videogame again. Mobile games get a not-totally-undeserved bad rap, but every year there’s a few that rise above the sea of Bejeweled clones and deliver something truly special. Gunman Taco Truck is a funny and challenging mixture of the kind of satisfying shooting Romero’s known for and — of all things — restaurant management simulators that works better than it has any right to and remains one of the most gleefully fun experiences of the whole year. Plus, it’s always nice when somebody makes a game specifically for the under-appreciated Android market.
#3 — Sonic Mania
I never bother to 100 percent games. Even when it’s a game I love, I find myself inevitably drawn to other, newer experiences before I can be bothered to chase down every ‘chievo. But after I hundred-percented Sonic Mania, my only regret was that I’d run out of things to do in my favorite platformer of the year. It’s the game that reminded me of how much I love Sonic and the game that convinced me that this Switch thing was gonna be a force to reckon with, topped with complex level design, gorgeous graphics, and near-endless replayability. All while making it look effortless.
HeyPoorPlayer’s EiC reviewed Sonic Mania here, and I talked about it a lot on this episode of the HPPodcast.
#2 — Pyre
If your game of the year list doesn’t include Pyre somewhere, then you’re doing it wrong. It took me awhile to get into this visual-novel-meets-fantasy-soccer adventure, but it ended up being the most emotionally invested I’ve been in any story of any game this year. Once the two disparate elements finally mesh, they feel like two parts of a cohesive whole, forcing you to make tough decisions in-game and out as you try to guide your little party of exiles to something like a satisfying conclusion. In a lot of ways, it also feels like The Game of 2017 — it’s about incredibly hopeful and likeable characters navigating a world full of endless horrors, sadness, and oppression, and if that isn’t a perfect summary of what we all went through this year I don’t know what is.
The lovely Jay Petrequin reviewed Pyre here.
GAME OF THE YEAR — RUINER
As a lover of sci-fi and a fan of all games fast-paced and gory, I was pretty sure I’d like RUINER. But the final product is so much more than any of us could have expected — maybe the best example of the cyberpunk genre since Snow Crash, moving beyond the aesthetics to tell a story about the crushing realities of capitalism and the fruitlessness of human technological advancement while also serving up those aesthetics at an unprecedented level of cool. You can’t read about RUINER, you can’t watch playthroughs, you can only experience it firsthand in all its jarring, gorgeous, heart-pounding glory while it rocks your world and blows your mind. Best of all, the devs keep supporting it with so many free updates that it already feels like a different game now than it was when I reviewed it. RUINER is quite simply the best the medium has to offer.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour would be the best shooter of 2017 if it wasn’t for RUINER.
I’ve only barely started Night in the Woods as the year comes to a close, but I suspect it’s going to retroactively become a favorite.
Dawn of War III is probably the 2017 game I’ve played the most and likely the best RTS of the year, but I didn’t feel right giving it a proper spot due to some really terrible business decisions and general scumbaggery on the part of the developers.
Everyone should play The Sexy Brutale at least once.
TOP 5 BEST FILMS
This year I vowed I would go to the movie theater once every week, and while that didn’t quite happen, I’m proud of how many I was able to see and how much I started to expand my horizons. I’m not a film critic (yet), but I know a good story when I see one, and here’s my top 5 of this year:
#5 — Brigsby Bear
For the most part, I despise nostalgia-bait. It’s why I can’t enjoy Stranger Things and hard a hard time with IT, and it looks like that kind of blind 80s worship is only gonna get worse as 2018 prepares to vomit the putrid pile of cultural stagnation that is Ready Player One onto a thousand screens nationwide. This, then, is Brigsby Bear’s great achievement: it manages to be a movie about the importance of nostalgia and the effect pop culture has on us all (and on my generation in particular) without being cloying or stupid. It also earns a place in that culture in its own right with striking low-budget setpieces, plenty of good jokes, and Mark Hamill’s second-best performance of the year as a giant sky-head thing. It’s great. Just…just trust me on this one.
#4 — The LEGO Batman Movie
I made a promise to myself that I’d only put one superhero movie on this list, which means I pretty much had to give the spot to LEGO Batman. At least as good as its storied predecessor and a lot better than the Ninjago spin-off that followed it, The LEGO Batman Movie remembers better than most that we go to see superhero flicks for the escapism, but also provides real emotion and a fresher take on the Batman mythos than any other piece of media has dared to give us in quite a few years. It’s not just the funniest film of 2017 (which it totally is), it’s also a damn-near perfect entry into the superhero genre and deserves to be remembered as such, even if it does feature talking plastic bricks.
#3 — STAR WARS: Episode VIII-The Last Jedi
I’m a die-hard Star Wars fan, so I was pretty sure I was gonna love The Last Jedi. But Rian Johnson managed to go beyond even my high expectations and provided the sort of parallelism and craftsmanship we usually see from auteur films in a freaking Star Wars movie, without skimping on all the glorious action setpieces and goofy fun we go to these things to see. I’m not surprised that a movie about the need for Star Wars to evolve has offended the kind of people who want the franchise to stay stagnant forever, but every time I see The Last Jedi I become more and more convinced of its greatness. BB-8 drives an AT-ST, 10 out of 10.
#2 — Baby Driver
Yeah, it’s “just an action movie,” but like Fury Road or Pacific Rim before it, it manages to elevate pure action into something more, a ballet of car-based music-driven violence that shows off the best of film as a visual medium. Plus, while the simple “good kid gets in too deep” story may not exactly be revolutionary, it’s incredibly well-told thanks to a great script and great performances from everyone involved. Edgar Wright has yet to make a movie I didn’t love and Baby Driver is probably one of his best.
FILM OF THE YEAR — Get Out
There’s really nothing I can tell you about Get Out that other more qualified people haven’t already expressed more articulately. Certainly this is the movie this year needed, a harrowing story of institutionalized racism that still manages to find something like hope, albeit a fucked up kind of hope. But the reason it’s the film I’ve rewatched more than any other this year is because all its pieces fit together like clockwork — there’s always something new to notice, and there’s no part of the acting, direction, cinematography, or storytelling that isn’t the best that it can possibly be. Maybe my favorite horror flick ever, certainly the best film of 2017.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Dunkirk was *this* close to being number 5. If Brigsby hadn’t been specifically about the kind of nerd culture industry I live and work in, this probably would’ve bested it.
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was the best live-action superhero movie of the year, a worthy successor to the best Marvel film of all time that’s also the most emotionally affecting of any of the feels-like-seven-thousand MCU entries.
Wonder Woman was way better than Spider-Man, and it’s okay if you still haven’t accepted that yet.
mother! was a fascinating film that I’m glad I saw, even if I’m not sure I ever want to see it again.
Everyone should see Colossal at least once.
OTHER GOOD THINGS
Just a quick rundown of a few more things that were good in 2017.
TV SHOWS
Amazon’s reboot of The Tick immediately became one of my favorite TV shows of all time, balancing humor with pathos to tell a story that matters. It also led to what I, personally, view as my best writing of the year in this review.
A Series Of Unfortunate Events showed how to do a book adaptation right and is pretty much the only reason I still have a Netflix account considering how bad the rest of their original content was this year.
Okay, fine, Dear White People was good, too. Not perfect (Netflix originals love their graphic and unnecessary sex scenes) but so hilariously funny that I ended up binging it in a single late-night sitting.
I was never much of a fan of Samurai Jack, but I’m glad I tuned in for this year’s ten-episode final season. If you’ve seen it, you already know why it deserves to stand among the best of 2017. If you haven’t, the only word I can use is “sublime.”
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return is at least as good as the old series and frequently better. Plus, I’ll always have a special place in my heart for stuff that I watch with my Dad.
BOOKS
I read a lot more books in 2017 than I usually do, but only a handful that actually came out this year. That’s okay, though, because the only ones you need to read are Dreadnought and Sovereign, the first (and so far only) books in April Daniels’ Nemesis Cycle. Like The Tick and The LEGO Batman Movie, they showed that you can still tell new stories in the overcrowded superhero genre, blending themes of transgender identity with the usual themes of secret identity and going out of their way to provide a convincing explanation for why magic users, aliens, sci fi technology, etc. would all exist in the same universe in a way Marvel and DC have never bothered to even attempt.
MUSIC
I like Jonathan Coulton’s old stuff well enough, but this year’s concept album Solid State — which tells an ambitious sci-fi story about artificial intelligence, Internet trolls, and the best and worst of human technological achievement — was so much more than I ever thought he was capable of. Bravo.
I’m a sucker for sad music, and you’d be hard pressed to find sadder than Aimee Mann’s Mental Illness, which features a song straight-up titled “You Never Loved Me.” Sometimes that’s the kind of catharsis you need.
Never would have guessed I’d fall in love with something as weird as Dawg Yawp’s self-titled inaugural album, which features music I guess I’d describe as heavy-metal country/folk psychedelia? But nonetheless, fall in love I did.
Not really music, but it doesn’t fit anywhere else. The Adventure Zone podcast is one of the best fantasy stories ever told, and its 2017 finale was everything we could have asked for and more.
PERSONAL LIFE
A time to reflect? If I must.
I found a well-paying job I really needed, and as a result was able to buy everyone I love a Channukah present this year.
I started a new, incredibly-self indulgent YouTube series and was shocked to find that people loved it. (Watch this episode if you haven’t.)
I’m gonna finish Steelarm soon, I promise.
But as always, the highlight of the year was Bailey, who for some reason once again failed to break up with me in 2017. Until you wise up, my dear, I’m yours.
