The top 20 games of 2017

Your definitive guide to the year that was

this year I played 194 games for a total of 59317 minutes. You can find detailed information here

1) The Legend of Zelda — Breath of the Wild

Another New World

by Nintendo
Total Time Played: 3088 minutes

It’s objectively true to me that this is the best game of the year. I want to find some way to express my unique point of view on this game, but everything I can think to say about it has already been said, better, by someone smarter than me.

Breath of the Wild perfectly aligns with my interests and philosophies about game design. It also aligned with a deep need that I had for quiet and solitude, contemplation and escape right at a time when I craved it most. It is beautiful and perfect, and I loved it. It was worth buying a WiiU for.

2) OneShot

Lose Yourself

by Little Cat Feet
Total Time Played: 282 Minutes

Very few games can re-organize your relationship to the idea of a “game”. Very few games can make you step back and ask you what it means to play a game, to actually be unconsciously conscious of the mental prosthetic you are using as an information delivery loop. Very few games objectively prove that the manner in which we engage with this medium differs from all other previous mediums — by examining every relationship involved in the mechanism of interaction. This is one of those games.

Steam link

3) Opus Magnum

Albrecht Mein Frei

by Zachtronics
Total Time Played: 1596 minutes

Zachtronics has consistently produced a very specific game; there’s an ethos and a philosophy underlying all of their work, but the question is, is it a warning or is it a belief? There’s no getting around it — Opus Magnum is work, like TIS-100, Spacechem, and Infinifactory before it. Shenzen I/O is explicit in this regard; you play as an outsourcer for a Chinese corporation building circuits. It’s very challenging puzzle solving that requires creativity and lateral thinking — but at the end of the day the games are training you to solve a very specific set of problems. Why?

Is this a dystopian future that Zachtronics is trying to warn us about? That in the future we’re all going to be part of some kind of species-scale mechanical turk that’s madly trying to solve problems in the most efficient way possible for a force beyond our ken? Or are they taking full advantage of the medium by giving us the tools to solve problems that can’t exist in the real world, to teach us how to think, to teach us that the only way to succeed is to try, to fail, to succeed, to try again, to learn, to optimize, and to never give up until you’re at the top of the leaderboard. Because there’s always that one fucking friend with a doctorate in computer science and a masters in philosophy who’s SO SMART and you can never beat his solutions. Because there’s always room for improvement and there’s always satisfaction in making a machine to solve a problem.

I made this, and it solved a lot of my problems:

Steam link

4) Super Mario Odyssey

The Anxiety of Influence

by Nintendo
Total Time Played: 1638 minutes

This game somehow manages to be an unoriginal pastiche of itself and a totally original joy factory simultaneously. It does this by tactically using references to its own bizarre, mismatched canon in short, perfectly paced bursts while at the same time introducing new concepts and gameplay dynamics at a furious pace.

The core conceit, that Mario can use his sentient hat (!?) to take over the bodies of specific enemies allows the game to deliver a familiar but wholly new experience — you get to be a Bullet Bill, or a Hammer Bro, or even that weird football player from Super Mario World. It’s the simplest thing, suddenly turning your enemies of 30 years into your weapons and tools. It takes your nostalgia and fires it into your brain at a million rounds per second. It’s like the game software is made of mirror neurons or something.

Everything that makes this game successful comes from combining the subversion of classic Mario tropes with deft homage to a timeless character that is defined by his lack of definition. The thing that characterizes Mario is his gallery of enemies and compatriots. Goombas, Koopa Troopas, Bowser. Peach, Luigi, Toad. Mario and Bowser have simple, understandable motivations but no personalities and they are surrounded by creatures and characters with very clear gameplay affordances that make no effort to fit into the world, they’re just there. Like a chain chomp is so perfectly clear what it is and how it works that you understand exactly how it works and how to overcome the challenge it presents, yet it was originally introduced in a desert level in Mario 3, but now it’s everywhere? They just don’t care about anything other than perfect clarity and joy.

5) What Remains of Edith Finch

Kodachrome Gardens

by Giant Sparrow
Total Time Played: 138 minutes

When you’re making a game like this, with minimal gameplay and a heavy emphasis on ambiance and a linear story, you have to ask yourself — why is this best experienced in this medium rather than just as a movie? Edith Finch answers that question quite elegantly in the way that it requires the player to define the pacing and framing of the game.

The stories of the family that owned this beautiful, cursed house and it’s grounds are allowed to play out at your pace, and it gives you time to consider each revelation as it unfolds. The house is the only tangible character in the game and as you move in and out of it, around and through it, you’re given new perspectives on it’s inhabitants and why they lived and died the way they did, and why they built this colossal sculpture of an inhabitance. You can take as much or as little time as you need in order to appreciate the level of detail each room provides — and there’s a lot to take in. You have to clamber around and climb about to appreciate the weird mentality of the multi-generational family and its rich history, and while you’re doing that you’re seeing the house new perspectives, literally and figuratively, as the narrative vignettes unfold.

Steam link

6) Orwell

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?

by Osmotic
Total Time Played: 456 minutes

It’s been a bad few years for reality. Orwell is playing off the sensation that we are losing a common, consensual understanding of shared reality and instead it’s being replaced by one of many versions of reality presented to us through a variety of inputs. This is further exacerbated by the fact the we opted into a surveillance state out of convenience — the cognitive dissonance that our amazing technology is spying on us to sell us more shit we don’t need is creating a deep paranoia. This observation is not new. I’m sure you’ve had conversations, or more likely seen someone post something on Facebook that’s so divorced from your understanding of observable reality that you can’t help but feel like you’re surrounded by aliens. People you know and trust putting forth information that is objectively false, and can be disproved by a simple google search. Authoritative news sources are no longer authoritative, they’re just part of some kind of grand conspiracy to obscure “the truth” which has evolved to mean “the set of inputs that I use to construct my worldview”, and everything else is a distortion of that truth.

Conspiracy theory comes from a desire for the human mind to organize the unflinching, unyielding chaos of the universe around us into some kind of coherent narrative. We are pattern recognition machines and a lack of pattern causes deep discomfort. The problem is we can’t have all of the information and the information we do have is full of holes. It’s impossible to tell which part of your reality is especially distorted, so we reconcile those distortions with conspiracy.

Orwell asks you to be the one in charge of reality. You shape the reality that your advisor, Symes, comes to understand and uses to shape public policy and take direct action on citizens of a nation that you’re not part of. Orwell makes you the problem, whether you like it or not. And you’ve got to admit it, you kind of like it. It feels good to be in control for once.

Steam link

7) Heat Signature

No plan survives contact with the enemy

by Suspicious Developments
Total Time Played: 1374 Minutes

I heard a story that Tom Francis spent all of this time working on the systems in Gunpoint, and got it to a point where he really liked it, then realized he had to design all of these levels that take advantage of the systems and test them and write a story and that’s why Gunpoint is only four hours long because making levels by hand and writing a story to go along with them is a pain in the ass.

Heat Sig rather elegantly solves that problem by systemizing or proceduralizing EVERYTHING. Story, missions, level design, enemy placement, it’s all part of the stew. This is a game of systems that combine to give the player maximum flexibility — in what goals they choose, how they choose to overcome them and how they adapt when it inevitably goes wrong. From simple snatch ’n’ grabs on a transport ship to complex, 7 layered enemy warrens, you can do it all with a wrench. And if you’re good enough you might not even need the wrench - even though there’s way cooler shit to play around with.

Steam link

8) Getting Over it with Bennet Foddy

Fuck You and the Cauldron You Rode In On

by Bennet Foddy
Total Time Played: 354 minutes

Not only is this game designed to hurt “a particular type of person” it’s also inadvertently designed to bring joy to a different type of person. The type of person that likes watching people cry when they try so hard for hours on end only to fail at their moment of triumph. The only real currency we have in life is the time we have on this planet and you can take it all away from them in the blink of an eye.

Don’t buy this on Steam or anywhere else, you’ll just encourage him

9) Steamworld Dig 2

Under the Dirt

by Image & Form
Total Time Played: 390 minutes

Once a year I need a good Metroidvania game. I like the form, and I like when people play with it. It requires control and planning and a good, solid wrapper of worldbuilding so it’s not just some knockoff. I had Hollow Knight in this slot for the longest time but discovered Steamworld Dig 2 at the end of the year and I found the universe that Image & Form has built for itself is clever and full of twists and mashups but done in such a way that they don’t draw attention to themselves. Like, the universe is Robot Cowboys, but they never really draw attention to it, the world exists and the characters exist in it and there’s nothing unusual to them about it. I’ve come to really appreciate the ability to master and control tone in a game, it’s a challenging thing to do and like most great feats of design goes totally unnoticed when it’s pulled off successfully.

Steamworld Dig 2 also drafts off of the success of the mining genre, giving the player freedom unusual to the genre to blaze their own path within a relatively narrow corridor — but still control their path. Everything unfurls in the satisfying series of “ah ha, now I can do this” moments that make these kinds of games great, but it feels much less controlled and rigid than its predecessors.

Steam link

10) RiME

No Words

by Tequila Works/QLOC
Total Time Played: 240 minutes

It’s a marvel of game design. A 3rd person puzzle game that communicates everything to the player non-verbally. There’s a reason that so many mainstream AAA titles hold the player’s hand, and that’s because people need it. They can’t pick up on the subtle (or not so subtle) cues that designers place in the environment while learning an elaborate traversal system and paying attention to a complex story. This game trusts you and it pays off big time.

The visuals are breathtaking — not just from the use of the camera framing to create dramatic and transcendent moments of emotion, but in the contrast of visual themes from level to level and how the different elements are used to tell a story through environmental narrative that build to a truly rewarding crescendo.

Steam link

11) Prey (2017)

Space Oddity

by Arkane Austin
Total Time Played: 814 minutes

I like to think that at the start of this game, the lead systems designer had a psychotic episode and decided to create systems that were impossible to build airtight levels for. Somewhere, years ago, someone showed a gameplay demo where you could use a foam gun to create nearly any path you wanted and let the player turn into a coffee cup that hops around basically wherever you want to to fight against black shadow creatures that can also turn into coffee cups on a weird space station, and for some reason they greenlit it.

The GLOO gun is like, a level designer’s best friend and his worst enemy. The player can basically make their own path and “cheat” to get past challenges — even though they’re not cheating because the level design is impeccable and taking shortcuts feels more rewarding but frequently takes vastly more time and effort and failure cycles than doing it the “right” way. The GLOO gun and the mimic powers force the designers to create exemplary gameplay spaces that beg to be “broken” — and they’re unbreakable because the point is for the player break them.

In classic immersive sim form, there’s no right or wrong way to play this game. You choose your path, your choose how much you want to engage with the story, you choose how you want to play the game. In true Arkane fashion, the role of the level designer was to enable the broadest possible possibility space for the player to express themselves.

On top of that, it’s the most concrete “place” i’ve experienced in years. It feels like a real space station with some artful touches that set it apart from the usual down-the-line, NASA styled endeavor. Everything fits together and has a purpose in the narrative. You don’t have to read one single piece of text to “get” it. Shit ain’t easy.

Steam link

12) Emily is Away Too

Come as you are

by Kyle Seeley
Total Time Played: 105 minutes

So the experience of playing this game is deeply personal and your reaction will vary depending on your age and level of emotional maturity. I’m turning 40 this year, and i’ve been married for 10 of those years. I’ve had the time to reflect on the choices that I made in high school, when everything seemed so important and immediate, and in a way it was, but i’ve also had the time to reflect on how my actions impacted the lives of the people I went through school with.

I was fortunate enough to see Ben Platt play the title character in the musical Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway this year. I didn’t know what it was about going into it and I almost had to leave at intermission it was affecting me so deeply, because I saw an extreme version of what I remember myself to be in high school. In my day-to-day life, I experience waves of guilt and regret over memories from events that happened more than 25 years ago, seemingly at random and this show triggered them deeply and at a rapid pace. Things that other people have no doubt forgotten about as they have moved on, but you get the brain you get.

Emily Is Away Too gave me the opportunity to approach that anxiety and those unwanted memories in a different way, experimenting with the familiar characters and situations at my own pace with intent and purpose and a sense of my character as a grown man, channeling my experiences and hoping for the best for these characters and for my character, and realizing that so much of it was out of my control. This is only a perspective that I could have after a lifetime of coming to understand that the world is chaos that in which the only thing that I can control is the way in which I choose to react to things.

Steam link

13) theHunter: Call of the Wild

A Fortress of Solitude

by Expansive Worlds
Total Time Played: 504 minutes

The most underappreciated tool in any medium is quiet. This year and the year before have been very noisy. A lot of people were yelling on TV and everyone on facebook went kind of crazy and it seemed like the world was becoming unhinged.

This added up to me being particularly receptive to the the tranquil, picturesque landscapes in Call of the Wild. It’s authentic to the hunting experience as I understand it — observation of behaviors and understanding of needs and movement patterns are essential to being successful in this game, just like the hunt in the real world. It gives you a challenge to focus on beyond the madness of the IRL, just you and this beautiful snow globe of a world. There just was something reassuring about the patience and observation required to stalk your prey successfully.

In the times when I didn’t want to hunt, this game turned into a mountain climbing/photography simulator. It had great environmental design that made you want to traverse on foot to unlock vistas to take spectacular photographs.

Steam link

14) Everything

Ce n’est pas tout

by David O’Reilly
Total Time played: 270 minutes

At last, a game that accepts me for who I am:

Actually the beauty of this game is that I can be a whole horde of giant turds and my turd horde can destroy an entire city:

Or I can be a pod of whales drifting through the cosmos from galaxy to galaxy, whatever. It’s poetry, dude.

Steam link

15) Sniper Elite 4

You Done Picked a Bad Year to be a Nazi, Son.

by Rebellion
Total Time Played: 708 Minutes

I love it when a game subverts my expectations and surprises me. There’s nothing really novel about this game, it builds on a formula that’s this team has been working on for 4 installments, and borrows heavily from other games in the genre — but i’d always dismissed it out of hand because it sounded dumb on its face. I only knew about the grotesquely detailed death cams and the boring name.

Boy was I wrong.

The game combines stellar level design, immersive open world design with generous stealth to create a game that allows you to solve the problem however you see fit. It does everything it sets out to do perfectly.

Steam link

16) Subsurface Circular

Theta One One Was Alone

by Bithell
Total Time Played: 126 Minutes

Part of the appeal of this game was that it came out of nowhere, it just liked dropped on tuesday with no warning or advertising like the guy thinks he’s Kanye or something. That’s cool, man. I wish I could do that.

It’s also a really great text adventure, you should play it. It’s your kind of thing.

Steam link

17) The Sexy Brutale

Murder Prevention Simulator 2017

by Cavalier
Total Time Played: 390 minutes

Everything here is done with purpose and meaning. Every smashed glass heard in a different room, every gun shot, every death that you can’t stop, it all has a purpose that reveals itself to you in time in elegant and thrilling fashion. And don’t worry about trying to save everyone, there’s always yesterday.

Steam link

18) Shadowhand

“A man can be an artist at anything. Shoes, Food, Whatever … Jake’s art is Solitaire Games set in Regency England. And he’s about to paint his masterpiece”

by Gray Alien
Total Time Played:

Steam link

19) Happy Room

Room is happy now

by Mana Potion
Total Time Played: 1350 minutes

Trust me this game is a lot more fun when you read the objectives in your head with a Russian accent.

Steam link

20) Scanner Sombre (VR)

Grave of the fireflies

by Introversion
Total Time Played: 75 minutes

I’ve long held that there are so many shooters because the input devices that we use have triggers on them, and triggers really only have one affordance. You pull them, usually to shoot. But i’ve reconsidered this idea partially because of the design of the Oculus Touch controllers, perhaps the finest human-computer interaction device ever made — and of course it has triggers; not because they need to support games with guns but because our index fingers are so dextrous. There’s a second, larger grip pad that covers the other three fingers which are less dextrous but still provide valuable input. I think my original belief was a little shallow and not accurate as well because people play shooters at the hardest core level on mouse and keyboard, which throws a huge monkey wrench in my argument, a fact I am realizing as I write this.

Last year I talked about how I hoped that VR would rise above and beyond the simple waves-of-robots and shooter ports, but Scanner Sombre also made me reconsider that point of view — it takes the gun and flips it on its head. The gun in Scanner Sombre isn’t about removing something from the world, it’s about adding something to it. Through the gun, you reveal something beautiful.

Steam link

Honorary Mentions and Special Commendations:

- Achievement in those dope aesthetics:

1. Absolver
2. ECHO
3. Ruiner
4. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
5. 0RBITALIS
6. BOTOLO

- Achievement in consistency of tone:

1. Cat Quest
2. Kindergarten
3. Rock of Ages 2: Bigger and Boulder

- The “Once More With Feeling” Award for Mega-Sized DLC that did justice to two of my favorite games from last year:

1. X-Com: War of the Chosen
2. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

- Commendation for getting me to play an Early Access game for more than 20 hours despite my strict rules regarding the topic, and if it had released this year it would have easily made my top 5:

1. Dead Cells

- The Reverse-Battlefield-Hardline-Award for releasing a game whose themes perfectly drafted the zeitgeist (rather than fall ass-backwards into controversy):

1. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

- The Cow Clicker award for games-as-satire:

1. I Can’t Believe it’s not Gambling GOTY Edition

- Achievement in Cinema for showing what it’s like to be deeply passionate about something and have it be poorly received and the resulting emotional turmoil and ultimate reckoning, while also showing what it’s like to work for a total asshole and making you sympathize with him regardless:

1. The Disaster Artist

- Lifetime Achievement Award for changing my life in dramatic, immeasurable ways that I couldn’t know at the time and still don’t know the extent of:

1. Dead Space