My favourite games of 2013

Year in review: In alphabetical order, here are the games I came to love this year.

Antichamber

There are plenty of puzzle games that confuse you, stop you cold in your tracks, force you to stop and think for hours about what to do next. But there are very few puzzle games that have you coming up with harebrained schemes for solving a problem that you think will never work, only to eventually unlock a skill or a tool that lets you execute your plan flawlessly. The idea that you might have thought of a solution that violates the constraints of a video game isn’t new; realizing that the game is more than capable of handling your solution is the novelty. That’s exactly what Antichamber gave me in spades. It threw me into a world I thought I knew but didn’t, demanded I understand the obscure and peculiar ways in which it violated the usual logic of space and time, and then stepped back to let me scheme. And when my insane Rube Goldberg contraptions—built without so much as a hint from the game—would work perfectly, I felt like Antichamber and I understood each other on some deep, fundamental level.

Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk

I’ve played a bunch of Atelier games now, and every single one offers the same basic pleasures: the joys of coming up with ever stronger medicines, bombs and foodstuffs in your alchemy workshop to defeat a big bad boss or help a friend with an errand. Ayesha freshens things up a bit by tweaking how alchemy works, streamlining things that didn’t really matter and adding new ways to mix and match your ingredients to create better items. And where the Arland series became increasingly devoted to fan service by the last game, Ayesha is refreshingly more mature in outlook. The cast of characters is near-universally likeable and the setting of a world tumbling into decline lends a slight melancholic note to a series that has traditionally been fairly carefree. The lack of Japanese voice acting aside, Ayesha is an ideal entry point to the franchise if you’ve never played an Atelier game before.

Battlefield 4

This is probably the most controversial game on the list, mostly because EA and DICE have completely bungled the game’s launch. Almost two months later, people are still reporting problems with nearly every part of the game, from multiplayer server and client crashes to lost progress in the single-player campaign to simply not being able to join games. What makes Battlefield 4 different from other EA blunders like SimCity is that when Battlefield 4 works—and it does for me most, if not all of the time—it’s still the best team-based multiplayer shooter in existence. Shooting helicopters out of the sky, planting C4 on motorcycles and driving them into tanks, killing three people trying to clamber up the stairwell you’re defending—these are all Battlefield moments you won’t really find anywhere else. It’s somewhat difficult to actually recommend Battlefield 4 as a purchase, knowing there’s a non-trivial chance you won’t be able to play it as the developers intended. But keep an eye on this one, because when DICE finally irons out the majority of the issues plaguing the game, watch out.

Fire Emblem: Awakening

Until this year, I’d never finished a Nintendo game in my entire life. But then Fire Emblem: Awakening came along and showed me that Nintendo can make games even for people like me. Not surprisingly, the last time I got so attached to the characters in a strategy RPG was Valkyria Chronicles, which features similar character-building aspects. I got really wrapped up in guiding my team members into new roles (hello Tharja, my all-powerful Dark Knight) and figuring out which of them should get married to whom. And having to juggle things like weapon ranges, the pairing mechanic and the sword-axe-spear triangle of strengths and weaknesses added just the right amount of strategy to make tough encounters really interesting. It’s not often that I enjoy grinding in RPGs, but Fire Emblem managed it. That alone is a sign of quality.

Gone Home

If Battlefield 4 is a controversial pick for top game of the year, Gone Home isn’t far behind—the backlash against this game for barely being a game, or for pretending to be something it isn’t, or for simply being far too short for the money, is pretty strong here. And yes, in the end the story isn’t necessarily Oscar-quality writing or anything, and you can indeed finish the whole game in about two hours. But simply by virtue of telling a story you don’t normally expect from a video game, in a way that allows you to explore at your own pace and come to your own conclusions more naturally, Gone Home’s simple premise becomes something more. For fleeting moments, you feel like you know the family in Gone Home like they were your own family, with their own quirks and failings and intimacies. And like very few games this year, the ending of Gone Home affected me strongly. If that isn’t an indication of success, what is?

Saints Row IV

It might seem like a very hipster choice to make, picking Saints Row IV over the much bigger Grand Theft Auto V. But there’s actually a very simple reason for this: while Grand Theft Auto V often demanded its players submit to a level of realism that often got in the way of really enjoying the game, Saints Row IV eliminates every roadblock keeping the player from the fun stuff like jumping off skyscrapers, sliding underneath aliens and punching them in the junk, and playing ragdoll in traffic to rack up insurance fraud claims. That part isn’t a surprise; what is a surprise is just how much care and affection Saints Row IV has for its characters and the story as a whole. This is, after all, the game that includes multiple callbacks to the original Saints Row, which was an altogether more serious and grounded game than IV. This is the game that actually attempts—and succeeds—at reconciling the stoner Shaundi from Saints Row 2 and the meaner, tougher Shaundi from Saints Row the Third. No one would have faulted Volition for simply pretending the first two games didn’t exist. Instead, they came up with a game that’s surprisingly sympathetic to the franchise’s past and sent off its characters in style. Grand Theft Auto V may have ambition, but Saints Row IV has heart.

Tearaway

If you had told me Tearaway would be a very strong contender for my favourite game of the year, I’d have said you were joking. But I was wrong, so wrong. The game is all about how you affect the world of its protagonist, a messenger who has to deliver something to the godly being reshaping its world. Along the journey, you leave your mark in many different ways—you take Instagram-like photos of things, and build crowns and moustaches and other paper trinkets, and give animals new fur by taking photos of your own world with the Vita camera, and so on. You do these things not to fulfill objectives but because it’s fun to play around. But by the end of the game, you’ll realize that all that play actually does mean something profound, and that’s when you’ll realize what an accomplishment Tearaway truly is. The truly sad thing is we’ll likely never get another game like Tearaway, one that takes advantage of the Vita’s many controls in ways that don’t feel like afterthoughts, one suffused throughout with tender loving care. Tearaway is like a great big hug from an old friend; you never want to let go.

Honourable Mentions

Beyond: Two Souls: amazing graphics, great performances from Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe and a story that does a great job of hiding all its branches, but poor writing and plotholes you can drive a truck through.

Bioshock Infinite: breathtaking world-building and an ambitious, well-told story, but false equivalencies between the two “sides” in the story, and combat that feels more repetitive than most shooters.

Gran Turismo 6: lots of cars, lots of events, streamlined user interface, still the best racing simulator on a console, but it’s still a racing simulator on a console, and so in a sense is more of the same.

Metro: Last Light: moody Metro setting, improved in nearly every way over its predecessor, but loses the surprise factor of the original by sticking close to the formula.

Remember Me: gorgeous art direction and a striking, unique protagonist, but less than stellar combat and platforming and not enough of the one unique game mechanic it has.

Strike Suit Zero: a fantastic revival of the arcade space sim with a twist, but harsh spikes in difficulty and progression systems that demand you replay earlier missions.

The Last of Us: a mature story with a strong, realistic relationship between its two main characters, and perhaps the best looking game on the PS3, but certain encounters are intensely frustrating and I can’t get over its ending even though I respect its intentions.

The Swapper: a unique puzzle platformer that exudes atmosphere and has great puzzles, but I’m not sure, actually. It’s a great game that for whatever reason I didn’t like as much as my final list.

Tomb Raider: surprisingly good at being a more open Uncharted, but Lara Croft can’t decide whether to be the vulnerable survivor of a shipwreck or a ruthless, nearly invincible murder machine.