My Favorite Games of 2018

Hey everyone! The world conspired against me finishing my year-end lists until now, but I’ve fought tooth and nail to bring you my favorite games from last year. We can only pray that I can wrestle the other lists into a presentable state for y’all.

Anyway, this list is at least 3 months late and I still haven’t finished all the games I wanted to from 2018. Sorry to those who I missed and are destined to be totally forgotten by the ravages of time.

Celeste

In the most formative years of my life, Super Meat Boy took my love for platformers and twisted it into some perverse desire to be tortured by intense, bite-sized snippets of 2D action. But here’s the thing about Super Meat Boy: it’s ugly, emotionally vacant, and too punishing for me to ever come close to finishing it.

Here’s what Celeste has on Super Meat Boy:

A) It has a solid and moving story,

B) The characters have vibrant personalities across very visually distinct levels, and

C) It isn’t too unforgiving of your mistakes for a hardcore platformer… unless you want it to be.

This is, without a doubt, my favorite game that came out of 2018. It carefully folds the try-until-you-succeed nature of platformers into its story of self acceptance and friendship, slowly dialing the difficulty of its challenges up along the way, providing more difficult B and C sides of its levels as you master each. Celeste provides plenty of challenges for both casual and hardcore gamers alongside accessibility settings that can be tweaked to meet your level of play and ensure that you’re able to experience all that the game has to offer.

Celeste never overreaches in accomplishing its goals. It creates a world, characters, and aesthetic that is deeply satisfying to sink your time into.

Return of the Obra Dinn

A little bit eldritch, a lot bit cold, hard logic puzzle, Return of the Obra Dinn saddles you with the job of an insurance adjustor who’s being paid to determine the fates of all the passengers meant to be onboard a recently returned (and less recently abandoned) ship. With the help of a detailed roster and a magic compass that allows you to zero in on the last moments of some of its passengers, the game confirms your log entries in sets of three correct answers, giving you access to new floors and snippets of information you’re able to use to slowly flesh out its creepingly eldritch tale.

Though it isn’t quite as challenging as I expected (probably because I made sure to use every chance to skip some legwork through random guessing), the music cues and voice acting fill out the very simplistic 2-bit artstyle perfectly, and the story is just complicated enough to be a challenge to piece together from beginning to end. I personally think the ambiance and intrigue peak somewhere around the middle of its overarching story, but many characters have compelling subplots and interesting mysteries to solve. Smartly, the game relies on your curiosity and investment in these characters to resolve their fates and unravel the story chapter by chapter, and you’re forced to have a good handle on everything that happened on board the ship to work your way through all 60 passengers.

Return of the Obra Dinn somehow twists a gameplay concept reminiscent of the logic puzzles you’d find on the LSAT into something that doesn’t feel like homework at all, using evocative visuals and music to punctuate the journey.

Donut County

Watch out, massive plot spoilers ahead: You’re a hole in the ground. You move around and make stuff fall inside. You get bigger. You move around and make bigger stuff fall inside. You repeat the process until the world is a barren wasteland.

Donut County is a fun throwback to when the Katamari Damacy games were as good as it gets. It’s very short and very charming with a simple twist on the Katamari gameplay loop, complete with a mouthy almanac full of fresh takes on household items.

Despite its nonsensical premise, Donut County has a straightforward and powerful message about gentrification and the power of community that is rooted in humor and linked to its gameplay in a way not unlike how Celeste’s gameplay feeds into its themes.

Hollow Knight

The Dark Souls genre rarely works for me. It’s hard for me to feel like I’m making progress in a world where one mistake means death and save checkpoints are rarely found and punishing to use.

Luckily for me, Hollow Knight is a bit more forgiving than a Souls game, even if most of the above still applies. Where Hollow Knight really shines through is in its world, hostile, beautiful, and carefully themed, crawling with original character designs that span the depths of the insect kingdom.

There are only a few games each year that make me really excited to explore their worlds, scrounge in every corner for secrets, get attached to minor characters… Hollow Knight does all of this and combined it with a steady drip of new attacks and movement abilities that constantly revolutionize how you’re able to traverse the map and increase the secrets you can find — it is a metroidvania, after all. A benefit of publishing this end-of-year list criminally late is that we now know we’re getting a full-blown sequel to Hollow Knight sometime soon. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, I’m excited to smash my head against the wall that is Sekiro when I get my hands on it… though we’ll see if I can ever translate my passion for 2D metroidvanias into a 3D Souls game.

God of War

A mainstay on almost everyone’s end-of-year lists, God of War is the most satisfying AAA game I’ve played on the PS4, both from an emotional standpoint and a lizard-brain gameplay-feel-good standpoint. I wouldn’t hesitate to say it’s in the running for my favorite major studio release ever. I opted out of playing the original trilogy so I’m missing out on the blood-soaked, sex-fueled backstory, but the story stands alone without any broader series context whatsoever.

God of War expands from one fairly bland corner of its world by slowly incorporating more and more mythical and fantasy elements, gradually crafting a complex story that is rewarding to engage with. You’re free to mess around with in-depth RPG mechanics, gearsets, skills, and more to palpably change your build… or you can just toy with different skills and rarely touch your armor and end up progressing at about the same rate.

These systems sometimes border on feeling generic, included only because they are industry standards, but their implementation in God of War is only a little bit excessive (rather than, say, Assassin Creed: Odyssey’s endless gear cycle and arbitrary rarities). The game rewards any time you spend learning its RPG systems, but isn’t demanding to the point of requiring complete understand of in-depth buildcrafting. And even if you do end up working your way through side quests to backtrack for collectibles, constant banter between characters weave stories that give color to the world and otherwise fill that empty space with interactions that end up being, when it comes down to it, some of the best moments in the game.

It’s hard not to hype this game up too much since essentially everyone already has, but it’s well worth playing, especially now that some time has passed and you can probably get it at a discount.

Monster Hunter World

Monster Hunter World is one of my favorite game franchises streamlined, beautified, and made more accessible than ever before. World has taken the bones of the monster fighting, carving, and armor-making and taken it to a broader audience with more forgiving controls than ever.

World provides the perfect way for people to get into Monster Hunter than the more open-ended recent entries into the series, scaling back some systems and developing better AI and creating more environmental interactions than ever before, whether that’s human vs. monster, monster vs. monster, monster vs. tree, or basically any other combination.

My main issue with World is that once you’ve mastered its basics it doesn’t open up quite as rewardingly as past entries in the series. Clocking in at around 35 monsters to hunt vs. Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate’s 85+ (the most recent Switch release), it’s missing many of the creatures that I love from the series, though it admittedly does add a few new top-tier creatures. Unfortunately, I’m not a major fan of many of its endgame beasts compared to the more colorful ones from past games… and there are only a handful of them to start.

Since release, Capcom has added content has skewed towards the hardcore players rather than fleshing out the lower levels of content, which makes sense but is much less interesting to me than the having a busier and more colorful ecosystem of dozens and dozens of monsters available to fight in the earlier game or later on in enhanced forms. Word is there’s a big DLC coming later this year that should add some additional biomes and, if we pray hard enough, G rank endgame hunts for all monsters, which would flesh out the game’s content considerably, but that’s just a rumor I’m trying to start.

However, this is Monster Hunter at its absolute most intuitive, accessible, and rewarding, and I’m expecting there to be full sequels to World that are broader in scale than the first, and that’s definitely something to look forward to without hesitation.

Assassins Creed Odyssey

The first Assassin’s Creed title I’ve played since I quit halfway through Black Flag, Assassins Creed Odyssey’s attempts to pull me back into the open ocean almost lost me at first.

Luckily, the story is anchored by Kassandra (if you have ANY taste and chose right at the start of the game), my all-time favorite Assassin’s Creed protagonist. She has a towering personality that blasts through your own quest choices and input, motivated partially by revenge and partially by the deep desire to find and protect your family, a theme that I can easily see being hit-or-miss, but it almost always resonates with me. The story is pretty weak when viewed as a whole, ESPECIALLY the completely non-sequitur present day arc (coming from someone who skipped Origins), but the other systems are rewarding and Kassandra is a revelation in the context of Assassin’s Creed rich legacy of one-step-above-bland protagonists.

The addition of RPG mechanics has its benefits, mostly in how it makes your playstyle more flexible than in any past Assassin’s Creed game I’ve played, but the item level and rarity equipment juggling dominates the first half of the game and a very specific form of gameplay torture. Luckily, this juggling act fades significantly after the first dozen hours, where you can cut loose and play the game the way you want, doing as much or as little side content as you please along the way.

In Odyssey, the Assassin’s Creed gameplay loop is stronger than ever, paired with a world that is far more varied and beautiful than I expected for a country that has such a small geographical footprint. Maybe I’ll loop back around and give Origins a try… or just wait a couple months for the inevitable next entry.

Dragalia Lost

After building a rich history of publishing somewhat disappointing phone games, Dragalia Lost is Nintendo’s latest mobile release. This time around, though, they’re backed by a more or less universally beloved developer, CyGames, the minds behind GranBlue Odyssey and a couple other mobile games mostly big in Japan.

Nintendo’s first published mobile ARPG, it’s mostly carried by a cute art style with likeable (if heavily troped) characters and a pretty solid story. The main thing that sells me on phone games is visual style, and Dragalia Lost is right up my alley, with bright colors, over the top animations, and fun monster designs. The one caveat is that it’s a gachapon and ends up relying on the regularly release of horribly oversexualized female characters to get people to spend money on the app.

Though the gacha system is the worst to be found in Nintendo’s releases thus far (ten gacha rolls costs $30 (!!!) if you aren’t rolling with free-to-play currency or using one of the periodic sales), the developer handouts are generous, the team is responsive, and new events, characters, and content are added at a steady drip. As long as you have a good amount of self control, what else could you wish for in a casual phone game?

That’s it for 2018! If the stars align, 2019 should be stacked with some big Nintendo releases… and some other studios too, I guess. I promise I’ll try to get this next one out on time.