My favourites games of 2016
It is weird to me to not be doing this on Arcadian Rhythms. It was a site that was my home for over 5 years and saw some of my best writing as well as some really bad articles (not the worst articles, fortunately I never released those on the Internet). I am sad that we closed it down but I see why we did.
This is likely to be a long waffling post about the video games that I have loved this year, so if you were coming here for some sound bites (let’s be honest most of you are here over a sense of guilt that you should read this or else no one will) then I recommend you book mark this and come back later. That, or skip the ReCore section as it is good but really long.
These are the games that I most enjoyed this year.
5. Inside
When developers, Playdead, released their debut game Limbo on the Xbox 360 I dismissed it as an art house game that I wasn’t interested in playing because in some way it insulted my sensibilities. For some bizarre reason I saw it as a cynical faux indie game. It was only after some poking from friends that I tried the trial version (do you remember trial versions, they were great weren’t they?) and fell in love instantly.
The monochromatic world with a silhouette boy walking through a Murnau nightmare was enticing, the implied story so different from everything else available on console at the time.
Inside is the follow-up and although the framework is the same, there is more and less going on in the game. You follow a young boy, running left to right, through another hellish landscape, this time instead of surreal black and white purgatory, it is a dystopian futuristic city. The parallels are there but this time Playdead is focusing on Limbo’s strengths and boosting them.
Instead of the singular story of a boy’s plight, Inside has that in the foreground but as that plays out there is the secondary story of painting the picture if the society he is surrounded by. There is plenty to miss in the background and the game rewards multiple playthroughs, not just because there are two endings but also because there are things that in the beginning that the ending sheds light on.
Expanding on their storytelling, Playdead have lessened the number of twitchy, trial and error of Limbo’s tougher puzzles and I think that this is largely for the best. Inside is primarily a story and the flow being broken up by death does not make thematic sense in the same way that it might have before. I only got truly stuck once and that was from over-thinking the solution by attempting elaborate platforming.
To talk about anymore of Inside is to spoil the discovery of the areas and narrative. So, instead I am going to leave it at that. Play it.
4. ReCore
A surprise announcement a few years back at Microsoft’s E3 presentation, ReCore, looked like a dream to my eyes. Designed by Keiji Inafune, creator of Lost Planet and Mega Man, and developed by Armature Studios that had key members of the Metroid Prime 3 team (my favourite Wii game).
The premise of ReCore is that you play as Joule, a young woman who wakes up expecting to find the planet she is on to be terraformed by the robots that got there before her. Instead, she finds the planet is still a desert and the robots have all gone rogue, except for her trusty dog-bot Mack.
The opening of the game is truly beautiful, it has you traversing through dunes and up a rocky Cliffside, shooting bug robots as you go, solving a few simple puzzles here and there and climaxes with an engaging boss battle that explains how the combat and loot based levelling up works.
All of the building blocks of ReCore — the platforming and shooting — are so well executed that they themselves constitute the reason for ReCore being in my top 5.
I don’t know what magic the developers used (I suspect a subtle autocorrect in my jump trajectory and generous range for the character to auto-grab platforms) but they managed to make me feel like I am good at 3-D platforming but at the same time delivering some of the best, challenging levels based around jumping that I have witnessed this side of Super Mario Galaxy.
ReCore’s take on shooting is unlike anything on current gen platforms. It is not about accuracy as you will auto-lock on any enemies that come into proximity. Instead the emphasis is on switching between different coloured bullets to match them with your enemy, timing charge shots in conjunction with lethal attacks from your animatronic buddy, and using your double jump and dash to avoid incoming attacks. Encounters feel more like a fighting game or a twitch-based puzzle game than a conventional third person shoot-em-up.
As a result of these two things ReCore maintains a very strong 8 hours of having something fun to do or experience every 30 seconds.
ReCore would be one of my favourite games of the last decade if it weren’t for some fun-crushing bugs and a tail-end that gets dogged down in too much repetition and ill-conceived padding.
The bugs are random, they range from the camera clipping through the floor in places that confound, to hard crashes that take you back to the dashboard as you are beating bosses.
These add up to the game feeling like it is 2–3 iterations away from final release, except the game has been out for a couple of months now.
The ending of the game wouldn’t be that bad if it didn’t clash with some design decisions. To ‘finish’ the game you must collect enough prismatic cores to unlock the final levels of the game (a series of fantastic platforming set pieces and combat arenas). To find the cores you need to complete dungeons littered throughout the world.
This wouldn’t be problem in itself as the dungeons are really fun but the fact that you cannot set custom waypoints and there are certain dungeons and cores that require prerequisites, this means you need to do further back tracking.
Despite these stumbling blocks ReCore remains one of the best experiences I’ve had this year and even if they never patch those bugs it is worthy of your attention.
3. Forza Horizon 3
Full disclosure, I was involved in the making of Forza Horizon 2, as a result I didn’t write about it at the time (even though it was my favourite game) due to a conflict of interests — because it is all about ethics in video games or some such bullshit.
At the time of FH2’s release I remember saying that it helped me understand why people could be in love with driving and that I was in love with the idea of being in love with driving. Who knows, I was a bit drunk. I think my point was that that the open road driving, the colours, the feel of slingshoting out of a corner and nudging opposition out of the way as a result was just perfect.
Forza Horizon 3 is, somehow, more perfect, perfecter or a real word for that.
For starters, they got rid of the annoying English commentator that calls you ‘mate’ every few seconds. They increased the diversity in tracks. The sense of speed is improved. They even tried to make the barnyard searches less tedious (they failed but you can’t fault them for trying).
I always find it hard to write at length about games that I truly see nothing wrong with. This game has its feet planted in both simulation and arcade and managed to keep me hooked. There are moments of improvisation where you race against other players and try and find shortcuts across desert plains in a way that evokes the film Vanishing Point. The online features have been greatly improved with ‘co-op’ and competitive modes now being fully supported so that players can go into the single player mode together.
There is in-game custom sound track support that ties into the underused Groove Music player. On top of that it is genuinely exhilarating.
If you have a decent PC or an Xbox One, this is the best racing game I’ve played in years. My only concern is how do they make FH4 better?
2. Overcooked!
I love same screen multiplayer games. When I lived in a country surrounded by games industry people, one of my favourite things to do was get a few beers in at a local bar and get four controllers together with friends and over the process of an evening turn them into enemies.
Overcooked is one of the best in this current generation for exactly that. The game is simple — there are three inputs: pick up, chop/execute action, and dash. The complexity of the game comes from trying to make dishes to spec on your own or in coordination with others. When more people are involved the more carnage can occur. Communication is key and it is easy to see that communication falling apart as you try to move plates of burgers between moving trucks.
The versus mode is hilarious but the main meat of the game comes from the extensive campaign co-op mode in which you can enjoy screaming at your loved ones and maybe never speaking to them ever again. The plot is that you travel through time planning to hone your skills so that you beat an apocalypse monster that hungers for burritos and soup.
Each level is compact, never taking longer than 5 minutes but it has that hook of wanting to perfect your run and get three stars on each of them. There is the aforementioned moving trucks level, levels set on ice floes, over lava pits, in a space station and each of them have excellent hooks to get you rethink how you approach food preparation.
Again, Overcooked is near perfect (excluding the occasional bug where you drop a pan and/or plate in a spot where you can no longer pick them up) that I don’t have a lot more to say about it, other than be prepared to have no friends.
- Kingdom: New Lands
Kingdom’s learning curve is about as vertical as a brick wall. With little fanfare, it places your regent-on-horseback on a 2-D plane, it explains how to build a simple fort and equip your peasants and then it is down to you to figure out the rest. Within about 2 rotations of the day/night cycle you realise that this is going to be complicated because you’re visited by scary shadowy apparitions, you find out are called the ‘greed’, that rip apart your defences and attack your subjects. Other than defend yourself, it isn’t really clear as to what else to do.
Mistakes will have to be made in this Roguelike, RTS hybrid before you can figure out a lot of the nuances. For example, there is a good chance you will get excited to build catapults only to realise that you built it in the wrong place so that it is either ineffective or prone to being destroyed. Farming effectively is also likely to remain a mystery until the procedurally generated terrain provides a light bulb moment. Personally, it took me several playthroughs of the first level to figure out why the guy who arrives every morning to deliver money stops doing so ‘randomly’.
That is the key to this brilliant game, nothing is random and all input has an effect that might make things seem random when you first encounter them. After you get past that initial first step and start deciphering what the systems are doing, the game then adds new layers and wrinkles. You’ll find yourself pulling your hair out over having enemies coming from both sides, if you survive to day 25 you’ll have an unpleasant visitor at night that makes you rethinkall your strategies. There have been at least two points where I thought I had reached my limit with the game but it just kept pulling me back and trying something else. The achievements are well placed as they make you think outside the box on what is possible in the game and in attempting to beat these challenges you learn more about the game.
So, despite the repeated wall that faced me every time I had to learn a new level or accommodate a terrible random level layout, I was happy to climb it again.
Honourable mentions
10 Second Ninja X — With every level possible to complete in 10 seconds the battle then comes for hundredths of a second shaved off your time. It is compelling to see how good you can become. This failed to make the top 5 because the leaderboards tend to break.
The Final Station — A creepy, cool game about travelling on a nuclear train from station to station in an attempt to thwart an invasion. Looks like a Roguelike but isn’t. Moody music and simple animation that conveys a great sense of depression.
The Division — This was the first game to make me understand stoners that just like to wander around open worlds without a proper objective. The plot and setting are a right-wing nutjob’s dream, still, beautiful looking game with delightful loot driven murder.
Titanfall — No, not Titanfall 2. Titanfall. It came out years ago, but this was the year where I got to reap the best rewards of playing in a group of like-minded individuals.
Virginia — You play an FBI agent investigating a missing person in a small town. What makes it great is that there is not a single word of spoken dialogue. The game gets gradually more surreal, and it makes you question what the hell the game is about.
Firewatch — The game is at its best when it is a slow-paced examination of one lonely man’s life in a remote outlook post. The interactions between him and a fellow ‘firewatcher’ are considered and well written. It stumbles a little with one of the subplots but is still a fun ride.
ABZU — Finding Nemo the video game. Made by some people that made Journey, and the influence of that game shows. I think that in some ways I like it more but that is because I am a sucker for games set underwater.
Banner Saga 2 — Phenomenal sequel to the depressing original. The artwork evokes norse mythology and the story is one of loss and grief. Nothing quite like it anywhere else. I feel bad for not putting this in my top 5 but I only just remembered it from earlier this year and I wrote a lot about Recore.
