The 50 Games of the Decade
Listen to an audio version of this article by becoming a Patreon supporter.
Welcome. We made it. 2020. Wow, what a year. A lot has happened as I’ve been trying to write this list, but what’s important is that video games are good and here and should definitely be allowed to exist.
OK, I know what you’re thinking. “Why a games of the decade list now? Why a list at all?” Best games list are bad for a lot of reasons (go watch Sarah Zedig’s great video on the topic), and though I can say that this list is different for reason X, Y, B, the mechanics are the same so I’m just calling it what it is. Because lists are also fun. I love a list. You love a list (you clicked on this, didn’t you?). As damaging as canon’s can become, they can also help remind us about the media that impacted us, what hasn’t held up over the years, and what has gained greater resonance in that same time.
In that regard my tastes sure have changed a lot. You’ll find some of the usual suspects here, but in looking over other similar lists I found that what stood out for me over the decade was not flashy AAA games with Maximum Content. It was weird stuff. Games that upended and changed my relationship to the medium. If there’s any through line to this gargantuan jumble of words, it’s that all of these games resonated with where I was in life while playing them. Maybe that doesn’t make them all “good” but they all mean a lot to me, whether as games or time capsules for how I was feeling, or as something that changed how I understand art and writing about it.
I welcome disagreement on placing. Please indulge me with the games that mean something to you that I missed. This could never be a definitive list of any kind, but I got a lot out of putting it together and I hope you get something from reading it. Whether that’s just a new game to play or different way to think about it. Video games are bad, except when they’re good, and thankfully that happened often enough for me to group 50 of them together and call it a decade.
50. Doom (id Software, 2016)
I’ve never played Doom. I’ve watched it played for hours - mostly in the form of video essays that could use an editor - but have yet to rip and tear a demon with my own two hands. But, for reasons lost to time, I have listened to the soundtrack at least once a week since the game came out four years ago.
This isn’t a best soundtracks of the decade list, but everything that makes Doom work is encased in Mick Gordon’s gross, chunky score: over the top narrative vignettes? Check. Guitars that sound like machine guns? Check. A gleeful disregard for subtlety and good taste? Check. At this point I the only thing playing Doom could do for me that the soundtrack doesn’t is last long enough I grow numb to it.
49. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Bandai Namco/Sora Ltd. 2018)
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is one of gaming’s greatest toyboxes. There are surely those who enjoy the actual fighting mechanics - maybe people even like the super crunchy board game campaign - but for me, Smash Bros. has always been a game of throwing Happy Meal toy versions of my favorite Nintendo characters at one another and delighting in the sheer chaos that ensues.
Ultimate leans the most into pure extravagance and Smash-as-spectacle. Its roster was intense at launch and continues to grow with DLC. The third-party character dam that Sonic broke in Brawl is now flooding the valley with everyone from Banjo Kazooie to Joker from Persona 5, and though nobody should, it’s now possible to play with eight people at once which is just the best and worst way to Smash. Ultimate is a fitting museum of video game history as told by Masahiro Sakurai: densely populated, overflowing with flavor text, and all in service of watching Luigi headbutt a Jigglypuff. Bliss.
48. Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games, 2012)
Hotline Miami isn’t as smart as it’s often held up to be, but like Fight Club it’s a work of overwhelming style and just enough narrative ambiguity to work. A lot of games have played like Hotline Miami, but none of them feel like it. The muscle mechanics of toss, shoot, punch, dodge, and again, of each encounter has a physicality detached from the floating neon rooms and thumping soundtrack. You have to mean it.
For all that, I don’t find it an especially gross or excessive game. The violence is extreme but too much so to trigger the sort of disgust of a The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013). It has some vague ideas about violence in media but that’s not why you’re here. Hotline Miami is all sensation. How it feels, how it looks, how it sounds - god what a soundtrack! It put Devolver Digital on the map and defined their house style, which while now played out has not made Hotline Miami any less fresh.
Further reading: Hotline Miami - Review
47. Broken Age (Double Fine, 2015)
Broken Age is remembered more for its Kickstarter drama than as a game, which is frustrating as it is Double Fine’s best work (save, maybe, Psychonauts (2005), but that’s an argument to be had). It brings together their skills as adventure game designers, comedy writers, and corrallers of talent to tell a story about identity, tradition, and the pop culture omniscience of Jack Black.
It’s also messy in the way all Double Fine games are messy. It’s too ambitious, gets bogged down in the second act, and is built on design tropes a decade expired. But it’s never enough to destroy the game. Double Fine’s strength is in their charm and ability to pull off concepts that only succeed through the studio’s unending tenacity.
Double Fine’s output through the 2010s was unrelenting and overwhelming, hitting more often than not even if the studio itself seemed perpetually on the brink of complete financial collapse. Broken Age captures this drive and precarity as part of the text: an imperfect game trying desperately to get out the door, and somehow Elijah Wood is here. Because of course he is.
Further reading: Broken Age - Review
46. NaissanceE (Limasse Five, 2014)
It’s hard to accomplish scale in games. Everything is relative to my own perception of size and while the raw digital footprint of games has ballooned, it’s uncommon for that to be reflected in how I feel in a space. NaissanceE reduces me to an ant within violent buildings. I am small and fragile, tissue bones against concrete walls that stretch on for miles.
Ducking under ledges and hurling myself over gaps I try not to look down or up because the sheer magnitude of NaissanceE’s constructions gives me chills. Grandiose monuments to brutalism, their jagged edges reflect fractions of light to guide me forward. It is suffocating and magnificent, digital architecture imposing enough to inspire fear. NaissanceE is a testament to the power of just inhabiting an alien place, something that could not exist and yet feels so real I could touch it if I wasn’t scared to fall.
Further reading: NaissanceE - Review
45. Dance Central 3 (Harmonix, 2012)
I’ve always wanted to dance. It’s one of my life goals that I’m still the furthest from fulfilling, but for a brief moment, Dance Central 3 made me feel like maybe I could dance. Poorly, sure. No amount of yoga seems to be able to relax my muscles or allow me to move in degrees more subtle than right angles. But Dance Central 3 is forgiving and enthusiastic about creating a space where dance is natural, accessible, and somehow capable of stopping evildoers.
It’s a silly game that is all the better for being so, leaning fully into the spectacle and absurdity of its choreography. I’ve definitely injured myself playing it, elbowed my friends, and made an absolute fool of myself. And I’ve rarely felt as freely me.
Further reading: Dance Central is for the Wallflowers
44. Tacoma (Fullbright, 2017)
I went back and forth between whether to include Tacoma or Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013) on this list. Both were impactful – to The Discourse and to interactive fiction design – but I think Tacoma will ultimately have the longer tail (not culturally - Gone Home was a singular moment - but from a design and storytelling perspective). Gone Home popularized the first-person exploration “walking sim” genre and Tacoma builds upon it while introducing a radical non-linear storytelling engine unparelled across games.
The closest comparison to Tacoma is an immersive play like Sleep No More, where the actors perform within a space and you are free to follow whichever path is most interesting. But because this is a video game the conversations in Tacoma are rewindable and can be distorted. The actual content of these conversations is compelling but it is the form that still feels revolutionary years past release.
I am still conflicted about the naïve optimism of the ending (a problem I have with both of Fullbright’s games) but it is difficult to argue that they are not working at the top of their craft. Tacoma is unlike any other piece of interactive fiction from the 2010s, and I expect we are only just glimpsing at its influence on other projects.
Further reading: Can Tacoma have a happy ending?
43. Trace Vector (Vexel Games, 2014)
It takes a lot of style to sell a one-button game about tracing lines. Trace Vector shoots way past its modest premise and unassuming presentation, as much a hectic arcade game as a synth-wave music video. It’s like watching TRON from a helicopter, oversaturated to hell in neon with a beat that won’t let go.
This might be the wildest pull on this whole list but despite an abundance of faux-arcade games last decade none of them captivated me like the elegant simplicity of Trace Vector. It hits at just the level of twitchy intensity and chunky visual feedback that’s like a shot of dopamine right into my eyes. Then the soundtrack kicks in and it’s all over for me. Sweep me out with the trash, I’m gonna need a moment.
Further reading: Trace Vector - Review
42. Mass Effect 2 (Bioware, 2010)
In retrospect, Mass Effect never really understood what it was. I’m not mad about the ending, it’s the ending the series deserved and just one aspect of a story that focused way too much on the things that didn’t matter: dense codex entries, big picture threats, RPG quest tedium, being precious about morality.
Everyone remembers Mass Effect 2 because it didn’t care about any of this. It’s a space opera of small adventures, getting to know a bunch of hot, charismatic characters, and long elevator rides to your crush. Forget about the big terminator baby, I’m flirting with Garus. Whenever Mass Effect forgets it’s supposed to be a AAA space adventure it’s a delightful, silly, melodramatic beefcake of a game, and 2 stays there the longest.
The ending is still a mess and the camera won’t stop aggressively ogling Miranda’s ass, but Mass Effect 2 is such a good time at such a scale it gets a pass where the other games don’t. Now just give the series to some queer indie devs who actually understand what sort of game they’re making.
41. Antichamber (Alexander Bruce, 2013)
The 2010s were a period where every game was becoming increasingly continuous - the Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011) effect if you will - and I was growing increasingly bored with the whole function. Video game environments aren’t inherently more interesting when they make sense, and in fact, one of the joys of games is how they allow space to be collapsed and perverted in ways reality couldn’t allow (Melos Han-Tani wrote an excellent essay highlighting this fact in the Dark Souls games).
Antichamber does not exist in physical space. Tunnels loop on themselves; walking backwards take you forward; an object sits upon a dais in a room that’s only there when seen through red glass. The world is consistent but the rules defy physics and any understanding of space analogous to our own, requiring a level of lateral thinking I was frankly incapable of.
Antichamber makes the sprawling open-world look like the easy option. We understand how a mountain looks from far away, we can be sure of the linearity of space. Antichamber unseated me, tore the chair from beneath my legs and declared it a hole through which I would fall further into a machine trained on Escher and Vasarely. It is a strange and uncomfortable place that I dare not look away from, less it changes once again.
Further reading: Antichamber - Review
40. Killing Time at Lightspeed (Gritfish, 2016)
Killing Time at Lightspeed is about how time and distance collapse over the internet, and how relationships can so easily fade when compressed into the shape of an avatar. It hit hard in 2016 but in 2020 has taken on an even more intense resonance.
A few games did mock-social networks last decade but Killing Time at Lightspeed struck on a very particular feeling of melancholy and loss baked into these platforms. It’s become increasingly obvious that social networks, for as much as they can bring us together, also spur unhealthy habits and para-social relationships. Everyone is doom-scrolling and we don’t know how to stop without also losing our means of talking to friends and knowing what’s happening in the world.
I don’t like to think about how people I’ve lost still have Facebook pages. It’s uncomfortable that even in passing a part of them has been joined to the rolling network machine, selling ads against their digital tombstone and collecting status update eulogies. Killing Time at Lightspeed is a game that could only exist in at this point in history, and perhaps the one which captures it best.
Further reading: Killing Time at Lightspeed and the Ordinary Horror of Losing Touch
39. THOTH (Carlsen Games, 2016)
Thoth is a visual design masterpiece. It revels in its white space, the purposeful use of color, big blocky text. Any frame could be an Ellsworth Kelly painting; in motion, something akin to watching stars kill each other. There is beauty in its reservations, just shapes and bold contrasts and the absence of digital complications
Carlsen’s other game experiment, 140 (2013), does something similar with platforming that Thoth does for shmups. But there is confidence in Thoth where at times 140 needed to prove itself. Thoth simply is, without pretext.
Thoth is as much a game as an art piece, a particular sort of clean, gallery-ready exhibitionism that can be institutionally alienating but individually exciting. Thankfully, you don’t have to stand in a cavernous white room to play Thoth. It’s right here, running on a toaster singing an eldritch love song. Go to it.
Further reading: THOTH Reminds Us Of The Power Of Minimalist Design
38. Jazzpunk (Necrophone Games, 2014)
Video games are pretty silly. Wonderful, but utterly, wholly silly. We look upon duck-tape-and-trains bug fixes with endearment, approach puzzles informed with the knowledge of a thousand arcane lifehack solutions before them, but nobody need kid themselves. This is absurd. Yet when games try to reckon with this absurdity they are often unconscionably on the nose, or at the very least a dull reference in search of a joke.
I couldn’t tell you all the things Jazzpunk is inspired by. Each time I play it I catch jokes I missed, something hilarious hiding on a rooftop or in a corner, and never once does the game openly wink at me. If it tried its eyes would start to strobe. Jazzpunk marries the surreal depravity of Adult Swim with a level of restraint uncharacteristic for either them or video games. You do absolutely use a photocopy of your butt to open a door, and yet it feels almost tasteful compared to Duke Nukem and Rick & Morty.
I will never stop laughing at a stack of fruit shaped like Rita Repulsa shouting “after ten-thousand years I’m free” and initiating a Fruit Ninja minigame. It’s the sort of reference-within-a-reference that takes actual writing and craft to pull off. I don’t want to oversell Jazzpunk. This is not a paradigm of satire, just a very lighthearted and fun one. But games have always managed to do a lot with very little, and Jazzpunk’s attaché case is filled to the brim with zingers and live birds.
37. Waking Mars (Tiger Style, 2012)
Video games can’t stop fawning over colonialism. So many games center around “discovering” and harvesting environments, expanding industrial systems, and converting natural resources into currency it is easy to become uncritical of this hidden curriculum and shrug it off as just how games are. Waking Mars is different.
As a scientist exploring the caves of Mars, you interact with different alien fauna, helping to shape the ecosystem and fending off invasive species. Rather than mastering the environment, you serve its caretaker, cross-pollinating different plants and helping transform Mars from a barren desert to one brimming with natural life.
Waking Mars makes me long for more games that approach the environment as a living being rather than a human resource. I feel a strange connection to these plants in a way games like Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) and Surviving Mars (Haemimont Games, 2018) never allow me to. So maybe let’s make fewer games about cutting down trees and more about appreciating how incredible it is they’ve grown so tall.
36. Bejeweled 3 (PopCap, 2010)
It’s surreal to play a match-3 game in 2020 without microtransactions. I forgot how enchanting matching gems can be when it’s not shackled to four different currencies and an antagonistic progression curve. Bejeweled 3 is exactly what you expect of it, of a pedigree that looks easy until you play its peers. I used to take Bejeweled for granted, but after EA absorbed PopCap it’s evident how of a time 3 was. I doubt we’ll ever get another match-3 game of this sort and caliber. 2020 rejects its lack of economic ambition.
But what I really want to talk about are the affirmations. These beautiful, inexplicable text files buried in the Bejeweled 3 data folders. I don’t know who at PopCap wrote these. I’m not sure why they’re here. I don’t know why they’ve been buried in folders very few would ever bother exploring. But I love them, as absolutely corny as they are. Here’s a taste. I think they do the most to explain why Bejeweled 3 is worth remembering:
I accept that things change and end.
I accept life as it is.
I trust that I will always find an alternative.
I love courageously.
35. The Prom King, and Other Stories (Olivia White, 2015)
Twine games are one of the most exciting developments of the 2010s alt games scene. Evolving out of choose-your-own-adventure books and text adventure games, Twine is among the easiest ways to make interactive fiction while being flexible enough to support larger projects. The Prom King highlights a lot of what I find exciting about Twine as a writer, allowing for narrative techniques and structures that the linear nature of books can’t support.
The Prom King toys with perspective, pulls characters aside, presents context when needed, choices where they matter. These aren’t unique to The Prom King or literature but the execution is exciting and fluid where past attempts felt clumsy. I keep coming back to the game as much for the unsettling story of teenage love and conflict as to lift techniques for my own writing.
That story has aged less gracefully over the last five years than the structure around it, but when it hits The Prom King captures something about the insecurity and uncertainty of teenage relationships that is often lost in media that isn’t Lady Bird. Characters are empathetic but they’re also miserable. They lie and fuck and undermine one another in ways that are so terribly familiar. I don’t know if that comes across in a more traditional format, but the marriage of a non-linear structure with the open wounds of puberty left a mark that I can’t seem to shake.
34. Thumper (Drool, 2016)
Thumper is a video game panic attack. That’s the only way I can come close to describing how intense, how violent and stressful playing it feels. I don’t know if that makes it good - if it’s something I should even have in my life when I can already give myself panic attacks just existing - but I can’t stop thinking about it. If Rock Band is approximating how it feels to perform as a band, Thumper is being like being trapped in a moshpit with social anxiety.
Every beat is a personal attack, each mistake the terror of repeating last minute’s obstacles. I don’t like it, it makes me nervous and tense to a degree horror games envy. I want to stop playing but there’s something deeply compelling in the noise. Maybe it’s the soundtrack pulling me through, or the false belief the next level will bring some sort of peace. Maybe I’m just playing for those short seconds between areas where the adrenaline fades and I’m just playing a video game again.
It makes complete sense that Brian Gibson of Lightning Bolt composed the soundtrack. Like that band’s music, Thumper is something I want to escape from but can’t bring myself to delete. It’s a level of sonic abrasion that is challenging on a good day, unendurable anytime else. I don’t know why I need to be attacked by a bassline, but Thumper exists so I must not be alone.
33. Devil Daggers (Sorath, 2016)
Sound doesn’t behave in Devil Daggers. I don’t know how it works. My headphones have two speakers and yet the demons are all around me, circling, cackling, spewing something vile. I dance around the circle in limitless darkness just waiting to die and I can’t help it, I’m here again, dancing and shooting and feeling the hair stand up on my neck as something pricks over my shoulder.
I wonder if playing Devil Daggers is what it felt like to play Space Invaders (Tomohiro Nishikado, 1978) when it was still new. The graphics are crude, the arena cramped, yet there is something so intense and unfamiliar about the experience it transcends itself.
If I dare to jump back into Devil Daggers, inevitably I lose an hour at least looping through the same movements as my muscles tighten. There’s an irony to it being directly above Thumper in this list. Both games are bad for me and for that very reason I can’t get enough of them. Devil Daggers gets a nod for having one step less towards complete nightmarish intensity. There’s no time to breathe, and who knows what I’d inhale if I did.
32. Sleeping Dogs (United Front Games, 2012)
Some day we’ll reach a point where games’ culture admits Grand Theft Auto has had a net negative effect on games. Just like South Park spawned dozens of pseudo-edgy frat boy cartoons, Grand Theft Auto defined a certain kind of prestige open-world action game that we’re still being suffered with today. Sleeping Dogs is the sole exception.
The meets-meets-meets is that it’s GTA in Hong Kong with martial arts, but while it’s in conversation with GTA it eclipses the series by allowing itself to be warm and charming and light. Wei Shen is fun; he’s hot; he flirts with people and drives motorcycles. Sleeping Dogs leans into the excess of open-worlds the way Just Cause 2 (Avalanche Studios, 2010) leans into explosives. There are no wink-wink attempts at social commentary, no gratuitous torture mini-games (though I could have done without the Fargo wood chipper scene), no pasty white men being sad about how much they hate themselves. It’s a game I wanted to be pulled into, delighted by its many many checkboxes.
It’s possible that Sleeping Dogs only works relative to the self-serious slop of GTA and its contemporaries. It isn’t quite as eccentric as Saints Row or as lustfully violent as Just Cause. It feels expansive instead of just large, has character without the bitterness. If we only ever got one big-budget open-world action game I’d want it to be Sleeping Dogs. That it somehow missed the franchise train shows even Square Enix knew it was enough, and we should maybe make other types of games.
31. Bioshock 2 (2K Marin/Digital Extremes, 2010)
Video game franchises should only get one sequel. The second game is where the series’ ideas get refined, there’s enough groundwork already laid to do some wild experimenting, and the games are not yet serving as reactionary pieces to fan outrage. Bioshock 2 is the least remembered Bioshock and the only one I would still recommend to people.
The original’s art direction and sense of place remain strong but the surface level exploration of capitalism has aged like underwater milk. Bioshock 2 takes the city of Rapture and uses it to tell a story of ill-fated revolution, the dangers of dogmatism (regardless of ideology), and the weight of family. It’s a denser, more purposely told narrative that values pacing and control, an early gesture at AAA games realizing moments of inaction can be just as powerful as explosions.
Ultimately, Bioshock 2 has served as a launchpad for other developers more so than being recognized in its own right. Fullbright took the quiet moments and helped kickstart the era of “walking simulators,” and Digital Extremes’ success with the ill-fated multiplayer modes lives on in Warframe’s obscene popularity. I can only hope the eventual Bioshock reboot also takes lessons from _2_, despite it living in the shadow of two lesser entries.
Further reading: Bioshock 2 - Review
30. Beeswing (Jack King-Spooner, 2014)
Nobody makes games like Jack King-Spooner. His games are scrappy, ugly, warm, intimate. When I interviewed him he told me he likes art that shows the fingerprints of its creator, and that ethos is everywhere in his work. These are games made with human hands, pencil shavings, and lots of clay.
Beeswing is a pseudo-autobiographical game about Jack’s hometown in Scotland and captures so many disparate aspects of his artistic impulses. It is cozy and nostalgic, but the sort of nostalgia that comes from actually revisiting a place. People have and haven’t changed; what was once home is now just another place; the TV plays the same re-runs as anywhere else. Paper sketches and crude clay models define a world half lived, half-remembered, half-constructed. These pieces shouldn’t fit together and yet you can move between them with ease.
I admire Beeswing for its lack of pretensions. It is artsy and intellectual but in a plain sort of way. It exists for itself, not as a response to some broader trend in games or as a response to gaming’s hyper reactionary fanbase. Beeswing allows you to interact with every toilet in the game, but they are only and only need to be just toilets. There’s something lovely in that, I think. A world that is utterly mundane and significant.
Further reading: Beeswing - Review
29. Fract OSC (Phosfiend Systems, 2014)
Consider that you’ve been placed inside a synthesizer. Plucked, shrunk, and transported within the cavernous expanse of light and sound, how would you know yourself? Would you feel small, suddenly, standing beneath what were once dials and capacitors and tubes of neon as thin as your thumbnail? The proportions are all wrong, an eldritch recontextualization of your relationship to matter.
Consider, though, that you are not afraid. These machines are alien, and yet, awaken upon your touch. The lifeless landscapes begin to look a little less austere as they stretch and contract, emerging from deep slumber for one final performance. You, at the center, conduct them as if teaching fish to swim. Both part and apart of the show, not always sure what changes you’ve caused but nevertheless amazed at the outcome.
Consider what it must be like to know these systems for real. To connect with the dials and levels and understand, intuitively, what each one does. Surely those people exist. They built this place, after all, and allowed you to wander naively through its halls poking at whatever interests you. It is inspiring and humbling, that simple tools could produce such an effect. Like something inside you is calling out to the machine, and neither you nor it understands quite what that voice is saying.
Further reading: Fract OSC - Review
28. Hyper Light Drifter (Heart Machine, 2016)
You dart between lunging beasts as your glass body cuts through them. Easily. Clean. You are injured but until death, you feel nothing. Driven only forward, towards something else to kill. Another fighter to best. You have no friends but recognize skill in others. Each as lost as you. Each trying to make sense of the grace in your movements and the death that follows.
Drifters are nothing but movement. Dashing. Running. Swinging. If we ever pause it’s to fire a shot, transfer our momentum to an even faster object, even more deadly. It’s in this tension between beauty and violence that we curse ourselves. We languish in the understanding that however bright this world, as much as it may sing to us, guide us through its deserts like an eager child, we are destined only to eventually consume ourselves.
We are fragile by design. This kind of energy cannot - should not - be maintained. But something outside ourselves calls us forward, and we follow it, performing as comes naturally, dancing for reasons that could never be clear. We are drifters. We are rooted. The edges of the world cut at our palms and we wonder if it was worth it, to see this, to know we’d made it to the end. How much it looks like the beginning. How much we wish it was, and this could all be undone as our bodies give out at last.
Further reading: The Loneliness of Heroism in Hyper Light Drifter
27. The Jackbox Party Pack(s) (Jackbox Games, 2014- )
Cards Against Humanity is a shitstain on party games as a genre. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the luxury of attending a party again where this cursed black box won’t be casually pulled out. It’s the friend of a friend who won’t stop doing racist accents and “joking” about jerking off in the bathroom. They’re relentless, predictable, and somehow everyone still loves to have them around (which is to say nothing of the real-life awfulness of Max Tempkin).
Thank god for The Jackbox Party Pack(s). The ongoing anthology of your-phone-is-the-controller party games could have easily doubled down on the crass juvenilia of You Don’t Know Jack, but instead, these games are warm and inventive. Each game is a vessel to write jokes with your shitty friends, whether crafting lies in Fibbage or pitting t-shirt designs against each other in Tee K.O.
There are so many of these diversions that the specifics of the games start to matter less and less. Jackbox is a communal space, something to put on when you’re not done talking but need something to do with your hands. Unlike so many “adult” games, it doesn’t punch down, the goal isn’t to be the most depraved person at the table, and it appeals to demographics who don’t belong to a fraternity. With a little luck, the only black box I’ll be seeing now is the shiny rectangle of my phone.
26. Sound Shapes (Quesy Games, 2012)
Sound Shapes may as well be a snapshot of my iPod circa-2012 (when I still had an iPod). A minimalist musical platformer featuring Beck, Jim Guthrie, deadmau5, and others, this simple game about jumping to the beat has had a lingering effect on my design sensibilities to this day. It’s both a texture-less game and one overwhelmingly about the sensory experience, riding that balance between ambiguous geometry and an instantly recognizable circle.
Sounds Shapes is extremely “early-10s indie.” Depending on where you sat within the indie music blogosphere it was either a perfect playlist or a tin of ear trash. I appreciate it for being grounded in a particular time, focusing on a style of dissonant electronic music that has since waned in popularity somewhat. When licensed music is used at all in games it’s often as a cultural chronology - this is stuff from the 70s, here are your 80s ballads and your 90s grunge. More rare is contemporary music, the kind that will instantly date your game but if done right is all the richer for it. There’s a reason when I think of funk-influenced drum & bass I think of Jet Set Radio (Smilebit, 2000). I think about it a lot.
I don’t have an iPod anymore, but just as it is a delight to find an old MP3 player tucked in a drawer, returning to Sound Shapes is like rediscovering a side of me I’d left behind. In this case, as with MP3s, that side is Beck. So much forgotten Beck. Even he hasn’t resurfaced the music from this game, but you should.
25. Florence (Mountains, 2018)
Maybe it was circumstantial. Coming off a breakup I was in a weird place with games, media writ large. Listening to lots of Mitski and wondering if I should be crying more. I don’t know if I’d bought Florence and never played it, or saw it while doom scrolling, but something told me to play it then - 2 AM, in an empty apartment.
The first half of Florence is a recognizable rom-com romp. Girl stumbles into boy, they flirt, cue montage of cute dates and tiny moments. Depending on where you are emotionally it is either sweet or insufferable. I was somewhere in between and that made it all worse.
Then the second half. Boy and girl break up. Boy moves out. A sense of lethargy reaches everywhere. We don’t often get here with romances as it’s the part nobody wants to recognize. That most relationships fail and not for any particularly dramatic reason. People just move apart. Don’t mind me, I’m just sitting in bed at 3 AM crying over a phone game.
Ultimately Florence pulls herself together. She quits her miserable job and becomes an artist. Life is different but she’s happy. And sure, it’s wish-fulfillment in a way. To so easily disentangle yourself from another, and have the means to pursue an art career while keeping your nice apartment. But damnit, I don’t care. At a certain point, I have to reject cynical pragmatism and embrace an idealized future, if for no other reason than moving out of the nihilistic funk always lurking underneath me.
Florence was exactly what I needed, in ways I still can’t fully assemble but still feel as acutely as if I played it yesterday. It’s in the simplicity of its love story and that love story’s unwinding, a distinctly “2010s indie dramedy” vibe without the existential monologues or prolonged shots of people sitting dead-eyed in their kitchens. Florence is a warm hug from a friend a little better off than you, someone who made it out and believes you can get there to. And I did.
24. Nidhogg (Messhof, 2014)
It’s been a great decade for local multiplayer. The best thing that’s happened for the form is it finally being easy to plug pretty much any controller into a PC and have it work out of the box. The second best thing is Nidhogg. It’s as if they followed a secret family recipe: arresting visuals, simple controls, almost-too-fast-to-comprehend encounters, and enough fussiness to allow for a lot of unexpected events to occur (“oh my god I just rolled into my own sword!”).
But it’s more than that, certainly. Nidhogg works because it can be explained in two-seconds to anyone. Its crisp art style is great for spectators. And structuring fights as a tug-of-war across screens creates so much suspense as it’s entirely possible to come back from the edge of a literal cliff. Plus we all love the big demon worm.
I don’t like to stagnate on multiplayer games. I’m constantly throwing out new contenders on game night, testing the waters with challenging and weird new games. Sometimes they hit and other times we spend a moment of silence and regret wasting half the night on a flop. But Nidhogg has yet to leave the rotation. Across groups, years, and many broken controllers it remains one of the most intense fighting games out there, made more so by how even if you don’t know how to play - even if you lose all the time - it feels great to stab and jump and roll these little pixel dudes. Huddled around a screen on my living room carpet, that’s all we need.
Further reading: Nidhogg - Review
23. Spelunky (Mossmouth, 2012)
Playing Spelunky is like controlling an avalanche. Debry and casualties pile up as the run goes longer, longer, straight to hell on the edge of a knife. It is the beauty of systems crashing into each other, emergent play giving way to agony and delight in equal measure. Spelunky has never been a game I expect to “solve” so much as excavate. What happens when I throw a rock at this creature? Can I survive this fall? Will the shopkeeper notice me stealing?
There is a definite uneasiness to Spelunky’s themes, its comical and reverent place in the lineage of colonialist adventure stories. But like most things in Spelunky, its setting feels coincidental. A deadly temple is nothing if not an engine of combusting systems, too many operations happening in close quarters to not interfere with one another. That doesn’t excuse its colonialist skin, but it feels so much more harmless when what is being focused on is not “how much loot can I plunger from these indigenous peoples” but “holy shit here comes a ghost!”
Spelunky turns even the most cautious of players into agents of chaos. There are few things as gleeful as watching a new player’s disastrous attempts to tame what they haven’t even come to understand. It’s an elitist type of fun, but always with the knowledge that we were once the stragglers. Now we live in hell and ask the devil for a space heater.
22. To The Moon (Freebird Games, 2011)
Talking about To The Moon makes me a sentimental mess. I get misty-eyed about the lighthouse dance, gush over its heart-wrenching piano motifs. I don’t seem to have the nerve to criticize it, even if intellectually I know it’s perhaps less impressive than all this - a mutated genome of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
But maybe it’s that familiar, non-pretentious feeling that makes To The Moon work. Built in RPG Maker, mundane pixel graphics, simple enough for anyone to play. To The Moon invites players to emotionally engage, to get swept up in the melodrama and heightened romance. We’re simple people. We like happy endings.
I haven’t played To The Moon since the first time seven years ago. In gaming years that’s a lifetime away, but I still think of it, often alongside that old Electronic Arts poster “can a computer make you cry?” To The Moon does not defy literary tradition or inspire academic analysis. But it did make me cry, a litmus test I both dislike and cling to as I feel increasingly hardened by the world, looking for something to break the crust.
Further reading: Quick Thoughts on To The Moon
21. Journey (thatgamecompany, 2012)
I’ve heard Journey described as video game poetry. The loose narrative certainly calls back to the ambiguous poems of William Blake, and the precision of Japanese haiku. Journey is both full-bodied and formless, probing the audience to bring something of themselves but never feeling lacking in itself.
But Journey is primarily a visual experience, and while it may inspire comparisons to poetry (as much for the conception of poetry as it exists today, as to any particular formal elements) it is more like an impressionist painting, holding the form of something tangible but without the harsh clarity of the baroque.
When I think of Journey I don’t remember any cerebral interpretation of the ending or the nature of its non-verbal multiplayer. I picture a wall of sand, my fragile body deftly carving over dunes, the way light reflects off each grain and casts long shadows over the ruins. Playing Journey gives me the same feeling as standing before a Mark Rothko painting. It feels imposing, encompassing.
Trying to articulate why it’s affecting never quite gets there while showing it to someone is immediately clear. It hits at something deep the way a sequence of chords or combination of colors can make us cry. It’s a game I can show anyone and within five minutes they’ll understand how it could mean so much to me. And it is as simple as how sand curves in the wind.
20. The Marvellous Miss Take (Wonderstruck, 2014)
One of my earliest gaming memories is being terrified by Percy Weasley in the Playstation 2 adaptation of Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets. About 30 minutes into the game Harry has to sneak by Percy in the common room, which takes about three minutes if you aren’t caught. But I did get caught, over and over, each time the music bursting from a soft twinkle into a discordant crash of strings and drums as Harry windmills his arms, stuck in place. It was terrifying and I couldn’t stop playing.
Jump-cut to today and I adore stealth games. I delight in the meticulous waiting, the memorizing of room layouts and AI patterns as I make plans in my head that will almost certainly fall apart. There is a rhythm to stealth that through dozens of games has become familiar and comfortable, the joy being how each game repurposes the same beats. Then there’s The Marvellous Miss Take.
Miss Take exists entirely in the post-plan stage of stealth, where there’s no time to wait and everything is instinct and wild luck. The meticulousness of Splinter Cell (Ubisoft, 2002-2013) and Mark of the Ninja (Klei, 2012) gives way to cartoon antics and sloppy escapes. It reminds me of my earliest experiences with stealth in games - games that were not trying to be about stealth but just living in Metal Gear Solid’s impact - where it was enough just to get away at all, let alone unseen and unheard.
I may never get another Carmen Sandiego game again, but if so I’m glad there’s another red-hat wearing thief to adventure with. Miss Take is deceptively subdued, just another top-down stealth game with more colors than Metal Gear or Volume (Bithell Games, 2015). But the true crime is how few noticed Miss Take at all.
Further reading: The Marvellous Miss Take - Review
19. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017)
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is challenging. It has received both effusive praise and damning criticisms for its portrayal of mental illness, and I am still uncertain how I feel about it being given a sequel. But while its criticisms are fair I think they broadly stem from how any major game which deals with complex themes like mental illness has to be everything to everyone.
Hellblade is not a universal story. Its depiction of mental illness is solely that of its protagonist and should not be taken as a totality of how mental illness can manifest in people. But with those caveats in mind, it is remarkable what Ninja Theory has done. As a studio, they’ve long struggled with making games that want to be movies, and Hellblade is the first that marries the studio’s exceptional motion capture and animation work with mechanics that enhance and complement them.
Hellblade is heavy. Every step Senua takes has a density and weight that is felt from her reactions through to every swing of her sword. As Tevis Thompson wrote, “this is what AAA graphics and sound are for: to give flesh to virtual experiences. To foreground sensation.” It is the sort of narrative/mechanical unity that so few games of this scale achieve. Hellblade articulates a purpose for the spectacle and scale of AAA games outside financial incentives. It is meticulously paced, highly compact, and uses its graphical heft to tell a moving story about a woman’s struggle to overcome trauma.
We need games about mental illness, and part of that is a diversity of depictions. Hellblade cannot convey everything about psychosis and shouldn’t attempt to. It operates at a high level of analogy and is primarily concerned with a singular story grounded in Norse mythology. But it is a story and one utilizing tools that so often are used for little more than explosions and propping up capitalist ambitions of the forever-profitable-game. Hellblade is something more intimate and deliberate and takes care to do it right.
Further reading: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice thinks games can do better than “crazy”
18. FEZ (Polytron, 2012)
It’s strange and a bit sad that Fez will likely always be remembered more for the internet drama around Phil Fish than the game itself. Innuendo Studios has already said all that needs to be on the enigmatic developer, but Fez remains as charming and clever as ever. What propels the game is its layers of understanding. The lightweight puzzles from the opening build to visual riddles, ciphers, and a game spanning meta-puzzle that took internet collaboration to solve.
Fez doesn’t demand that you pull out a pen and paper but it allows for that level of deciphering, gradually layering in new ways to play with the 2D/3D world that is always deeper than it appears. But it’s also just as pleasant to explore aimlessly. To watch the sunset and bake in the synthesized soundtrack. Maybe you’ll stumble on a solution, maybe you’re just vibing.
Fez is one of only a handful of games I’ve used a walkthrough for, and it’s the one that I felt the least cheated by for doing so. The internal continuity is so strong that I always knew a solution existed and seeing that written out on a forum only furthered my admiration of the game. It’s exciting to finally open that door you’ve been walking by through the whole game. Even if you needed some help to do it, the catharsis of Fez’s progression is still acutely felt. I just want this little fez-wearing weirdo to succeed, and by god, they’re going to!
Further reading: FEZ - Review
17. Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019)
Nothing comes close to the awe and terror of leaving your home planet in Outer Wilds. Set within a clockwork universe, Outer Wilds achieves a feeling of sublime with every discovery. Scattered notes from a lost civilization; knowledge of a planet’s gravitational pull. If codex entries are reading a biology textbook, Outer Wilds is getting lost in the woods.
It should in all likelihood be much higher on this list had I not run up against a difficulty wall I couldn’t traverse. In a game that is all about discovery looking up a guide feels anathema to Outer Wilds purpose. So it remains unfinished, yet even then not a week has passed where I haven’t thought about the game and felt the pull to return, to crack the last few riddles and understand why the universe has trapped me in a time loop.
I haven’t felt such an overwhelming sense of scale since Shadow of the Colossus (Team Ico, 2005), but where that game let me transcend my fragile body Outer Wilds pummels it smaller and smaller. I am not the god of this world, I’m barely a speck among the stars. Outer Wilds feels impossible, like it shouldn’t work. Where is the artifice? Where are the actors pulling on the strings?
Sometimes, when I knew I’d missed my shot, I would fly my ship into the darkest piece of space I could find and look back at the sun as it went supernova. Even having felt it a dozen times, as I watch the sun contract in on itself, turning blue and translucent, I feel such acute dread I have to look away. This won’t be the end, sure. But I’m the only one that knows that.
16. The Swapper (Facepalm Games, 2013)
Thud. A body. The rock. The voices within the rock. What is thought? Standing above looking down at myself. Thud. Another. The hiss of a suit collapsing, in on itself, in on the absence of mass. Thud. We are getting higher now. Leapfrog. Reaching toward. Thud. A terminal. Our thoughts, maybe. Or. Thud. Theirs? These people are dead anyway. Falling now. The map stops glowing.
…
We’ve collected ourselves in recreation. Marvel at The Swapper. Device, game, both or either it is up to you. It speaks in metaphysics. “What is the part of us that is truly us? How can we be ourselves, but also be over there, looking back at us, with the same blank expression we make when someone says something clever and we have to work it out.” The Swapper presents you philosophy, then directs you to a puzzle. Something that can be solved in an afternoon. The balance is delicate. We are threading a needle between Theseus and Sam Bell.
The Swapper swaps souls, so they say. But who is being swapped and who is doing the swapping? Couldn’t be us. We’re too self-aware, surely we’d know? But consider how much of yourself is defined by other people, through an affinity for a work, a craft, a social movement. Are we not constantly swapping parts of ourselves? Letting our old selves crumble and embracing this new form as if nothing has changed. It’s slower, but theoretically not all that different.
But I am getting a bit lightheaded, aren’t I. Relax. Enjoy the puzzles around you. Who put them there? Does it matter? You’re here to solve them, aren’t you, and oh they are a joy, so simple and yet I will stand in the same place for an hour scratching my head for a solution. But you are quite a bit cleverer than me. Why don’t you take the lead? Here, swap with me. I’ll help you with the next one. Just promise me we’ll leave. We’ve waited so long.
15. Cloudbuilt (Coilworks, 2014)
The Prince of Persia is dead. Long live the Prince! Ubisoft has utterly abandoned its wisecracking – at times unbearably edgy – wall-runner and with it their interest in parkour, now content with the milquetoast freerunning of Assassin’s Creed. The difference between parkour and freerunning is a nonsensical distinction to get hung up on, EXCEPT when we’re talking about video games. This helpful Diffen article defines that difference as parkour being about obstacles, while freerunning is about expression and personal movement. Parkour gives us strange vertical contraptions and walls suspended in place; freerunning is sprinting across a roof.
Cloudbuilt sees Ubisoft and raises them a parkour robot with a jetpack. Each stage is a floating obstacle course, slabs of wall held up with rockets in a void of clouds. Navigating these environments is dirty and painful, a quick fall into nothingness being the most common move I made. But when I managed to string a series of runs, jumps, and boosts together I was reminded why I miss the good Prince so much. The joy of parkour games is in the deliberateness of an environment, finding shortcuts that weren’t intended, pulling off moves no human could make.
Cloudbuilt’s learning curve is a great deal higher than any of the Prince of Persia games, but its rewards are also that much more. It bottles the wall-running and leaps-of-faith that made those games iconic and constructs something richer and more defined. Maybe I’ll check back in with Assassin’s Creed when it inevitably goes to space and they put a jetpack in, but I have a feeling Cloudbuilt will still be running circles above them.
Further reading: Cloudbuilt - Review
14. Race the Sun (Flippfly, 2013)
No endless runner is as urgent as Race the Sun. The sunset is an absolute. This ship can’t run on moonlight and the desert stretches on eternally past the blocks and buildings nobody knows who put there. Racing the sun, getting good at it, feels like every last second save stretched out to the point of near agony.
It both is and isn’t a stress heavy game. Broadly speaking, there is no penalty to stalling out. Race the Sun is meant to be lost a thousand times over, but what the best arcade games do is make each run feel like the run. So much of Race the Sun is flat and ambiguous that each discovery regardless of size feels monumental. “I can’t believe this area - how did I miss this move?!”
But what I respect most about Race the Sun is how it never attempts or pretends to be more than exactly what it appears. Everything you need to know is right in the name, with no microtransactions, dark patterns, or predatory terms of service lurking at the periphery. It was hard to make that work in 2013 let alone now, but as the sun sets I still feel the itch. This time I’ll beat it. Feel the whipping sand and watch your shadow grow.
Further reading: Race the Sun - Review
13. Rock Band 3 (Harmonix, 2010)
I don’t know when we’ll be able to have live shows again. It seems irresponsible to even be thinking about them right now, but I’m a human being and am feeling the absence of live music acutely. I have never experienced anything like being in a crowd as too-loud music envelops us, the performance becoming the totality of our shared existence, reaching in to a primal need to be caught up in something greater than ourselves.
My love of Rock Band is 100% Too Much. I’ve followed the series from my decrepit PS2, to the Wii I tore a pool down to afford, to a PS3 that I could barely read on our boxy TV, and finally to the 360 where it was too late to still get the family together to play. We didn’t experience the games chronologically, but Rock Band 3 still marked the capstone of our four-piece love affair.
Who told Harmonix they could produce a 102-button guitar facsimile? Who thought three random people would ever be able to harmonize as a vocal trio? Rock Band 3 is overwhelming in how much it tries to do, how many things it wants to be to so many people. That even half of them work is astounding. Getting a group of eight into my living room for Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the most chaotic and memorable gaming experiences I will ever have, and as I remain isolated in my home I return to these memories as something of both a simpler and more complicated time.
12. Queers in Love at the End of the World (Anna Anthropy, 2013)
Editors note: after publishing this I became aware that there are standing abuse allegations against Anna Anthropy. It is increadibly disappointing to see and I am sorry if the inclusion of her game on this list has hurt anyone. QiLatEotW still means a lot to me, but I can't advise people to continue supporting a creator who has clearly hurt people. I am leaving this here as a record of me needing to better vet the creators I feature on the site and not seem like I'm sweeping this under the rug. I am sorry.
Queers in Love at the End of the World is the shortest game on this list at 10 seconds. Yet I have continued to think about it, about how it subverts form and player agency, for literal years now. It is a Twine game handcuffed to an unrelenting timer, forcing the player into 10-second loops as they desperately try to hold on a little longer, spend a few moments more with their partner as the world ends around them.
We often talk about how interactivity is what sets games apart, but rarely do we interrogate what it means to guide an experience. Queers in Love confronts the player with their limitations by removing the god-like omnipotence and importance other games grant them.
There is no magic sequence to extend the timer, this isn’t a game that can be won. But it‘s precisely this inevitability that gives it such weight. 10 seconds might not seem very long, but when it is all you have left it can last an eternity.
11. Gravity Rush (SCE Japan Studio, 2012)
I’ve played dozens of Mario games and I still don’t know what it feels like when he takes a jump, falls on a platform, or butt-slides down a hill. Game feel is an amorphous, over prioritized, and perpetually vague ideal within the games press, but there is something to be said for games that give actions a tangible physicality.
Gravity Rush is all game feel, all comic book punch sounds, all percussive kinetics. It is a nightmare game for other 3D platformers, one that sees the comfortable flatness of their rectangular planes and mono-directional gravities and crumples them into the unrecognizable. Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo, 2007) dug deep into gravity-as-mechanic and Gravity Rush strips off the guardrails. Characters break, environments collide, and there is never once a feeling that the game is under your control.
Watching Kat fall from suspended bridge piece to the side of a house onto flying demon creatures never loses its vigor, the uncertainty of Kat and the player’s movement. I’ll assume the sequel capitalizes on all these qualities as I never owned a Playstation 4 but inexplicably did have a Playstation Vita, but even on a doomed device with too many features to ever make use of Gravity Rush was as vibrant as any game has been.
10. Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly, 2014)
OK, you got me. You’ve found my IP weak point. When Alien: Isolation was released I was in a middling place with the franchise. I adored Alien and Aliens, thought Prometheus was a mess, and hadn’t bothered to watch Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection (oh, to be so lucky). I liked Isolation well enough, but it was more a curiosity than what at the time I’d call a Good Game™.
But between then and now I’ve become completely obsessed. Alien is my all-time favorite film, I have way too many thoughts about the series as a whole (go watch Alien 3 please), and wrote my undergrad for and primarily about the first film. I’m in too deep - and I’m trying to keep - critical thoughts in my head - but the fan in me is stronger.
I won’t pretend my evolving adoration for Isolation isn’t due in large part to my attachment to Alien as a whole, but if that’s all it had there’d be no purpose putting it on this list. Isolation is bold. It pushes back on the player, each step forward a horrific and frustrating crawl through a dying space station.
The 70s sci-fi aesthetics are matched with 90s design choices, a blend of retired ideas and motifs that feels revolutionary just for existing today. Manual save points! Cheap deaths! Way, way, way too many levels! Isolation is a game built in the mold of Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996) with the production values of a modern blockbuster. It shouldn’t exist - who signed off on this? - but here it is, unconcerned with modern tastes, completely committed to its retro ethos.
It is still something of a curiosity to me, but one I’ve come around to love without reservation. Isolation is big and messy and overproduced like almost everything Alien related, and it’s the only Alien game that’s come close to matching the film’s tension and sense of place. Also, can we talk about the computer designs in this game, because OH MY GOD!
Further reading: Alien Isolation - Review
9. Rayman Origins (Ubisoft Montpellier, 2011)
Firstly, a hearty “fuck Ubisoft” all around. As more and more stories of abusive and toxic work conditions trickle out it has become increasingly difficult to recommend anything the company has touched. So let this be the last of it with Rayman Origins, one of the best platformers ever released with a style that even its sequel couldn’t rival.
More people point to Rayman Legends (2013) as the series’ highpoint, but where that game takes the typical Ubisoft approach of a content buffet Origins is deliberately paced. New moves and complexity are introduced with Nintendo-like care, making for a much more accessible game than its successor and also a more rewarding one. There is a great sense of progression in Origins, a feeling of momentum that propels you through stages excited by the next challenge. Learning new moves feels not unlike a Metroid game but without the backtracking Origins is all forward progression and execution.
And holy shit is it amazing what can be done with 2D on a AAA budget. Nothing moves like Origins, with exaggerated expressions and character designs leaping off the screen with a distinctly French flair. There are a lot of sad games on this list, but Origins brings me joy even thinking about it. I want to keep running through cakes and oceans and weird singing creatures forever, and this is probably the last time I’ll ever get to.
8. Transistor (Supergiant Games, 2014)
Transistor ruined me for isometric action games. By turning battles into hybrid real-time/turn-based affairs the game unlocks a level of mechanical symbiosis I’ve never experienced elsewhere. Every move is a modifier, each encounter a chance for new equations. The decision to make every function (ability) equally usable as a main attack, modifier, or passive ability is ludicrous and liberating.
A less considered game would present these mechanics through impenetrable tables requiring alchemical consideration, but Transistor makes two very important choices that allow it to remain accessible even with dozens of possible loadouts. First, it tied not only ever move but every permutation of that move to its worldbuilding and character development. Using a move passively unlocks different codex entries than when set as a support skill, drawing you towards different combinations and reminding you which you had yet to consider while expanding the world itself.
And secondly, it gleefully strips you of your favorite moves with each death, forcing a fallback to ones less familiar which you then have to sit with through multiple battles. It seems such a simple thing but I’ve yet to see either an action game or CRPG do anything similar. Transistor might be the only game I’ve ever felt compelled to complete every bonus objective and challenge in because I just wanted to see how new combos cascaded with each other.
Any of Supergiant’s games could have made this list on the merits of their presentation alone (don’t ask me how many times I’ve listened to Transistor’s soundtrack), but their design is less often recognized. Which is understandable, it feels so smooth and purposeful it is easy to ignore. Of course games should feel like this, everything just makes sense. It’s only in returning to those other games that Supergiant’s precision and grace become undeniable.
Further reading: Transistor - Review
7. Hatoful Boyfriend (Mediatonic, 2014)
I used to say Hatoful Boyfriend was smarter than it had a right to be. What I actually meant was that it presents as something far goofier and meme-like than it is. There is undeniably something silly about dating birds - birds with hot human anime boy avatars - at a boarding school, while you, the player, are definitively NOT a bird. And it is hilarious, at times inexplicable. But underneath the feathers and archetypes is some peak anime bullshit digging into questions of class, race, and the horror of war.
I don’t even know how to explain Hatoful Boyfriend without making it sound even sillier than it looks. It is somehow two games at once, both literally and thematically, and I will readily admit to laughing and crying over these avian bad boys in equal measure. Hatoful Boyfriend works because it quietly disarms you with its puns and internet allusions before catapulting into a supremely dark conclusion.
A lot of joke visual novels would follow Hatoful Boyfriend, taking cues from its self-effacing tone (Dream Daddy (Game Grumps, 2017)) or meta-structure (Doki-Doki Literature Club (Team Salvato, 2017)), but they’re all playing bits. Hatoful Boyfriend makes it look easy, almost accidental, but its humble pretensions are the method and charm. I’ll be forever seeking pudding with Oko San. Someday we’ll get there.
Further reading: Hatoful Boyfriend - Review
6. Portal 2 (Valve, 2011)
Wow, I miss when Valve made games (that didn’t cost $1000)! Portal 2 wasn’t the last game Valve made but it marked a shift in the company’s priorities from first-person innovators to steam-powered landlords. But what an outro Portal 2 makes. The puzzles are exquisite, the writing sharp, the sense of place so particular (despite being set in so many white rooms).
What strikes me every time I go back to Portal 2 is how singular it still feels, both within games broadly but especially compared to other big games from 2011. While Bethesda futzed around with its soulless fantasy treadmill, Portal 2 was teaching robots to tease each other; as Eidos appropriated civil rights iconography for stuffy cyborgs, Portal 2 put a sardonic AI in a potato. There is a playfulness here that has been broadly stamped out of AAA games which is even more apparent in retrospect, the notion that games do not need to be super serious business and could in fact resemble a toy-box or playground.
I don’t want a Portal 3. I’m sure I’d probably love it, but the moment is different and my capacity for loving AAA games far diminished. I don’t think Valve can make a game about inhumane experiments and being locked in a black-site facility while also being an opaque entity itself with reports or extremely toxic work conditions. Portal 2 is a masterpiece that released exactly when it needed to. That it holds up so many years later is a testament to its craft, but please, let’s leave it at that. I can’t live through another decade of cake memes.
Further reading: Portal 2 - Review
5. Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed (Sumo Digital 2012)
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed is one of the worst titles of any game. It’s unwieldy, conservative, and flavorless. I want to put this title through a shredder and reassemble it as a ransom note for whoever’s in charge of Sega’s branding department. Then I want to play more of the game
Transformed is the best Sonic game (it isn’t a Sonic game), the best Mario Kart (it isn’t a Mario Kart…clearly), and the best racer of the last decade. Each track is dripping with consideration, never too complex as to confuse but readily offering up new ideas at just the point a stage might get stale. A House of the Dead stage starts as a race through a mansion, then transitions to a boat ride through toxic sewers, then a skirmish through the wine cellars before routing back up to a dance party in the foyer.
It is almost irrelevant that at any point your vehicle might change from car to boat to plane and back again. Transformed does what Diddy Kong Racing (Rare, 1997) attempted sooner than it was possible, and pulls it off with a grace rivaled only by Excitebots: Trick Racing (Monster Games, 2009). Sonic driving a car remains gleefully absurd, but if that’s what it takes to perfect the kart racer strap him in baby!
4. Dropsy (Tendershoot/A Jolly Corpse, 2015)
There are not a lot of radically empathetic video game heroes. Like, Mario and Sonic are all hyper optimistic, but they’re the good guys and don’t really care if the bad guys get squashed. It’s hard to write complex characters, who legitimately want to see the good in everyone, and not verge on the saccharine or preachy. I want games about unapologetically loving people, broadly, but not at the expense of recognizing some people do truly awful shit.
So it’s weird Dropsy - a very Christian game that could have fallen apart so easily, especially in its characterization of its protagonist - succeeds. Resoundingly. Dropsy made me cry for how caring Dropsy is, to everyone, even those who don’t deserve it. As Ian Dansky said in his video on the game, “it’s not a game about Christianity, it’s one made by a Christian,” a distinction that really matters here.
I grew up Catholic, my family is still extremely involved with the church. I’ve spent so much of my life in hyper-proximity to religiously fueled hate and bigotry that I cannot think of Christianity with any positive terms. But I can still see things that are compelling about Christian ideology sans the church as a state: universal love, forgiveness, empathy, caring for those less fortunate than you.
Dropsy is what I thought being a Christian was as a child. It’s a game about helping others because it’s the right thing to do and meeting people where they are rather than forcing ideology upon them (Dropsy is maybe the best game I’ve ever played at modeling consent between characters). It made me hopeful about the innate goodness of people, emphasizing that one of the most powerful acts anyone can do is offer you a hug.
Further reading: The Unconditional Love of Dropsy
3. Anodyne 2: Return to Dust (Analgesic Productions, 2019)
Anodyne 2: Return to Dust feels of an era in games that never existed - some point amid the Playstation 1 and Dreamcast where technology and tastes were not yet solidified and the possibilities of 3D seemed endless. Something to this effect did happen, but it was clumsier, more restrained by corporate wishes than that conjured by Anodyne 2 simply being.
Anodyne 2 embraces form as fundamental to games. Nothing feels done purely for tradition, for “market value,” or from a lack of vision. It inspires the feeling that how we have been making and talking about games is wrong. Or maybe not wrong, but misguided. Look, it says, at the beauty of these clipping models; consider, it proclaims, the nature of a game as something built, not merely drawn from the air fully constructed.
And this is done, somehow, not through a rejection of the tropes born out of decades of games but a delight in them. The points of inspiration are stitched into every jump, each character, the musical motifs, but never as simple reference. Anodyne 2 loves games with a maturity that is tender, rather than suffocating; critical, but not reactionary.
I worry that I am using a lot of words to not actually say anything, but that is the effect Anodyne 2 produces. It leaves me questioning how I talk about games, about my relationship to a history so carefully cleaned and curated, and moving beyond meats-meats-meats to better recognize that games both are and are not the sum of a dozen other experiences. You don’t have to play games regularly to enjoy Anodyne 2, but I would be surprised if it didn’t inspire you to want to. What joy it is, it whispers, to play in another world.
Further reading: Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is human-made magic
2. Wandersong (Greg Lobanov, 2018)
It is tempting to refer to my Wandersong project from earlier this year and let that stand for itself as to why I’ve placed it so high on this list. It is certainly the most ambitious analysis project I’ve ever done outside of academia, pulling in elements of literary criticism, astrology, and self-reflection to attempt to understand this game and why it struct so deeply. What else could I say in a blurb that wasn’t already conveyed by those 8k words? I’m self-aggrandizing, but after a point, it is difficult to sustain the sort of critique I attempt here without doubling back on worn topics or needlessly elongating a simple point.
So I won’t do that. Which is to say, I would like to briefly speak plainly about Wandersong, inasmuch as I can control myself. In constructing this list I looked back over the last ten years and tried to pick out the games that meant something to me beyond just being a compelling way to waste a weekend. I have been thrilled to see how much games criticism has grown over those years - how much I’ve grown - but it still feels like we’re only being half honest. We couch ourselves behind buzz words and breakdowns and occasionally we can see the honesty underneath, but so often we get stuck. Stuck on hype. Stuck on how we’ve conditioned ourselves we’re supposed to feel. Stuck on what other people might say if our experience is different. To exist in this limbo is exhausting. I have written many things from that point which I now look back on with embarrassment.
The point of this site, of writing writ large, is an attempt at understanding another person. Not an abstract pseudo-person built by marketing, social pressure, and the exclusion of so many people. Just you, or me, or any other individual. Games are, broadly speaking, pretty insignificant, and yet we form such deep connections with them that surely that must be worth something. But we focus on the graphics or how the gun feels and I never get to actually know what that was like.
I played Wandersong earlier this year so certainly recency bias is playing some part in my singling it out for this. But I don’t think that invalidates that feeling. If something is meaningful, that experience of it being meaningful won’t be erased even if years later it doesn’t mean the same thing. We all grow, things get left behind. Wandersong isn’t groping at my feet, begging me to care about how pretty it looks or the changes in the last update. It is both simple, and yet not simple at all.
I keep going back to that scene in the nightclub. Miriam is dancing. She of all people. It’s surprising, but I’m not laughing and neither is she. We’re pretending we are other people right now. The sort who would dance in a nightclub and not worry that the world’s ending, or that we might look silly, or that there are so many people around all I want to do is fling myself out the nearest window. We are pretending, but only partially, constrained still by these bodies and our understanding that when we leave here we won’t be changed.
I go back to this scene so many times. It means so much to me. These are the moments that remind me why I play games. Why this silly, frustrating, horrible industry matters and what can be done when we are not chasing relevance and watching the numbers go up. I only played Wandersong on a whim. I think I saw it on YouTube and it was free and I had just finished the next game on this list and needed something lighter. The way I think about it, I could be describing falling in love with a partner or meeting a best friend. It’s just a game, still. But, if we allow ourselves to let go of our pretensions, surely it could be something more.
Further reading: A Thousand Tiny Touches - Wandersong and the Major Arcana
1. Pathologic 2 (Ice Pick Lodge, 2019)
It’s a pretty soft take that the 10s were rough. I don’t have the energy to reexperience the innumerable awful things that sprung up over the decade that we’re still slugging through now, from the global rise in fascism to increasing economic disparity to open congregations of nazis being condoned by the president. It’s all a bit too much and 2020 is somehow managing to pack 10 years of awfulness into the span of less than one.
I can’t do escapism anymore. Maybe that’s part of growing up, or how fucked the world currently is, or just the overwhelming heaviness that is now just what it feels like to be alive. I don’t want games that coddle me, I need to be pushed. I need art that doesn’t feel as if it’s being made in an alternate dimension where Mario didn’t take off his shirt and millions of dollars aren’t being spent on letting us kill dogs convincingly.
But I am also so tired of VIDEO GAME SADNESS. This is the only time I’m gonna mentioned The Last of Us in this list, as a footnote for how big games still think emotional maturity is having us kill hundreds of people and then reminding us that, hey, murder is bad, actually. Get out of here. Stop patronizing your design decisions and player base. If you’re going to make me miserable, do it with conviction.
///
In the Steppe wilderness, a town consumes itself. The earth has unleashed a plague, a manifestation of all the sins of industrialization, distrust, and violence that its inhabitants have committed within and towards the environment. The military wants to raze the town to the ground. The academic studies from a distance, as if watching rats die in a cage. The doctor is beset upon by forces they can’t understand, superstitions that lead to half-truths, awful truths, things they would as soon embrace as run from. The children play in the yard.
Pathologic 2 is what every Sad Dad Sim thinks they are. It is a game that engages not only with the gravity of its narrative but also the player’s inability to escape it. Even after difficulty sliders were patched in, Pathologic 2 is unforgiving. It is grimy and emotionally draining. A decade prior Bioshock (Irrational Games, 2007) pretended killing little girls was a complex choice. Pathologic 2 asks you if you are willing to sacrifice everyone for the sake of your own life. If you will give yourself the cure and watch a child deteriorate as disease takes hold.
Pathologic 2 is not easy in any sense of the word. It is the bleakest game I’ve ever played and gives no comfort in its conclusion. It exists in a post-happy ending timeline, where you can’t save everyone and you might not save anyone. It is an economy simulator where the horrors of capitalism push you to steal from the dead and dying. It’s a survival game where the environment cannot be tamed and is killing us for believing it exists for our consumption. It is a shooter where gunfights are legitimately terrifying and deadly. It is a game so confident in its darkness as to border on repulsion. But it is the game I needed.
Pathologic 2 is the game of the decade because it solidifies what so many games merely gesture at, at once starkly hopeless yet in conversation with its demons. These are not the sins of any one individual but the ongoing trauma of history and systems left to ferment until the stench is suffocating. It is impossible to save this town as it is, but rather than indulge in nihilistic self-pity Pathologic 2 demands you take action; to do something, anything, despite the world being so much larger and scarier than any one person could hope to overcome.
It is an astonishingly cohesive behemoth, somehow only a third finished and yet more fully formed than many games with comically vast resources. It is also the story of the fragility of indie development and the difficulty of marketing a game about pain and alienation in an industry that measures itself in technological hurdles and the realism of its guns.
It is the sort of game that pushes me into meaningless hyperbole, back into a form of thinking where back-of-the-box quotes are what good criticism looks like and will sell copies. Pathologic 2 laughs at my naivety. It balks at the idea of a game for everyone, of art complex enough to impress but shallow enough to appeal to mass audiences. It is the anti-video game, and so of course, it is also the best.
Further reading: Pathologic 2 challenges what it means to be a player
Kritiqal is made possible through the support of my wonderful Patreon supporters. If you enjoyed this post it would mean a ton if you shared it with a friend and considered becoming a supporter yourself.