These are the 10 best and 5 worst games I played last year, with a few additional mentions. First, the worst…

Dishonorable mentions: Destiny 2, Gravity Rush 2, Monument Valley 2

5. Super Mario Odyssey

This is no odyssey. It’s a shameless work of fan service tourism. Shallow, safe, repetitive, boring. Shackled by just-for-you world design, exactly fit to Mario’s movesets.

Incongruous New Donk City was the way forward. But they balked and went backward.

4. Horizon: Zero Dawn

Decent backstory, but terrible storytelling. Diverse cast, but dull characters. Alluring landscapes, but overarticulated, hyperreal, and thus, unbelievable. Always beautiful so never particularly beautiful, never really yours. A failed, generic world.

3. Sonic Mania

I hate playing it. And that would be enough. Same as it ever was. But it’s the nostalgic celebration that makes this particularly unbearable.

This is a salvage project, to rescue 2D Sonic games from a natural oblivion. But these games are over. Let them be over.

2. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

It’s not the game of this moment. It cannot bear that weight. It’s just a terrible shooter with a half-baked story that flatters as much as it challenges America.

Punch Nazis, sure. But agreeing with a game doesn’t make it good.

1. Little Red Lie

This is a game that hates people. This is its truth. Its writing drones on, insular, self-satisfied. Despair masquerading as straight talk. Enamored with its monologuing anti-hero.

This is a narrow, masculine vision of life. An elaborate lie by omission.

Now, the best.

Honorable Mentions: Night in the Woods, Mario + Rabbids, Arkanoid vs. Space Invaders, Echo

10. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

This game feels ancient. Like it’s been with us forever. Trash mountains & failure, the heart of videogames.

It seems like an old conundrum: to jump without legs. A virtual koan. But then, so much of our videogame body remains unexplored.

9. Pyre

In these metaphysical landscapes, everyone plays the same game for different reasons, and Pyre honors those differences. It’s a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress Olympics, but less didactic, more generous.

I’m not sure I believe in redemption right now. But I’m glad Pyre does.

8. Hidden Folks

I love the attention it requires, always on the edge of frustration. The intensity of reading a surface. The constant shifting of focus and field. The pleasures of micronarratives, intimations of world.

Plus the warmest, most human sound design of the year.

7. Hellblade

This is what AAA graphics and sound are for: to give flesh to virtual experiences. To foreground sensation.

We need to feel it. Slow steps and heavy swings. Whispers that convince. The textures of psychosis. A self rebelling against colonization by foreign gods.

6. Everything

What seems lost in all the profound talk is just how funny Everything is. An existential comedy of incongruity, it reminds me of the deep humor of Zhuangzi and all the radical transformations of the 10,000 things. If only Mario could have been so bold this year.

5. Universal Paperclips

A game in love with numbers, both their beauty and horror. We play to feel out their inevitability, to surrender ourselves, to do what we must.

Universal Paperclips is that rare thing: the videogame as complete thought.

4. Shadow Tactics

Stealth w/ a humanistic core. It sees your 5 characters as agents in history, seeking that slip of space within which to move, to act. Then it does something remarkable: confronts the limits of tactics when one character’s honor cannot survive in the shadows.

3. Breath of the Wild

Zelda found its courage. And despite faults, it gets the main thing right: that sense of being in a world. Contingent, tangible, beautiful. An adventure.

Now if they’ll just lean into the rain, build a real underworld, & finally do right by Zelda herself.

2. Nier: Automata

It’s not the sad robots or existential angst that stayed w/ me. It’s the bold, almost desperate perspective shifts. Of character, genre, camera, ends. As if just one more switch might allow us to see the whole.

And then: the most beautiful finale of the year.

1. Butterfly Soup

While the world burns, people are still falling in love. Still flailing about. Still becoming. This is the most honest, hilarious, perfectly-realized game about what we’re fighting for. This too is resistance.

 

(originally posted to Twitter on January 25, 2018; other years can be found here)