The Worst Games of 2018

Interlude: The Failure of Game Critics

The Best Games of 2018

Interlude: The Other Failure of Game Critics

The Game of the Generation

The Best Games of 2018

8. Tetris Effect

You make all these small choices, and the consequences stack up.  Each is contingent on what came before.  Each carries that contingency forward to the next piece.  There on screen you see a well of contingency, the past made visible.  The pleasure of wiping it away, line by line, is the pleasure of wiping away your past, the perfect setups and the little mistakes both.  This is perhaps the ultimate fantasy of Tetris: that you can wipe away the contingency of the past, deepen your well, give yourself more time.

Tetris itself isn’t timeless.  It won’t be played forever.  It’s not the perfect game.  What a boring idea about videogames, and art.  Tetris Effect’s actual achievement is its felt relevance in 2018.  That it met our grim current context with old school optimism and a hard puzzle heart.  Warmth and pressure.  What we need and what we know.  Would it have resonated like this five years ago?  Will it still five years from now?

Which is not to say Tetris Effect doesn’t stumble in the present.  It’s a little too neat.  It could have been weirder, wilder, cheesier.  Placing Native American riders and Balinese rituals alongside dolphins, hot air balloons, and crystalline pop epiphanies, as if everything can be equally thematized, is a real mistake.  And the VR mode throws off the balance of concentration and sensory overload necessary for long plunges into the effect.

It’s in fact the effect of its title that excites me most going forward.  More subject, less object.  Or at least a more openly subjectified object.  I want to see more effects explored, not just the ecstatic and hypnotic and sublime.  I want even more unexpected effect modes that don’t add ‘value’ but play out variations on a theme.  Videogames as musical fugues that induce psychological fugue states.  I’m not talking reskins or remakes or reboots but delirious remixes and deliberate transformations.  Not for all time, but for now.  Right here.  This moment.

7. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

I’m not looking for pristine, uncompromised games.  And none of my favorites in 2018 was compromised quite like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.  I’d only played the second and fourth in the series before starting, and Far Cry 2 was the sole Ubisoft game I’d even liked.  So admittedly, I went in with my knives out.  And the dull frame story did not disappoint.  Pythagoras, the animus, some precursor nonsense, lord help me.  It’s like they don’t even understand why people like these historical fantasies.  As if worlds from the past, the details of distant lives, are not enough.  Pile on some typical Ubi excess and you’d think I’d be out.  There’s only so much assassination I can take.

But the excess had a curious effect.  Because Odyssey also committed to a certain amount of role-playing this time, my Kassandra was able to choose.  Not just which option in a quest but whether to do it at all.  It gave voice to my zealous inner Bartleby.  Thin the local bear population?  I’d prefer not to.  Turn the tide on that there battlefield?  I’d prefer not to.  Get revenge for a petty neighbor?  Naw.  I don’t fuck with that.

Odyssey’s muchness contributed to a stronger world feeling without stoking some inner completionist.  I went where I wanted, followed my interests, of which there were plenty, and the whole thing unfurled.  The spiraling map, the many interlocking systems, the slow unveiling of the cult, it’s actually remarkable how naturally it all unwinds before the player.  Which makes the DLC’s forced hetero blood legacy choice I’ve heard about so disheartening.  I generally don’t mess with DLC, but even from a distance it sours my Kassandra’s future a bit.

Because otherwise, what I’d found by the end of my odyssey was this: a gods-haunted people in landscapes of astonishing color and light centered on the best avatar in an open world game.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey gives us a layered history, a past with many pasts.  The Greeks you meet are grappling with all of them — recent events, fading stories, and ancient myths alike — and asking existential questions with refreshing urgency.  How do you live in a world of fickle gods?  How do you live without them?  There is an immediacy to these questions that humanizes almost everyone you meet.  And not just famous figures like Socrates.  Though Odyssey does recognize, correctly, what a sweetheart he’s always been.

Much of this humanity comes from the writing, full of pathos and good humor, warm and philosophic throughout, but always with a light touch.  My Kassandra was worldweary and worldwise, nobody’s fool, but also a misthios who just plain cared.  You could hear it in her voice.  She saw people clearly, their dreams and their bullshit, and yet still wanted to throw in with them.  She was game for the struggle, and she had the arms to prove it.

There’s just so much life in Odyssey.  Such a feeling of world happening all around you.  The markets and shrines, your ship with its shanties, every single dusk and dawn.  They don’t announce themselves or demand your attention.  When you come upon a patch of morning mist that just catches the light, the game doesn’t overdo it.  It’s not there for your mission or cutscene but for world feeling alone, something that just happens.  And sure it’s all background, and true you’ll run right through it, but that’s by design.  This isn’t your pokey howdy ma’am realism asking questions the game cannot answer.  Instead, it simply aims for beauty and adventure and a proud ancient world, with all the zip and thereness it can muster.  Even when it stretches, with stunning transitions from land to ship to swelling sea, its felt sense of continuity and scale makes the speed a source of wonder.  Will the illusion hold?  By the gods, it will.

Odyssey asks solid game questions, for now.  It attempts a world, not a stage show.  This world may clearly be a videogame simulation, but it’s not trying to fool you.  There’s far too much murder, but the game doesn’t ask me to mourn the assassin’s lifestyle or con me into believing it’s something it’s not.  And it is this honesty, along with its writing and its misthios and its goddamned humanity, that makes it 2018’s true alternative to that malákas cowboy game.

6. Dandara

Dandara is the first of two games that reinvigorated 2D platformers for me in 2018.  Between the boring abstraction of Gris and the masocore traditionalism of Celeste, I had trouble finding anything that actually did something new with a genre I’ve long loved.  Sure there were plenty of metroidvanias in between, but I continue to find them the most tiresome articulation of a gamespace.  That structure, that unfolding, it is known.  What else can the 2D platformer do?

For one, it can take away gravity and running and jumping altogether.  It can work in straight lines rather than arcs.  It can put the platform back in platformer.  Because without gravity, a world becomes platformed anew.  What is a platform?  A place from which to launch.  A place on which to land.

Despite its innovative approach to movement, Dandara is a modest game.  It’s barely a metroidvania, with limited backtracking and only a handful of locks and keys.  And what retraversal it does require remains a pleasure to the very end.  It is perfectly paced and does not overstay its welcome, so nothing gets old.  You are given a unique space to explore with its own distinct logic, compelling neo-historical visuals and chill sound design, matter-of-fact challenge that neither taunts nor condescends, and individually named rooms that provide some of the best flavor text of the year.  Dandara knows what it’s about and brings it off with confidence and grace.

5. Iconoclasts

Iconoclasts goes the other way, not exploring platforms in space but using them to tell a story of subjectivities at war.  Ideology as platform, personality as platform.  Essentially, character as platform.  This makes for a knotted, thorny game full of difficult people.  In other words, a hardcore platformer.  If platforms are people.

I used to have a very broad idea of the platformer.  Especially as a storytelling device.  There was something so natural about the story of a pit.  All the ways one might fall in or climb out.  The natural range of emotions that comes with moving across a landscape.  How different people might face the same world.  But somewhere along the way, as style and difficulty began to dominate, even thematized difficulty, I stopped thinking of their potential this way.

So I came out of Iconoclasts with something like gratitude.  I thought I was getting another metroidvania with a cool look.  But turns out it’s not actually a metroidvania.  Its spatial logic serves its story more than your empowerment.  And its pixel art is not there to impress you.  Instead, the blocky unnaturalness raises unexpected metaphysical questions.  It may be one of the only games that tries to reckon with pixel art, what and how it means, and what it signifies for worldbuilding.

Iconoclasts’ characters don’t know what to make of their strange, hard-edged world.  And they’re not nice about it.  They constantly pierce each other’s sacred solipsism, that worldview and faith we need in order to live.  Everyone ends up being an iconoclast to each other.  None more so than my favorite character, Mina.  Her directness, her intensity and realness, her raw family trauma, even her smelliness, they both endeared her to me and left me shook.  Because I’m full of fire too.  And I don’t know what to make of the world either.

The game is not exactly encouraging about any of this.  People die, their rightness or wrongness left hanging, and those left behind must reckon with the remains.  There aren’t lessons to learn or much in the way of a player’s personal edification.  Iconoclasts instead offers a rare realism about difference, about unresolved subjectivities.  Or rather, subjectivity as something ultimately unresolvable.  Your Robin is a mechanic who can fix almost anything.  But not this.

And yet Iconoclasts ends with a kind of hope.  As the known world is threatened and transformed, Robin’s hardass brother Elro finally relents as well.  “Alright, Robin…I won’t try to tell you what to do anymore.”  Our silent heroine hears him, pauses a moment, and then flops down in bed.  Hard cut.  But you feel this space open up, this possibility between people, if not to celebrate their iconoclasm, to at least let it lie.  The game knows that small shifts between people matter as much as the defeat of a calamitous space worm.  The credits then reveal an almost comically long list of named characters because that’s what the game cares about in the end.  No system of belief can contain all these people.  No explanation is total.

4. Walking Simulator A Month Club Vol. 1

Connor Sherlock is a master moodbuilder, and his collection of worlds leverages the most basic elements — color, space, scale, sound — to completely possess you.  Brief text files frame your visits as ‘far future tourism’, but there’s this constant sense that you’re not supposed to be there.  They’re not for you.  You’re trespassing on the universe.  You encounter abandoned megastructures, but they’re monuments without referents, full of dead intentions, unreadable but still somehow feelable.  Yet not in a way that draws you closer.  They remain alien and inscrutable but also specific, gesturing not at something generic or universal but exact and absolute and final.  The only gods left here are Wonder and her sister Horror.  The rest is silence.

So you walk.  What else is there to do?  The universe is vast and the best way to really feel that is to walk it.  Walking Simulator A Month Club Vol. 1 takes that old open world cliche — see that in the distance, you can go there! — and reaffirms its natural power.  To see there from here.  And then here from there.  These worlds answer important questions like: what’s it like on the far side of a megalith?  What’s the end of the day like for an alien archive?  How big, how far away is that strange silhouette really?  Everything works together — the light, palette, texture, depth of field, movement speed, the stunning score — to answer these elemental questions.  Are you lost?  Overwhelmed?  The music will tell you what to do.

Here’s an interstellar nightclub for sentient vapors.  Here’s a secret platformer where a superstructure insertion went wrong.  Here’s an honest to god dungeon, with choking halls and vast chambers and the buried aqueduct of Leviathan.  Here’s an overmined crystal planet just before its death.  Delve deep enough and you’ll fall through the bottom, into the wild pink.  You’ll visit these worlds pre or post or mid apocalypse.  Mind your step among the gassy foothills.  Nevermind the shadows of comet debris.  Is that a world engine burning below?

This collection of worlds, taken together, is the greatest walking simulator I’ve ever played.  It takes a primary complaint against the genre — a lack of interaction — and walks it right off the edge of its worlds.  It makes walking feel not like a limitation but an end in itself.  Because it understands the walking simulator as ultimately a game of distance and desire.  There’s no end to either, no end to the universe.  The only question is: how far will you go?

3. Astro Bot Rescue Mission

Super Mario Odyssey was the most disappointing game of 2017.  It was Mario as a completely modern videogame.  Mario as content.  With a bad moon economy, a tourism model of exploration, and the most unapologetic fanservice.  Not an odyssey but a mockery.  Mario Kibbles ‘n Bits.  Mario Groupon.  Mario Are You Being Served?

So it was the most welcome surprise to find that Astro Bot was not only the best Mario game of 2018, but the best Mario since 3D Land.  In many ways, its heir.  If the screen can’t get any more 3D, then we’ll just have to go further inside it ourselves.  And what we find here is a fully arrived VR experience, perfectly suited to its own limits.  There are no compromises or half measures.  No nausea from movement or teleportation to hide its lack.  It doesn’t apologize for or try to hide its limits but instead delights in them.  Which is often the best response to our limits anyway: laughter.  Let’s make a game of them.

This is the pleasure of constraint.  I’m on a conveyor belt, every level a tunnel, and my little guy is crossing a bridge above me.  Or he’s just around a corner up ahead.  Or he’s running in circles somewhere beneath me.  Point being, I can’t see him well.  My view is decidedly sub-optimal.  In a typically screened videogame, you would complain about the bad camera and strain against the controls to get a better view.  But here, the strain is actually in your neck.  You are the bad camera.  Every player her own Lakitu.

There is such delight in this.  Your body is centered, but you still have an avatar.  And it is through this connection, this interplay that the haptic limits to current VR tech are downplayed and instead you feel your centered body anew.  It’s not the same as the first person perspective of so many shooters.  There you are not a body but a naked eyeball, untethered, flattened via the screen, more point-of-view than center.  And this perspective is empowering.  Without a body, without defined borders, what you see is the world.

But in VR, to bring your actual body in, its center, its limits, doesn’t empower you.  It humbles you, just like in everyday life.  You are a thing in the world, one of many, and what you see is a limited view, also one of many.  And strangely, by combining the first and third persons and centering my actual body, an unexpected comedy emerges.  My body, which I usually like to forget in games, becomes something dear, almost cute.  Something to feel out again, gently, curiously, with laughter, even pleasure.

There are so many things to feel anew, which screenshots cannot capture.  Heights that take your breath, waves that stifle it, caves that press in and enclose.  Near and far, light and dark, the very fundaments of perception, you can feel them.  Darkness is not a rectangle of black but the death of sight.  Behind is somewhere you can never truly go.  Everywhere textures tease.  You can’t help but constantly reach out for things that are not there.  There is no periphery to remind or frame or distract.  You can’t check your phone.  You can’t put on a podcast and chill.  You have a headcrab on your face.  It’s all in or get the fuck out.

I play Astro Bot and it’s as if I’ve never played videogames before.  As if it all still lies ahead of me.  That future feeling.  I’ve known that feeling before.  Super Mario Bros. in a Pizza Hut.  Final Fantasy VII at Shane’s house.  Grand Theft Auto III off the Old Santa Fe Trail.  Demon’s Souls in Corte de Monterey.  And now, here in that future, I’m still feeling…something.  Not disappointed exactly.  Their sequels had their moments.  But I feel the struggle of all aging groundbreakers.  For relevance.  Vitality.  New Ground.  And I pause.

The language of VR hasn’t settled out yet, the genres haven’t calcified.  And there are many obvious challenges to meet — bodies in motion, haptics, a basic solipsism.  But I’m going to relish this future feeling a bit longer.  It’s just a hope to feel new things, to keep feeling things anew.  Soon enough videogames will do what videogames do.  Domesticate.  Capitalize.  Sequelify.  Turn a future feeling into a past we’re desperate to recover.  But it’s not that future yet.

2. Subnautica

The terror of open water.  The panic of caves.  Always this tethering, to surface, to Seamoth, any pocket of air.  I drink fields of color.  I dive into the wreck.  And I float here in space, this alien lightness, like I once did in pools, to hide my thick body.  Dawn breaks just above, on the underside of waves, a sea-wrinkled sky.

For forty hours I hold my breath.  I’m overwhelmed, transfixed, in perpetual disbelief.  Water is so intimate, the way it envelops you, holds you.  And tries to get in.  It’s hypnotic but treacherous.  And it is this exact combination of trance and threat that makes Subnautica not only exactly a videogame but the most beautiful game of the year.

How long can you last in this suffocating beauty?  You’re always in danger of overextending yourself, and complete absorption will kill you.  So you plan, you calculate, you hone your OCD and cultivate your humility.  Because you will never dominate this ocean world.  You’ll barely get a foothold.  Forty hours in, it never stopped being mysterious or terrifying to me.  I never tired of gazing out the viewing window I built just below the surface.  I never stopped feeling vulnerable to it all.

What’s shocking is that a game this beautiful and intimidating also makes so much sense.  And not just videogame sense.  It has a natural logic and coherence throughout that is incredibly rare.  From initial crash to progression via wreckage and fabrication to the revealed geography of its alien world, the game does not cheat.  It makes a commitment to materiality and storage and all the struggles of liquid space.  And it binds this vigilance to the most basic player motivation: the desire to explore.  You make new tools not because the game forces you to but because each tool will help you see more.  And you always want to see more.  This focus is so compelling, and so completely realized, that even a few serious technical issues cannot detract from the final experience.

None of these qualities capture the quiet of this game, though.  The stillness it draws out of me.  Some nights I couldn’t play it because I didn’t have the calm.  Driving my Cyclops submarine through Lost River and into the lowest depths required my complete preparation and attention.  Extracting myself and all my materials afterwards somehow required even more.  It was an ordeal, like any real journey, and it weighed on me.  Floating there in the deep, so far from the surface, I would often think of the end of Jane Campion’s The Piano, one of my favorite movies.  I would think of the ocean’s weird lullaby, of the buried selves floating below, of how part of me wanted to stay “in the cold grave — under the deep, deep sea.”  Not death overcome, as in most videogames, but death contemplated and dwelled in.  My usual voices hushed.  This silence in me.

I’m back now, but like with any powerful experience, part of me is still anchored there.  Still floating in the silence below.  My speaking voice here on the surface, though, wants others to know: Subnautica is not only the greatest deep, deep sea game I’ve ever played, not only the greatest survival and exploration game I’ve experienced, it’s one of the greatest videogames of this generation.  And in any normal year, that would easily make it the best.

But this wasn’t a normal year.  This was the year of Fortnite.

~ April 7th, 2019

Next — Interlude: The Other Failure of Game Critics