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Is it too early to start talking about games of the year? It seems like there's no more big releases coming until February. Spike's doing their GVX Awards (because "VGA" wasn't extreme enough) this weekend, so I'd assume so. 

 

Teg's picks! It's in five categories because I have a hard time deciding things. I only just now realized that I played nothing but PC and Nintendo games this year, with almost all of my gaming done on my 3DS, so this is honestly a pretty crummy list. I have a feeling I'm going to regret a lot of this list when I upgrade my PC in January or so.

Best game over 5 hours (console/PC): Super Mario 3D World (runner up: Pikmin 3)

Best game under 5 hours (console/PC): Gone Home (runner up: Kindness Coins)

 

Best game over 5 hours (handheld): The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (runner up: Animal Crossing: New Leaf)

Best game under 5 hours (handheld): Attack of the Friday Monsters (runner up: Steamworld Dig)

 

Best remake, rerelease, or reimagining: Earthbound (runner up: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD)

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Despite the fact that I buy and play far more video games than I ought to buy and play, I have not played anywhere near enough games to make an informed decision about this. So, for instance, Fez, The Stanley Parable, The Swapper, Starseed Pilgrim, Kentucky Route Zero, Antichamber, the Dishonored DLC, Hate+, State of Decay, Proteus, Risk of Rain, Rogue Legacy, MirrorMoon EP, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and Knock-Knock (and maybe more stuff) are all games that would potentially be in the running for being, like, good or whatever, but I haven't fucking PLAYED THEM. I don't even own most of them. Well, many of them. I own a surprising number of games I haven't gotten around to playing yet :(

In any case, so far stuff I've liked includes:

Spelunky, Gone Home, Far Cry 2, Papers, Please, Gunpoint, Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC which is the only part of that game I really liked, Teleglitch... maybe that's it? I can't remember if I'm forgetting anything.

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This was truly the Year of the Indie Renaissance for me. I think the only blockbuster game I played this year was Dark Souls, and that's such an outlier it's ridiculous. A recurring problem in my list is that I mainly played games of the last couple of years, and only very few that came out this year. From the top of my head, only Proteus, Gone Home, Rogue Legacy, Dual Destinies, The Starship Damrey and maybe a few others were from this year. That seriously hampers any current discussion, I'd say. But, let's not be a spoilsport about this. Of all the games I happened to play this year, these were the ones that made a definitive impact on me.

 

Nominees

Indies: Dear Esther, Gone Home, Thomas Was Alone, Awesomenauts, Dust: An Elysian Tale

PC extravaganzas: Dark Souls, Deponia, Sonic & All-stars Racing Transformed

Handheld pleasures: Theathrythm: Final Fantasy, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies, Mii Force, HarmoKnight, Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask

 

Winners

Indies: ERROR

This is impossible to pick. The serious competition is between Gone Home and Dear Esther on the one hand, both of which are arguably the same "genre", but so evocative both in their own right that I can't choose, and Dust: An Elysian Tale on the other, which is this cool, atmospheric platformer that I really liked. Gun to my head, I'd probably pick Gone Esther. Or Home Dear.

 

PC extravaganzas: Dark Souls

No contest, really. Deponia and Sonic were fun, but Dark Souls was this crazy thing that absorbed me for months.

 

Handheld pleasures: Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy

It's truly stupendous that I'd pick a rhythm game over a new Phoenix Wright, but there you have it. It held me enthralled for so many evenings. That's the power of music and the long legacy of beautiful Final Fantasy soundtracks.

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Immobile Game of 2013 released in 2013

Broforce (early access / online demo via broforcegame.com) - explosions, humor, polish polish polish and a complete lack of cynicism. Suck on that, Stolen Car 5. I put a good chunk of time into Path of Exile as well but didn't enjoy it quite as much - now there's an aesthetic that definitely needs more hugs. For example, Ittle Dew is totally awesome and full of the hugs.

 

Immobile Game of 2013 not released in 2013
Euro Truck Simulator 2
, which is totally not sad at all and really helps everyone respect truck drivers, totally overinflate estimations of a trucker's salary, explore central Europe (and a slightly buggy Scandianvia with the appropriate mod) and maybe check out cool trucks when they see them for real. Idling for Steam Trading Cards: In Order To Buy More Games That You Can Idle For Cards came a close second.

 

Handheld Game of 2013
Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Then the Halloween event turned into some sort of overly complex masked ball mindjob instead of the required sugarcoma-enabler. Seriously? Lrn to GuildWars2 your seasonal events, Nintendo.

 

Handheld Game of 2013 not released in 2013

StreetPass Puzzle Quest still rules. It would be better on smartphone though. And also crazy in multiple ways.

 

Name of the Year 2013: Penumbear. It's a procedurally generated and really quite challenging puzzle-platformer about light and shadow, featuring a bear.

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Most Criminally Underrated Game - The Last Of Us

An inspiring tale of success from a scrappy little studio with nothing to their name but a dream, a mocap studio and millions of dollars.

 

Most Predictable, Paint-By-Numbers CoD Clone - Arma 3

Okay but really I have over 200 hours played in this already and it still continues to provide me with immense amounts of fun playing with friends. In between all the running for miles and dying, that is.

 

Honorable Mentions

Dust: An Elysian Tail for being incredibly fun and endearing and Spelunky for being Spelunky.

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For me, this was the year the 3DS became my favorite handheld system. Period.

I said pretty early on that Fire Emblem: Awakening would probably be my game of the year, and it still is. Beyond that, listing off my other favorites from the 3DS this year would mostly just be me going through a list of games i played on the 3DS this year; everything was just so good.

This was also the year i finally built a new PC, so i spent a lot of time catching up on various PC games from the last few years i missed out on.

X3: Albion Prelude was quite a revelation, as was Amnesia: The Dark Descent. (Even if i wussed out after a few hours and have yet to continue.) I also absolutely loved playing through Teleglitch and FTL.

Addendum: Stanley Parable is also an awesome thing.

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This was the year I got a 3DS and of all the games I've played on it so far, A Link Between Worlds has to be my favorite.  I really love the Zelda series and Link to the Past is my absolute favorite one.  That said, A Link Between Worlds managed to walk an incredibly fine line between nostalgia and innovation to produce what is probably the best Zelda game in a while.  I'm still not a huge fan of the visual style and some of the minigames are dumb, but otherwise I loved it.

 

On the PC front, TF2 has sucked me back in so that's where the majority of my time has been spent.  But I also greatly enjoyed Rogue Legacy, Papers Please, and of course Gone Home.  They're all great for different reasons that I won't get into because I think enough time has been spent discussing them over the course of the year.

 

Spelunky is also going to get a mention from me, not because I've put a lot of time into it, but because of how much entertainment I've gotten out of watching others put time into it.

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I saw no mention of it so far, so I'll go ahead and say that my GOTY without any qualifiers or categories attached is Tomb Raider. I'm such a sucker for shooters and action-adventure games of this type, and I feel like it was easily the best executed of the pack. While I find the characters of Uncharted more charismatic and memorable, Tomb Raider tops it both mechanically and story-wise. The shooting felt superb, much better than other sub-par straight shooters that came out this year. The weapon selection was just right and there were just enough tools for traversal that it frankly felt almost like a Zelda game in terms of enjoyable backtracking and modes of movement. I thought the voice acting was really great, and it was just the kind of length that I like in such a game even going through and collecting everything, maybe something like 20 hours.

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I played a handful of things that encouraged me to perceive my world more capably. The two stand-outs are Civilization 5 (with the Brave New World expansion) and Spelunky HD.

This spring, I was very much concerned that the U.S. was going to enter a proxy-war with Iran through the humanitarian crisis in Syria. My desire to encourage anti-oppression (regardless of borders) conflicted with my perception of the inherent methods and motives of the military-industrial-complex within which I live. Civilization 5 gave me a toy with which to visualize and vernacularize a few of the many complexities involved in the world outside of Civ 5. Being able to play with fictional versions of state-motives and methods allowed me to think about the situation with a reduced sense of alienation. This is good. Otherwise I would have just cried angrily. I do not take for granted that the U.S. and Iran are not at war currently. Civ 5 helped me deal with all that.

Spelunky realized some things I've wanted in games for a while. The coherence of everything in that game comes together in such a way that I suspect no one could do it on purpose. Spelunky is the Kind of Blue of video-games (not really, but they share the quality of containing synergy beyond the capabilities of those skilled artists who produced it). In puzzle-games, I can assume there is a solution; in Spelunky, I assumed there was a use. Discovering the way that objects interact in that game gave me highly euphoric moments, multiple times. I'm not an evangelist of pure-mechanical focus in games, but Spelunky is a demonstration of what that focus has to offer. I wasn't only motivated to play the game because of wanting to beat it, or because I wanted to see the next zone for the first time; I wanted to see what happened when you put a key on Kali's altar and investigate how much higher you bounce off of frogs. For every 10 hypothesis I proved wrong, I discovered another logical interaction that made me say "I never expected that, but it totally makes sense." and in that way, I was exposed to a unique sense of mechanical humor that I will be able to access and extrapolate from for some time.

Spelunky demonstrates much of what its form has to offer. Becoming skilled enough to beat it was just a side-effect of the mastery aquired while doing little experiments in its world.

I don't have to choose between them. They are both magnificent examples of why I play computer-games.

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I think the only games I've played this year that were actually released this year are Bioshock Infinite, GTA V (which I've only played around 10 hours of so far), and Animal Crossing New Leaf. 

 

So I guess I'd have to go with GTA V. It has been a really fun game.

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I'm surprised how little i care about my 3DS. I was very excited to get it, but FE, Mairo and the Zelda remake are all sitting unfinished. I may go back over Chrstmas, as I'll not have my PC with me.

 

For me the year has all been about roguelike-likes and tiles.

My standouts are:

 

Civ V: Brave New World. I haven't spent a great amount of time playing it, but the few games I did complete were a joy. The new systems they added were just excellent. (I imagine that the Xcom expansion would feature beside this if I had purchased it, but I'm waiting for the sale.

Rogue Legacy and Spelunky: Maybe unfair to compare the two, but they occupy the same place in my brain and on my joypad. Despite the surity that I will never be a master at either, they are both just hilarious fun to play, dodging spikes and farting on enemies. 

Card Hunter: Tickled every bone that I expected Fire Emblem to tickle (FE was excellent as well, but missed that something). I put my money in the very first day I tried it out as from the outset I knew I would be spending a lot of time with it.

868-HACK: Gosh but this helped me pass the time in my old job.

 

Honoruable Mentions:

Risk of Rain (so good, but i feel it needs multiplayer to shine, and i haven't played enough multiplayer)

Desktop Dungeons (finally released, same flaws, same triumphs as two years ago)

Gone Home (Really wonderful)

Mario 3DS (Again, not sure what keeps me from this)

Super Crate Box (thank you jake for the offhand recomendation on the cast! Let down as usual by the bloody controls)

Fire Emblem

 

Disqualified, but close to my heart:

Brogue on the ipad

Elder Signs Omens ipad (2012)

Dota2

Lol

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I don't know which games I bought this year were released this year, so I will have to work that one. For the mean time, Saints Row 4 and the Stanley Parable are in my top list.

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This is the year where I pretty much gave up picking up games at release, so I too have no idea what I've played actually came out this year. With that being said, Dark Souls is clearly the best game I've played this year. It's not often that I choose to spend 80 hours in a game these days, and when I do it's usually due to multiple plays in something like Civ 5 or Crusader Kings 2, but Dark Souls had me sucked in for so long, and I'm still considering playing again to kill the time until the sequel comes out.

 

Honorable mention to XCOM: Enemy Unknown

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I'm surprised how little i care about my 3DS. I was very excited to get it, but FE, Mairo and the Zelda remake are all sitting unfinished. I may go back over Chrstmas, as I'll not have my PC with me.

 

Interesting. I've only just gotten a 3DS XL (couldn't pass up that limited edition zelda beauty) and have been super excited to play all the games I've been missing out on.  I've played through new Zelda (beaten it and about halfway through a hard playthrough) and the first 8 worlds of Mario and those have both been fantastic, but the real standout for me has been Fire Emblem. I've been playing that game on hard classic and trying to adhere to a "don't reload to save characters" unless I'm forced to when Chrom or the player character dies and it's been a fantastic experience so far.  My first time through I made it to chapter 7 or so before I had lost so many characters (I think I was down to 4 guys) that I just couldn't proceed.  I restarted and now I'm on chapter 10 and in a much stronger position.  Can't wait to see what else this game throws at me.

 

Other strong titles that I've enjoyed this year:

Risk of Rain - fantastic if you can get a group of friends and multiplayer it up

Gone Home

Civ V Brave New World

Spelunky (Steam) - this game was great when I first played it on xbla, but with the addition of the daily challenge and the social elements surrounding it, this might be my favorite game ever. Love playing the challenge and then watching other people play through the same level, seeing how our decisions differ, etc. I think I'm going to be playing this game for a long time to come.

 

Games I suspect are great but havent played yet:

The Last Of Us

Bioshock Infinite

XCOM: Enemy Within

Gunpoint

 

I can't actually think of other games that came out this year. I'm sure there are others that aren't coming to mind right now.

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My top 10 games because I'm boring and unoriginal.

 

10. Rogue Legacy

  9. Grand Theft Auto V

  8. Stanley Parable

  7. Dota 2 (I know it should be higher, but I have only played against bots so far)

  6. Papers, Please

  5. The Last of Us

  4. Brothers

  3. The Swapper

  2. Gone Home

  1. Bioshock Infinite

 

Keeping in mind this list has no appropriate categorization they're just an approximation of my favourite games released this year. 

 

i haven't played gunpoint, but its next on my list

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Depression Quest. Undoubtedly. 

 

It's not fun. It hasn't got much in the way of replay value. The graphics do not live up to todays AAA standards and it's severely lacking in the most important feature in modern video games; dogs.

However, it provided me with the single most emotional experience I've had with any game, movie, book or other media. It convinced me to go back and seek help for my own issues, and it shattered my belief that I was alone with the thoughts that haunt my mind.


The fact that a game was able to do this for me has inspired me to try and create something in a similar vein that hopefully could help others.

 

On a lighter note... Brothers was pretty good, eh?

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GotY: I need to spend more time with it, but I think the answer for me is Europa Universalis IV. I finally found a Paradox title that I don't seem to be bouncing off of despite my best intentions, and it is glorious. How good is it? I'm not sure I can go back to Civilization now!

 

Best First Person Exploration of Mundane Environment with Excellent Voice Acting: We have a tie between Gone Home and The Stanley Parable!

 

Best Expansion: Maybe I should check out the free Mountains of Madness expansion to Eldritch before I call this one, but the competition feels too stiff from Firaxis this year. I'm going with XCOM: Enemy Within.

 

Best Strategy Game that Irritated an Entire Nation: No close contenders, this one goes to Company of Heroes 2

 

Best Innovation in a Roguelike: Thanks to the Daily Challenge Spelunky walks away with this one.

 

Best Evidence that Video Game Developers are Watching Cool Movies: Kentucky Route Zero

 

Game with Saddest Sad Spiral: Spacebase DF-9

 

Best Game About Robots/Best Game that has a STALKER roguelike vibe with a solid British sensibility: Sir, You Are Being Hunted

 

Coolest Old Game I Replayed this Year: Thief: The Dark Project 

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I think gamse of the year is becoming less relevant to me since I often play games on a later year than they are released and don't really keep track of when something was released. Notable things I've played this year:

 

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons -- this was really brilliant, with an interesting twist on input, some memorable emotional moments and a great overall structure which eliminated almost any repetition. It really felt like they managed to distill the design to its very core elements -- there was nothing superfluous in it.

 

Gone Home -- not my favourite game of the year, but an important one.

 

Miasmata -- I don't remember if it was this year or the last, but it was amazing.

 

Civ V -- got me back into playing strategy games. (or at least A strategy game, not sure if I'll play any others -- crusader kings II requires too much effort)

 

The Last of Us -- an ok game so far, haven't finished it yet.

 

MotorStorm: Apocalypse -- really fun racing in 3D

 

Spacebase DF9 Alpha -- very promising game

 

Kerbal Space Program -- to be honest, it's a bit intimidating and I haven't found the time to really play it much, but I want to

 

Botanicula -- was it from last year? Still worth mentioning. Awesome music and visuals and fun puzzles

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Depression Quest. Undoubtedly. 

 

It's not fun. It hasn't got much in the way of replay value. The graphics do not live up to todays AAA standards and it's severely lacking in the most important feature in modern video games; dogs.

However, it provided me with the single most emotional experience I've had with any game, movie, book or other media. It convinced me to go back and seek help for my own issues, and it shattered my belief that I was alone with the thoughts that haunt my mind.

The fact that a game was able to do this for me has inspired me to try and create something in a similar vein that hopefully could help others.

 

On a lighter note... Brothers was pretty good, eh?

 

Wow, holy crap.  I don't honestly have anything intelligent to say about this, but wanted to acknowledge it. 

 

As for the topic at hand...this is a tough year.  I've played a lot of good games, but not very many of them left me with that GOTY feeling. 

 

My nominees would have to be Spelunky HD and Gone Home, for which I give the nod to.......Spelunky!  Not because it's holistically better than GH, but it is a better game.  And it is Game of the Year. 

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In no order or category:

 

- Gone Home

 

- The Last of Us

 

- The Stanley Parable 

 

- Saints Row 4

 

- Metro Last Light

 

- Shadow Warrior

 

- Sir, You Are Being Hunted

 

- Eldritch 

 

How bout a worst of the year thread? Got a good number of those on the back of my mind.

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There have a lot of great smaller releases this year like Gunpoint, Gone Home, Papers Please, etc, but the one that is most memorable for me is probably Surgeon Simulator. It's so dumb and fun and I loved every minute of it. I think it was a good reminder to me of why I love video games so much.

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This topic has exposed how few games I actually played this year.

 

Anyway, of the games I played this year, I think the ones I think are worthy of mention in order of remembering them are Tomb Raider, The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Guild Wars 2, Rayman Legends, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, DmC: Devil May Cry, Legend of Grimrock and Papers, Please. I also played a lot of Saints Row The Third but that is really pushing what counts as this year's games. I basically abandoned the Xbox 360 wholesale - its insistence on advertising to me on the dashboard I found incredibly creepy, and I didn't like the system enough to prefer it over the PS3, which had more interesting exclusive games by that point.

 

Anyway, that's 10, which is about the upper limit of how many nominations you can have while still being selective.

 

Animal Crossing: New Leaf - essentially it's Animal Crossing finally reaching a viable chunk of the original premise: it's a town of computer friends. By giving the player explicit control over a bunch of functions, it gives the game an upgrade structure and a way to customise their town all at once. The villages are a little smarter, a little more elaborate (although still not exactly fun to just hang out with) and the game has wholeheartedly embraced the silliness of its random generation. Space station as a consolation prize? Sure! But this also means that the game can be genuinely surprising and entertaining, and the much improved internet features let it actually work as a social game instead of a game that clearly intended to be a social game but was too frustrating to really sustain.

 

DmC: Devil May Cry - Ninja Theory's reboot of DMC was exactly what it needed to be: a little more accessible, and with some actual edge to it. It had a proper story arc with actual character development and incredibly creative levels, and a combat system that played easy but had major depth to it when you started to play around with using attacks outside of the mode they started in. The Bad News boss fight is the best boss fight I've played all year, and one of the few fights where the boss made you fight a bunch of mooks mid-phase and it was even more awesome than the boss. It's also where I realised games had a real obsession with nephilim. Criminally overlooked.

 

Gone Home - one of the big trend this year was exploring games without explicit challenges. It turns out our interaction vocabulary is rich enough these days that a game about poking around a big old mansion is, in itself, interesting enough to warrant at least a few hours of your time. The subtlety and feeling of dread that the game builds comes from an honest place - you start caring about these people whom you know only through their artifacts.

 

Guild Wars 2 - the big flagship of the fourth generation of MMORPGs, in that games still responding to WoW feel janky and outdated. ArenaNet's insistence on trying to reinvent the wheel has meant the game's got a lot of things that just didn't work - their small-scale PvP mode is on life support, there's still a little too much reliance on grind - but they seem to have stabilised on a model where a new piece of story drops in every fortnight, for free, and along the way they've pushed out large-scale invasions, an 8-bit-style platformer, an election campaign and a couple of raids that smoothly scale between 2 and 80. Infrequent players can participate meaningfully, and long-term players can go for more elaborate rewards without burning through everything in a couple of hours. That is on top of what they launched with, which was throwing out questing entirely in favour of events happening in the world, and a comprehensive level scaling system that meant you could join up with a friend who'd just started on another server and your level 80 tragic, and all play together as equals. It's hugely ambitious, and while it bit off more than it could chew (and was a little too optimistic about what it was able to achieve), that shouldn't take away from its massive achievements already. I can't imagine Everquest Next would be nearly as ambitious if it hadn't been for GW2 demonstrating that swinging for the fences could pay off.

 

Legend of Grimrock - I played this in January! It counts! It's a first-person dungeon crawler that's filled with clever little traps, that plays fair but not too fair, and doesn't punish you too badly for not being psychic about the character development mechanics. It is a fine antidote to the poisonous idea of 'dungeon crawler' meaning 'mindless clickfest'.

 

Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - the best Zelda in a very long time. Reusing the game world of Link to the Past, and then giving you a different toolset (and making that toolset available from very early on), lets Nintendo have their nostalgia cake without having to compromise their game for nostalgia's sake. The story is actually half-decent; Nintendo's confidence in their storytelling lets plot points happen without them being pointed out, leaving players to make the connection, and there's at least one unexpected moment at the end. The wall-walk mechanic requires you to unlearn many of the Zelda tropes - can't go here, don't have the hookshot yet - and the abandonment of gear gating finishes off the rest. Because the game doesn't have to spend time in dungeons introducing its tired toolset, it lets the designers try out new ideas, like floors that glow when it's dark, or one where what's underneath you is just as important as what's to your left. Niggling problems the series has had for a while, like the worthless of rupees, get addressed, and the hard mode is actually hard instead of what the game should have been.

 

Papers, Please - a perfect example of the trend this year of games using their mastery over interaction vocabulary to do things that you simply couldn't do if you're struggling to make the most fun game you can. Papers, Please uses the mechanic of checking paperwork - paperwork! - to paint a picture of the political and society confusion of a vaguely Eastern Bloc state. Stripping down Kolechians because some of their countrymen keep bombing the border is exactly the kind of banal, systemic evil that Papers, Please criticises, and it does it by making you do it and then realising what you've done. It's masterful at keeping the player pressured, even when you're me and have had lots of practice at examining forms for inconsistencies and mistakes. I still feel sort of bad for separating that husband and wife.

 

Rayman Legends - utterly charming and expertly crafted. The new mechanic of the lum chains - if you collect a chain of lums in order, they're worth double - is genius, and the visual design and creativity on display is top-notch. It's a little I'm still playing it, actually, doing the daily and weekly challenges, which are semi-procedurally generated levels where the top 20% of players get a gold cup and credit towards being an Awesomeness Master (and an achievement!). Would I be doing this without the achievement? Probably not. Would I have missed out? Yep.

 

The Stanley Parable - here's a game that has opinions on achievements! And most of the rest of storytelling and choice and consequence in games! Essentially the Stanley Parable is: when you're presented with a choice that's been created for you in every detail, it's not really a choice at all. Some of the paths are more incoherent than others, and the mod that it's based on addressed the desire to actually guide a player experience much better than the final game does. But it still packs a punch, the jokes go down smoother, and some of the new arguments - such as how a game that doesn't provide a choice at all except refusing to engage is cheating when it tells you that you consented to that false 'choice' - feel natural and logical. It's one of the best critical arguments this year, and also a very entertaining game.

 

Tomb Raider - they finally managed to reboot Tomb Raider into something relevant. I could have done without the death porn, but its environments are striking, the storytelling is pretty great (let's quietly dismiss the argument that Lara should have been a wilting flower in the first half until she became 'comfortable' with killing, and accept that quick adaptation as part of the survival genre) and the level design is expansive without being prescriptive. It feels, for the first time in a while, like a game with its own identity.

 

I think that's the big narrative of this year - 2013, more than any previous year, was a year where we saw more games that had a personality of their own instead of being refinements and reskinnings of previous games. Indies built games that were utterly unique, AAA studios pushed their best games to be something very different than what had come before. It's a medium that's starting to mature, where developers are confident enough that they'll make a product that's fit for purpose that they can dedicate energy to also giving it a clear identity. The cultural critique hasn't quite caught up, but the fear that games needed critics to explain their virtues ended up not being necessary: it turns out games can speak for themselves, and when they can't, the piles and piles of money they make does a pretty good job in their stead.

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The games I enjoyed the most this year (who cares when they were released):

 

Super Hexagon - maybe the most pure video game that ever video gamed

 

Miasmata - The mapping mechanic is a really nifty and novel hook for exploring a pretty island and collecting stuff.  The story and other stuff is nicely understated and restrained.  The progression from sickness to health felt more empowering than the typical game that takes you from badass to demigod.

 

Spelunky - for the same reasons everybody else loves it

 

Kairo - for making me feel -- without any words -- like I was in an Arthur C. Clark novel, and for such elegant design in environment and interface

 

Brothers - For being one of the most artistically beautiful games I've ever played.  For looking like a children's fairy tale and remembering what Grimm's Fairy Tales were like.  And for making me glad I have a controller for my computer.

 

Jelly No Puzzle - for making me feel like a genius.  Maybe the best puzzle game I've ever played.

 

Race the Sun - another elegant, minimalist design; even the premise is elegant.  You're racing toward the sunset in a solar-powered hoverplane.  When the sun sets, you're out of power.  The faster and farther you go, the more time you have until sunset (it's kind of a small planet).  Shadows can be as dangerous as physical obstacles. The levels randomly generate every day, so you have some time to learn a level, find secret portals and power-ups, but then you have a new challenge the next day.  The game gives you some achievements that are mostly fun challenges (a few are grindy) that unlock upgrades for your ship, some of which make the game a lot more fun.

 

Risen - It does the RPG stuff pretty well, but I especially love the environments Piranha Bytes creates.  The Gothic games and Risen are more fun to explore than most any other open world games I've played.

 

Batman: Arkham City - because they removed GFWL and because they made zipping and gliding around the city as much fun as punching mobs of thugs was in the first game.  And for one of the best boss battles (Mr. Freeze) I've played in a long time.

 

Honorable mentions for Minecraft, Papo Y Yo, Saints Row the Third, and reinstalling MIrror's Edge (playing through a bunch of the time trials and then going back through the campaign made me feel like a badass,

).

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I'm really bad at finishing games and have only finished:

 

DMC The best action game I've played this year, it exudes so much style, the soundtrack is fantastic from both Combichrist and Noisia. It's not deep but boy is it fun

 

Gone Home Do I need to explain this. 

 

Gunpoint I don't have much to add about this that hasn't been said, I enjoyed it

 

Batman Arkham Origins The worst of the three games it's still pretty fun, after a very weak start

 

Zelda A link between worlds The first Zelda game I've finished in a long time, it's pretty great

 

My game of the year is Dota 2 I've gotten more into the competitive side, and formed a team who have played in two tournaments. Dota is the best competitive game that is currently available and the most interesting. Valve's approach to tournaments too is great, despite the lack of communication on their end the product is very solid. 

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