2018 Community Game of the Year

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Shadout wrote:

So, Slay the Spire is going to win this?.

**shakes 8 ball** Ask again later.

PikaPomelo wrote:

Thank you so much for running this. It's my favorite thread (on the internet) to read

You're very welcome! Thank you for the extensive write up. That's quite the retro gaming, there!

carrotpanic wrote:

You missed a post, keep reading

I'm confused, is this addressed to me?

Thank you to Mario_Alba, b12n11w00t, Tscott, Hedinn, PikaPomelo and Bnice for your lists! Votes have been tallied!
For the record, we've had 45 people vote for 217 games. That's quite a bit! Things are definitely shifting in the rankings, it's fascinating!

To cces, sorry

ccesarano wrote:

I keep sitting here thinking excitedly that you're gonna post your list only to remember you did, you just didn't do any naval-gazing.

And that makes me sad.

Flattery will get you nowhere, but from time to time, it might get you a couple thousand words.


1. Tacoma and 2. SOMA and 3. What Remains of Edith Finch

I have two confessions.

First, I had someone else rank my top three games because I simply couldn't decide. I'm not sure if I feel more lazy or more like I cheated on a class final, but I should tell you up front that the ranking isn't my work. As far as I'm concerned, these are all the best games I played this year.

Second, I don't have a high opinion of games as vehicles for storytelling. With very few exceptions, games have good stories in spite of being games, not because of it. There's very little storytelling that's done with games that wouldn't have been better told through other means: a poem, a play, a novel, a short story, a movie, an animated film. More often than not, being a game just gets in the way.

These three games are different. Each in their own way tells a story that is enhanced, not degraded, by being told through a game. You could turn any of these games into a movie or a book or a TV show, and, for once, something of vital importance to the narrative would be lost.

Tacoma, as so many games do, casts the player as a kind of roving camera, listening to recordings of events they're not actually witnessing. The narrative has all come before you, and you explore the aftermath. But Tacoma steps back from the tired audio plays and recitations of gaming to consider how the scenes you're replaying may have unfolded over an expanded time and space. Then it empowers you to freely explore both of those dimensions, wandering freely throughout the scene, forward and backward in time, seeing at your leisure how the lives of the characters come together, entertangle, and come apart. A house play could give you a full space to work in, and a video could let you skip around in time, but only a video game could give you both.

SOMA, meanwhile, grounds itself firmly in the second-person and tells you a story that is most effective when it's told about you. The game's narrative of shifting identities, malleable flesh, and questions of consciousness is enhanced so much by the times where you can be given a literal outside glimpse of yourself and think about all the implications of that. A movie could explore some of the same concepts very effectively, as could a second-person novel, but neither could give you the experience of you, in a new body, walking around you, in an old body, your consciousness copied (not cut) from one to the other. You need a game to do that.

What Remains of Edith Finch similarly uses gameplay to showcase shifting perspectives, but instead of inducing a vertigo of identity, it uses a half-dozen distinct sets of gameplay mechanics to illustrate how the game's characters each see and interact with the world. It's similar to the slippery narrative voices and perspectives of a modernist novel by a writer like Faulkner, but the game's interactive elements are used to give the player a distinctly tactile window into the way these people lived their lives. There are times when Edith Finch comes close to simply giving you something to do with your hands while listening to someone tell a story, but it also—brilliantly, uniquely, and unexpectedly—creates in the player the actual experience of daydreaming, using that divide between what you're doing and what you're thinking about to phenomenal effect. I cannot honestly begin to imagine how the scenes in the fishery could be accomplished in any other way.

4. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia

But enough about narrative and story.

I played through three Fire Emblem games on the 3DS this year: Awakening, Fates: Conquest, and Echoes. Of the three, Echoes was by far my favorite in terms of gameplay mechanics, presentation, and, yes, narrative. If you're not familiar with it, Fire Emblem Echoes is a remake of the Famicom game Fire Emblem Gaiden which, like many NES-era sequels, featured remarkably different gameplay from its predecessor. It had elements of dungeon crawling, role-playing, and visual novels long before the rest of the series made room for those elements in their ranks. Echoes attempts to modernize those things and perhaps to imagine a new Fire Emblem release for the current generation as if those things had always been there. What results is the best Fire Emblem game on the system, with surprisingly robust and mature gameplay systems that both wind back the clock on some of the sprawl of Fates and confidently step past the anachronisms of Awakening.

5. The Alliance Alive

The Alliance Alive, like I Am Setsuna last year, puts me in a funny position: it is a spiritual successor to a classic JRPG series that I have never played. It's pitched as a love letter to SaGa and Suikoden, but I can't honestly say how well it does or doesn't execute on that ambition (and as if that weren't enough, it's also a quasi-sequel to The Legend of Legacy; I can at least say with confidence that it improves on [i]The Legend of Legacy[/b] in every way). What I do know is that The Alliance Alive was the most creative and unexpected JRPG I played this year. It showed a remarkable willingness to look at seemingly every mechanical trope of the genre and question directly whether it needed to be included or if it could be reimagined. This game is not a minor variation on Final Fantasy or Pokemon but a floor-up reinvention of them. Whatever this developer does next, I'm onboard.

6. Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna - The Golden Country

With the benefit of hindsight, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as amazing as it is, was not my favorite game of 2017. That distinction lies with Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Torna - The Golden Country is an expandalone campaign tied to that game, and as a snack-size companion to its parent work, I adore it. (I say snack-size, but it's 20 hours long. It's only a snack compared to the 120 I put into the main game.) I'm not sure it stands especially well on its own, and there's reason to believe that it was never intended to, but its unique cast of characters, combat system, and settings bring just everything I love about Xenoblade to the table minus the cartoonish investment of time.

7. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Speaking of expandalones, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is a phenomenal mini-sequel or macro-expansion to Dishonored 2. It's perhaps the hardest to really wrap your head around at first: your character's supernatural abilities are more quirky and less intuitively useful than the powers of the protagonists in the previous two games. They require more careful planning and more thoughtful execution. However, once you've gotten the hang of them, they are an astoundingly flexible and inventive set of abilities that let you do things that make you feel like a real supernatural predator.

8. Little Nightmares Complete Edition

Given my viseral antipathy toward Limbo when it released, I'm still a bit surprised that I now count Playdead among my favorite developers. Inside is a hell of a thing.

And I'm not alone. In the wake of Playdead's releases, there's been a wave of games clearly influenced by their particular bizarre, nightmarish style and subject matter. Of those, Little Nightmares is my favorite. It is a game that understands well the distinction between the gory and the grotesque, and between the kind of scary that leaves your adrenaline pumping and the kind that fills you with an awful, creeping dread. Little Nightmares earns its title not through the genre tropes of blood and chainsaws but through elastic dream spaces filled with rot and shadows and hopelessness.

9. Silence

I'm a sucker for Daedalic's games. Something about the stories they tell, the worlds they're set in, and the earnest, theatrical voice work reminds me of the kinds of fantasy novels I used to read as a child that have gradually fallen out of favor in the current era of sprawling epics and knights who say "f*ck". Aerial bombardment has cast two war orphans on the verge of death into Silence, an parallel world of high fantasy, currently under the thumb of a powerful entity called the False Queen. Silence is by turns sweet, whimsical, depressing, frightening, and deeply melancholy. It left a lingering impression on me, like a sad dream I had as a child.

10. Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

You may have noticed I have a lot of JRPGs on my list. I played a lot of JRPGs this year. But I've always had a gap in my knowledge of JRPGs from the PS2 and GameCube era thanks to my having quit gaming completely during that time. Inevitably, this is seen as something of a heyday for the genre; I guess I just missed out. But I did finally play through Final Fantasy XII this year thanks to the PS4 release, and I can understand now why it had the impact that it did. From the vantage point of twelve years after its original release, it has some obvious and frustrating gaps in the Gambit system, and the world is all too often a succession of bland, maze-like corridors. But it has the verve and visual creativity I love about that franchise, and as with all the other releases: it's not a great game, but I can see one from here. The great game is maybe just a bit closer with this one than with some of the others.

Thank you, Clocky. What a treat. I’m 100% with you on Tacoma and Edith Finch and I can’t wait to play Silence.

zeroKFE wrote:

Sometimes mainstream vanilla stuff is good, you know?

Spider-Man is the most "fun" I've had in probably the last 5 years of games. I declared it my #1 when I finished back in Sept and nothing has changed my mind yet.

ccesarano wrote:

Knowing that a few others haven't posting around here this year also makes me sad, because that means there's some key folk I typically look forward to eagerly whose lists won't be making an appearance. Pour one out for 'em, I suppose.

If I don't post this week, then I'll likely end up posting late night Christmas Eve. That way I'm not tempted to try and rush through something I receive for Christmas just to see if it belongs on the list.

I'm a procrastinator. Also I'm splitting time between Smash Bros and Warframe right now on Switch, trying to decide on final placement for both.

And if you weren't talking about me then whatever.

Clocky, have you played Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, if so, how does it compare to SOMA, Edith Finch, and Tacoma?

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Flattery will get you nowhere, but from time to time, it might get you a couple thousand words.

Whoo hoo! As always, a delightful treat, and always interesting to not only read your thoughts but be surprised, even if it's surprise repeated. I actually really enjoyed Edith Finch, and for that reason I'm seriously pondering that snag of SOMA even though I do first-person horror poorly. Still not sure what to make of Tacoma, though. At this point I think I'm becoming more wary of the "walking-simulator", despite some enjoyment in games such as, say, Firewatch. Part of that whole "lean into what I like" thing.

Did you have any interest in The Missing? When I was reading your thoughts on Little Nightmares it came to mind, and from what I understand of it I feel like it's a game that might be in your wheelhouse. I have a feeling it'll be forgotten by all but a few people in the wake of Gris.

As for couple thousand words, I finished writing up my current post for Game of the Year and it is seven pages long. Punish your eyes or punish your scroll wheels, my inability to be succinct shall be inflicted upon the lot of you soon enough.

Mwa's and ha's to be inserted here.

carrotpanic wrote:

You missed a post, keep reading

I'ma confess, this went over my head a bit as well.

Stele wrote:

I'm a procrastinator. Also I'm splitting time between Smash Bros and Warframe right now on Switch, trying to decide on final placement for both.

And if you weren't talking about me then whatever. :D

I have a curiosity and/or interest in both of those games and therefore I look forward to your post.

I honestly feel I have nothing to contribute this year. My solidly PC mainstream tastes are so far afield from everything I've read here that anything I might have to say would have no real audience.

GWJ has gradually been leaning more and more away from my tastes for years now, from the popular topics to the games featured on the front page and on the Conference Call. I guess this year it just reached critical mass for me.

So I'm just going to keep playing my Tomb Raiders and Assassin's Creeds and Crews and Endlesses and Clancy'ses and Agents of Mayhems and Forzas, while the bulk of the community goes crazy for retro graphics and walking around games and three hour experiences.

I'm not looking for pity or condolences, just describing my perspective.

Shadout wrote:

Not too surprised RDR2 isnt showing much. Average GWJ has never seemed to care that much about Rockstar games? And it is still quite new.
I'd expect some of this years PS4 or Switch games would show up though.

I was curious about this, so I looked back at the 2010 list. Mass Effect 2 was number one (by a long shot), but RDR came in at number 2.

Also, BadKen, I'd love to hear about your games this year. I'm still writing up my list, but an Assassin's Creed will be high on it.

BadKen wrote:

I'm not looking for pity or condolences, just describing my perspective.

I'm right there with you! I still appreciate being able to lurk in all the threads and see what's going on with video games, even if I can't play much.

The CC and the forums certainly do love their Rockstar. I say that as someone who bought and tried to like RDR but couldn't stand it. GTA, too. I can see how it would appeal and it's precisely how people describe liking them, but I get annoyed too much by minor gripes and I don't enjoy the offerings quite as much. But we're fortunate to live at a time when there's so many games none of us has to go without our favourites. As for my Dave (fave) games this year:

1. Monster Hunter World.

Yep. I liked it. I suspected I would from my liking of HZD, but it turns out they're not all that much alike. HZD is a twitch shooter. MHW is almost like what a TBS fan thinks what an action-RPG should be. There is definitely a their turn/my turn swing to proceedings. The best speedrunners cancel "monster turns" by flinchlocking or defense equipment, but for most normal people, it's very deliberate, almost cerebral. While this is the most approachable of the MH's, the menus are still clunky and the game takes pains NOT to explain anything to you. I gather discovery is part of the game. It's VERY old-school in that regard.

2. Civ 6 - Rise and Fall. Between the patch balances, new mechanics, new units, new buildings, new Civs, new tile improvements, and new Wonders, this feels like a substantial leg up on basic Civ 6. Governors provide character to your citizens, and Loyalty means you can't just forward settle anything anymore.

3. Endless Space 2: Supremacy

Same deal with Civ6. Between all the balance patching, new Behemoths, and new factions, it feels like a completely new game. Even weapons and defense relationships were upturned from where they were before. Beam weapons went from being short range to long range optimal weapons. Minor factions, pirate shenanigans, and attacking your "allies" with disguised privateers are all things I've always wanted to do in a 4x. Not that I'd do that to any GWJer, of course. Never.

LarryC wrote:

As for my Dave games this year:

No-one asked for Dave's list, Larry, we want to know what you liked

This is the second year in a row I've felt I have worthwhile contributions! I'm just holding off until the last possible moment.

BadKen wrote:

I honestly feel I have nothing to contribute this year. My solidly PC mainstream tastes are so far afield from everything I've read here that anything I might have to say would have no real audience.

I'm not looking for pity or condolences, just describing my perspective.

Meh... never stops me. While I do end up voting for one or two of the top ten each year, most of my lists tend to be such blockbusters as Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online, Aselia the Eternal, and Fate/Grand Order.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Tacoma, as so many games do, casts the player as a kind of roving camera, listening to recordings of events they're not actually witnessing. The narrative has all come before you, and you explore the aftermath. But Tacoma steps back from the tired audio plays and recitations of gaming to consider how the scenes you're replaying may have unfolded over an expanded time and space. Then it empowers you to freely explore both of those dimensions, wandering freely throughout the scene, forward and backward in time, seeing at your leisure how the lives of the characters come together, entertangle, and come apart. A house play could give you a full space to work in, and a video could let you skip around in time, but only a video game could give you both.

I may have to check that one out. I enjoyed my time with The Invisible Hours earlier this year, and that game bills itself as "a piece of immersive theatre." You're free to explore the house, watch what characters you wish, move forward and backwards in time to see everything that is happening. It does suffer a bit from some of the characters having nothing to do from time to time (they just stand/sit there staring at something), the twist to the murder being pretty obvious, and the ending leaving everyone with one huge question.

BadKen wrote:

I honestly feel I have nothing to contribute this year. My solidly PC mainstream tastes are so far afield from everything I've read here that anything I might have to say would have no real audience.

GWJ has gradually been leaning more and more away from my tastes for years now, from the popular topics to the games featured on the front page and on the Conference Call. I guess this year it just reached critical mass for me.

So I'm just going to keep playing my Tomb Raiders and Assassin's Creeds and Crews and Endlesses and Clancy'ses and Agents of Mayhems and Forzas, while the bulk of the community goes crazy for retro graphics and walking around games and three hour experiences.

I'm not looking for pity or condolences, just describing my perspective.

I'm pretty sure the games you mentioned are played and enjoyed by a lot of people here. I thought the latest AC game threads were quite active, weren't they? I myself enjoyed the first 2 Tomb Raider reboots a lot and haven't played the 3rd yet. Even though I've never been a big fan of AC, I liked Origins and Syndicate quite a bit as they got better with the characters. I played a ton of Endless Legends and Forza Horizons.

So I'm pretty sure you aren't alone.

LarryC wrote:

3. Endless Space 2: Supremacy

Same deal with Civ6. Between all the balance patching, new Behemoths, and new factions, it feels like a completely new game. Even weapons and defense relationships were upturned from where they were before. Beam weapons went from being short range to long range optimal weapons. Minor factions, pirate shenanigans, and attacking your "allies" with disguised privateers are all things I've always wanted to do in a 4x. Not that I'd do that to any GWJer, of course. Never.

You’ve made me want to pick this up in the winter sales now. Stellaris has become such my default space 4x I keep forgetting there are other options out there to check out!

Yeah I'd agree with Rob. Badken your list is just as valid and valued as ever. In fact I like reading about the AAA stuff, most of which I get to in a few years time when it's cheaper!

BadKen wrote:

I honestly feel I have nothing to contribute this year. My solidly PC mainstream tastes are so far afield from everything I've read here that anything I might have to say would have no real audience.

If you are playing games and enjoying them (no matter how ‘mainstream’ they are or aren’t) your opinions are completely valid. I’d also love to hear what you have to say about the latest Assassins Creed for example. I’ve never bought an AC game but I have played the first (which I really didn’t get on with) and Black Flag (which was fantastic when you were being a pirate, and distinctly mediocre when you were doing anything else) after getting them free with PC component purchases. There was enough in AC: Black flag to make me think of picking up an AC game on a whim for when I’m in that sort of 3rd person gaming mode.

There hasn't been nearly enough chat about rules this year. It's a christmas tradition folks!

kergguz wrote:

There hasn't been nearly enough chat about rules this year. It's a christmas tradition folks!

Can I nominate a game that I've played each year for the past five years because it got a patch fixing some spelling errors? It's practically a new game! Eleima will allow that right?

robc wrote:
kergguz wrote:

There hasn't been nearly enough chat about rules this year. It's a christmas tradition folks!

Can I nominate a game that I've played each year for the past five years because it got a patch fixing some spelling errors? It's practically a new game! Eleima will allow that right?

If that's allowed then I'm changing my post and putting Overwatch back in. It got, like, a new character and map, and was balanced into the ground. Can't even identify what it is anymore.

BadKen wrote:

I honestly feel I have nothing to contribute this year. My solidly PC mainstream tastes are so far afield from everything I've read here that anything I might have to say would have no real audience.

GWJ has gradually been leaning more and more away from my tastes for years now, from the popular topics to the games featured on the front page and on the Conference Call. I guess this year it just reached critical mass for me.

So I'm just going to keep playing my Tomb Raiders and Assassin's Creeds and Crews and Endlesses and Clancy'ses and Agents of Mayhems and Forzas, while the bulk of the community goes crazy for retro graphics and walking around games and three hour experiences.

I'm not looking for pity or condolences, just describing my perspective.

There are plenty of console-only folks who mostly stick to the AAA path around here, myself included (given limited budget/time). I only had five games in my list: Dead Cells and 4 AAA titles that blew me away. Only you can prevent Slay the Spire or Subnautica from being GWJ’s 2018 GOTY, so post your list already!

There are two types of people in this world: people who rank Slay The Spire in their GOTY lists and people who haven't played it.

Here is my list and accompanying thoughts expressed through the medium of dance...

1. Monster Hunter

Spoiler:

2. What Remains of Edith Finch

Spoiler:

3. Battle Chef Brigade

Spoiler:

4. Gorogoa

Spoiler:

5. Rise of the Tomb Raider

Spoiler:

6. Enter the Gungeon

Spoiler:

7. I'm Ping Pong King

Spoiler:

8. Into the Breach

Spoiler:

9. Slay the Spire

Spoiler:

10. Moonlighter

Spoiler:

Love this thread. Thanks Eleima.

BadKen wrote:

I honestly feel I have nothing to contribute this year. My solidly PC mainstream tastes are so far afield from everything I've read here that anything I might have to say would have no real audience.

GWJ has gradually been leaning more and more away from my tastes for years now, from the popular topics to the games featured on the front page and on the Conference Call. I guess this year it just reached critical mass for me.

So I'm just going to keep playing my Tomb Raiders and Assassin's Creeds and Crews and Endlesses and Clancy'ses and Agents of Mayhems and Forzas, while the bulk of the community goes crazy for retro graphics and walking around games and three hour experiences.

I'm not looking for pity or condolences, just describing my perspective.

During the WiiU/3DS years the Conference Call had nothing negative to say about Nintendo while our little huddle was groaning at all the common misinformation being spread across the Internet. That, or all of the old arguments that held no ground. Here we were, enjoying one of Nintendo's greatest periods as a developer, and everyone else treated them as that clueless little sideshow.

Even within that group, the games I ranked above others were rarely or never favored among everyone else (see: Wonderful 101). Last year was the first time a bunch of my tastes synched up with anyone else's.

I suppose what I'm saying is that tastes shift and change, people's time and lives change, and how common your personal preferences are shift and adjust. We've all gone through it at some point, and in some cases continue to go through it. At this point I've grown to accept that I don't like the majority of indie stuff out there, I prefer AA or AAA, and moreso I prefer Japanese based rather than Western. But that's how it is, y'know?

My top ten is going to look like I'm just being a contrarian, but in truth I'm just posting what I honestly felt about what I played that year. That's how it is. Nevertheless, despite my deepest misgivings and self-doubts, I know that there are people on this forum that, for some reason, actually enjoy reading my thoughts on things, even if they don't feel the same. So I'm gonna post my novel, knowing that some people will skim right on past but also knowing that some will take the time to read through it all.

Also: as I stated regarding Red Dead 2, I think the sort of folks that would vote AAA games like that are going to be closer to the deadline. Just a hunch, but I feel like you always get the quirky indie titles early on, and then in the last week you have a horde of final posts that often enough change the game. Clock and Eleima would know better, of course, having tallied results the past several years, but it seems to me that you can never count on something being a solid winner no matter how deep into the month you go.

WizardM0de wrote:

Only you can prevent Slay the Spire or Subnautica from being GWJ’s 2018 GOTY, so post your list already! :P

On second thoughts no AAA lists allowed

BadKen wrote:

I honestly feel I have nothing to contribute this year. My solidly PC mainstream tastes are so far afield from everything I've read here that anything I might have to say would have no real audience.

GWJ has gradually been leaning more and more away from my tastes for years now, from the popular topics to the games featured on the front page and on the Conference Call. I guess this year it just reached critical mass for me.

So I'm just going to keep playing my Tomb Raiders and Assassin's Creeds and Crews and Endlesses and Clancy'ses and Agents of Mayhems and Forzas, while the bulk of the community goes crazy for retro graphics and walking around games and three hour experiences.

I'm not looking for pity or condolences, just describing my perspective.

Honestly I would like to hear your thoughts about those games, but I do agree with you, maybe I'm just not looking in right places but this year I haven't seen much traffic for more mainstream games. Peoples taste change, last year my top 10 looked something like straight from an anime convention, this year its mostly AAA western or atrsy games.

My list will definitely come on the last day or two this year for sure, and it will still be my usual schizophrenic mixture of of AAA “trash,” popular indie games, and quirky Japanese games that stoke my teenage nostalgia. I have no doubt that every entry on my list will be sneered at by someone for some reason — maybe because my popular choices seem too mainstream, maybe because my indie choices are always a bit pedestrian, maybe because my Japanese choices are either too Japanese or not Japanese enough. Oh, and at or near the top of my list will almost certainly be a game-as-a-service game which will be generally befuddling to nearly everyone except the other people who spent most of the year playing and loving it with me, and by and large my list won’t line up very well with the eventual summary results.

Still, I will post my list and I will be entirely unapologetic about what is on it, because it will be the list of games that I played and enjoyed this year ordered by how much I played an enjoyed them. (I might be somewhat apologetic with respect to the size of the screenshots I’ll post along with my list, but that will have everything to do with people trying to load the page on mobile devices and nothing to do with what I’ve included on my list and what order it is in.) As far as I’m concerned this thread isn’t a popularity contest, but rather a chance to connect with other members of our community on an individual level about what they enjoyed playing this year. The vast diversity of games I see on lists and the dramatic shifts year to year are exciting to me, and a representation of why this has been my internet community of choice for nearly a decade and a half.

So, BadKen (and anyone else feeling similarly), please post your list. The audience for your thoughts on the games you played this year is not just the people who played the same games; in fact, the people who didn’t play those games might be more interested, not less. I know for a certainty that I want to see your list, and I want it to be part of the summary at the end of the year. That summary is only interesting when it is a cumulative representation of what the wide spectrum of people who are part of this community have enjoyed during a year, and so it is poorer for every community member who doesn’t participate.

zeroKFE wrote:

My list will definitely come on the last day or two this year for sure, and it will still be my usual schizophrenic mixture of of AAA “trash,” popular indie games, and quirky Japanese games that stoke my teenage nostalgia.

That pretty much describes my list.
Also waiting until last few days I think. Plenty of time left to finish x and y!