Games, 2012

I already talked about my favourite films of 2012. So now it’s time to talk about my favourite games of 2012.

FTL

FTL is a deceptively simple game. You make your way across the galaxy, dealing with emergencies that come up. But it’s less frantic than it sounds. The game is rarely frantic. Any time you lose, it’s not because you weren’t fast enough to click on something, it’s because you made a bad strategic decision ten or twenty turns back. The best Star Trek game never made.

Dishonored

Just in terms of world-building, this game deserves some serious credit. The story was pretty disposable – a dystopian world, there’s a rebellion, you’re its last hope, nothing you haven’t seen before – but the depth of the world was incredible. Each character had a fleshed-out back-story, whether you interacted with them or not. And the game does nothing to force this on you. A lesser game would say WE PAID WRITERS A FORTUNE FOR THIS SHIT, SO WE’RE GOING TO MAKE SURE EVERYONE HEARS IT. Not Dishonored. Bless them.

Super Hexagon

Remember when I said that I’m not particularly good at games, but muddle my way through anyway? Super Hexagon is the perfect example of this. I’ve sunk a worrying amount of time into it and still haven’t beaten it on its third difficulty level (of six). But that’s okay, because I can feel myself getting better at the game, even if it’s only in millisecond increments. It’s the only game on the front screen on my iPhone. That says something, right?

Journey

Journey gave me a completely unique experience. As you make your way through the game’s dreamlike environment, your game may or may not intersect with the games of other people. You can’t touch these people or interfere with them. The only thing you can do is to ‘chirrup’ at them – a little sound, with a symbol appearing over your head. Each player’s symbol is unique, like a fingerprint. You don’t know who these people are and the only way to identify them is with this symbol. You could play through the game and intersect with lots of other players dropping in and out of your game. Or you could play through the game with one other person.

That’s what I did. I played through the entire game with one other person. Completely organically, we developed a way to communicate with each other through these chirrups. We’d fly around the levels and make different noises to say different things, like “over here!” or “where are you?”. We’d show each other cool things we found in the level. It was lovely. The last level is a cold, snowy mountain. As we made our way towards the peak, the cold started to affect our characters. We couldn’t chirrup as loudly any more. It was harder to stay together, with the wind blowing us around. We had to huddle together to keep our energy from completely disappearing. And even though we couldn’t communicate with chirrups any more, we didn’t need to. What we had to do was obvious. We had to stay together. That was all. Right at the end, you have to make it across a narrow ledge with the wind trying to blow you off. At the very last moments, before the turn into ‘safety’, I made it. I turned around, but my friend hadn’t. He’d been blown off.

I couldn’t believe it. I was distraught. I put the controller down, not knowing what to do. I waited there for fifteen minutes and he never came back. He was gone. That last part of the journey was the saddest thing I’ve ever experienced in a game. During the game’s credits, you are shown the symbols of each of the players you encountered and their PlayStation username. I messaged that guy straight away. I can’t imagine another game invoking a real, human-level connection with another person quite as well.

Mark of the Ninja

This was the most perfectly-judged game I played this year. The stealth mechanic was spot-on and actually meant that there was a sense of being a “ninja” (as opposed to most other games, where “ninja” means “guy with a sharp sword and throwing-stars”). I finished this game over the course of two sessions and immediately started a new game, on the newly-unlocked difficulty level, where your character has his field-of-vision limited to what’s in front of him. Oh wait, did I say “perfectly-judged”? Fuck those dogs.