2018 was a good year to game. Usually, I don’t have enough titles to even put out a top 10 list. This is due to many reasons: games are long, I usually have a huge backlog that I’m trying to catch up on, and if I find a good multiplayer game, I’ll play a lot of that instead of diving into single player games. But this year is different somehow. I sank hundreds of hours into a multiplayer game, yet I still managed to play a bunch of other great games. Damn, I did a lot of gaming this year.
A big part of it is this list is littered with indie games. Very digestible, nice length indie games. Not huge 100 hours RPGs slogfests. This means I was actually able to beat a lot more games in a year. Not only that, but I actually platinum’d two of the games in this list, and I’m one trophy away from getting a platinum in another. That shows I really like the game if I’m willing to get all the trophies. Also, this year I had that sweet, sweet software engineer cash to spend—it’s actually a depressingly low amount of cash but still. No more years of being hindered by no money to purchase games—I am broke as hell though with all my debt though.
10) Red Dead Redemption 2
How times have changed. As a teenager, Red Dead Redemption became my favorite game ever. John Marston’s no nonsense attitude, the satire, the gunplay, the open world, the challenges, and the hunting blew me away. It was a true story of redemption.
If this game had come out after, I would’ve been blown away. But things have changed. GTA V happened and that got diminishing returns. So you bet that this would get diminishing returns as well. It’s just the formula has been done so much from Rockstar over the past decade, and I’ve experienced and loved it so much. But I want something different.
And while RDR2 does things to change things up, it’s not enough. They make things overtly complicated to make things different. Arthur is a good protagonist, but nowhere near John Marston or Nico Bellic. Gone is the vicious satire; in is the historical representation. Things are funny still but not like it was.
Still, the game is gorgeous. Everything looks amazing. The map is way bigger, and there’s a bonafide city now. The one thing I can say about this game is I stopped playing it to play other games that are higher on this list. And while I am going back to it in hopes of finishing it, it’s not as easy as it used to be.
9) Overcooked 2
A year or two ago, my good friend I met at Full Sail got my girlfriend Overcooked for her birthday. It was a lot of fun playing it with all of them, but when we were by ourselves, Cali and I found out that playing it by ourselves wasn’t that fun. The game is meant to be played with 3-4 people. You can tell by the level design. So while we ended up playing a decent amount of the game by ourselves, we didn’t finish it. Fast forward to several months ago, Cali and I decided to play it again by ourselves. Something clicked this time. We figured out how to make the levels work for just two people. We ended up beating it and completing every level and getting those 3 golden stars (out of 3 duh!)
A couple months ago for Cali’s birthday, one of my good friends at work got Cali Overcooked 2 for her birthday. So all three of us played the game, and we all had a blast. Adding another cook to the kitchen made things way more complicated, especially given Cali and I were already certified Michelin chefs, but it’s fun to have someone new in the kitchen. It’s okay that he is new too. The new cook isn’t missing much from not playing Overcooked as Overcooked 2 just provides more of what you love about the first: cool recipes, wacky and dynamic levels, and a crippled racoon.
8) Tetris Effect
I just picked this one up a week or so before I started typing this up, but I was already confident that the Tetris experience this game was delivering was one of the best available. And this is coming from someone who has played dozens of hours of Tetris. Now, I’m not a god like some of these huge nerds who are just t-spinning their way to the g-spot, but I know my way around a back-to-back Tetris. This is all thanks to Tetris Friends and Tetris Battle where I saw dozens and dozens of wins and losses against Tetris players. And for me, that’s the best version of Tetris. The competitor in me loved playing against others in Tetris.
This game is the opposite of those games. This is all about getting you into the zone of Tetris. There’s no competing against anyone. It’s just you, the music, and a million particles. Oh, and the PSVR will really make sure of this. All of these things seem silly when you take into fact this is just a Tetris game for $40 when you can just play Tetris online for free. But this is the real deal when it comes Tetris. This is what it’s like for Tetris pros who close their eyes. This is what they see.
7) Firewall Zero Hour
It’s crazy how a game could be so good and innovative in VR, but if it were to come out in a non-VR form, it wouldn’t be that great. That’s the beauty of VR: simple game design goes a long way here. And that’s where Firewall shines. It does something very similar to Counter-Strike, but it’s something that hasn’t been seen in VR. A multiplayer FPS military shooter based around hacking a computer or defending said computer. Like I said, it’s not doing much that other games haven’t done before, but it does it in VR and does it so well.
Now, I don’t want to discredit Firewall here though. It does innovate. The PS Aim is used to great effect here. The PS Aim looks like one of those things you buy your kid for Christmas from Walmart, and then it goes into the closet after its few days of fun. But this is not that. When you pick it up, you feel that it is a really nice piece of plastic that’s beautifully designed. Yet when you put on the VR headset, the PS Aim turns into a metallic locked and loaded SMG. You rotate the PS Aim, and your gun rotates. You lean the PS Aim out in front of you and pull the trigger, and in the game, you just leaned your gun out around a wall and killed someone without them even seeing you. It’s all these little things that add up to making this such an immersive game, and it’s why it gets away with the sample game design. Because it does it so damn well.
6) Beat Saber
I love rhythm games! If I had put all those hours playing a plastic guitar towards learning to play a real guitar, I would be pretty damn talented at guitar. Instead, while others are playing 6 string, 7 string, and even 8 string guitars, I’m pretty talented at at the 5 button OG Guitar Hero guitar and the 6 button Guitar Hero Live guitar. The thing is that no rhythm games have really been able to compare to the Guitar Hero series for me. There was something so damn special about Guitar Hero. The rock/metal oriented soundtrack, the insanely high skill ceiling, and the sick controller were ultimately were really special. The series made rhythm games hold a special place in my heart. And I’m always looking for a new rhythm game that will make me feel as bad at what I am doing as I was when I initially picked up the plastic guitar.
And that’s Beat Saber. It’s one of the most intuitive games ever made. You have two light sabers, and there are cubes you have to slice through. There are arrows on them showing which direction to slice, and this is all done to the beat. I let Cali’s mom play last month, and she loved it even though she’s never really played any modern games. But that’s how easy it is to pick up. She also loved it because of how awesome it feels. You feel like a true Klingon master when you’re swinging your light sabers—Gollem himself would be impressed by your saber skills. But it’s not an easy game. The campaign starts you off easy, but you soon start to see that the skill ceiling is a lot higher than you thought. And that’s the way I like my rhythm games. I eat my magic bean, and I watch myself grow til my head touches the ceiling.
5) Celeste
Before this game, I might’ve not considered myself a platforming fan. While playing though, I found myself loving the hard as nails platforming. It’s weird because Super Meat Boy is incredibly hard, but I’m not the biggest fan of the game. I liked it enough to beat it, but once I beat it, that was it for the most part. I couldn’t push myself to beat all the dark levels. But Celeste made me want to complete everything the game offered me regardless of how much it hurt me and stressed me out.
I think deep down I’m a huge fan of platforming. While stuff like Mario doesn’t really interest me anymore, I’ve played so damn much of Spelunky (one of my favorite games ever); Rayman Legends is amazing; and I can now add Celeste to the list of platformer games that I love. The design is absolutely impeccable. The developer gives you a set of tools, and they design every level with the intention of making you utilize every single one of those tools. You might not realize how the hell you’re able to utilize them, but with enough trial and error, you can figure it out. Now, what’s wild is you will get to the point where you know how to beat the level, but it’s just so damn hard that you can’t. The amount of precision required is insane. But I kept on pushing because the gameplay just felt so damn satisfying. That satisfaction is something I don’t really understand if we’re being honest.
Now, one thing I do understand that I need to mention is that the game has a story. Platformers usually don’t need a story really, but this one does. And it’s kind of nice. And the dialogue is actually well written and intentioned. And people are reacting very positively to the story. But some of the writing is absolutely cringey. It’s not cheesey; it’s cringey. You don’t have dialogue in a game where a character asks, “Do you want to talk about depression?” You can talk about depression in your game through symbology, which the game does, and other methods, but directly bringing it up like that is just wack. Regardless of this, the good intentions are there, and you can truly feel the heart and love from the developers. And regardless of the cringey moments, the game is rather touching.
4) Rusty Lake: Paradise
Hey, look! A mobile game on my best of list! And it’s freaking high up there man. When I beat Celeste, I was blown away. I thought to myself, “This is one of the best platforming games ever made, and it’s surely the second best game of the year!” Things change though. I was itching for a great mobile game that I could play at night while I lay in bed. I spent around $10 on a point-and-click series called Inner World that was getting raved, yet the graphics were so dated, and the VO was so annoying, I barely even played half an hour of it. So I went on Touch Arcade to find something else. And the first thing I found looked great. It was a game in the Rusty Lake series, and it looked creepy as hell. I heard it wasn’t the first though, so I went on the Apple Store to see what was up. I found out that there was actually a separate series that was tied to this series, and that series had around 10 freaking games in it! The series was called Cube Escape, and the first several were free. So I downloaded the game and set into the unknown universe of Rusty Lake. Boy, I had no clue that I would be playing one of the best video game series ever made.
I can honestly tell you with no hyperbole that I cannot really describe to you what the hell the Rusty Lake series is about. The first game opens up with you, a detective, solving a murder case. It’s creepy as hell, the point-and-click puzzles are tricky as hell, and the graphics remind me of flash games I played as a kid. By itself, the game makes some sense. But somehow tying all the games in the series together makes things absolutely convoluted. This is all beside the point. I ended up playing all the game in chronological order. 3-4 years worth of point-and-click games were savagely devoured by me. And then I got to the Rusty Lake series which took the damn cherry off your cake and replaced it with an Oreo because those bullshit candy cherries suck.
The Rusty Lake games were the first premium games in the series, and they tried to tell a different story that would give some backstory to the Cube Escape series. In this case, it’s backstory, but it’s also more information to confuse the hell out of you. The first two Rusty Lake games are just phenomenal, and Paradise is no exception. You get to play as a sibling of a family living on the titled lake, and the circumstances are fucked up. Just the way I like it; just the way the Rusty Lake delivers it. It’s a match made in heaven.
Let’s list some of those circumstances, so you can get a good understanding of what this game is like: you pull a worm out of grandma’s nose, you dissect your stupid uncle’s heart out of his chest, you help turn your brother into a big disgusting fly, and a big fly decimates a cow with his sucker. I’m a damn sucker for point-and-click game, and this one delivers on every single front conceivable. It’s one of the most fleshed out series I’ve ever had the chance to play, yet it’s also the weirdest game series I’ve ever played. If the game coming out this year is on the level of Paradise get ready to see it in my next year’s list of bet games.
3) Astro Bot: Rescue Mission
When I first got my PSVR, the first thing I played was The Playroom VR. It was a cool collection of several mini-games featuring a bunch of little robots. The polish was surprisingly great, and there was a platforming mini-game that was pretty cool. It took the Moss route for platforming: you are a floating camera above some little thing that you play God with. In this specific case, you are guiding a little robot that can karate punch other robots’ asses.
And that little astro bot is what makes this game so special. He might not say much other than a few different types of squeaks, but he/she/they/xer/xe/your majesty/blop/bip is so damn charming. You look at him, and he’ll wave at you. You don’t make him move around, and he’ll get bored and whip out his own VR headset. What do you think he’s up to there? It’s obviously not Beat Saber given he’s not very active when playing. Maybe it’s one of those Japanese VR sex games? Who knows. It’s little characteristics like that though that give this game such charm. They obviously put a lot into the world and the things you interact with.
And they really put a lot of thought into the things you interact with. As the big brother robot following this little robot around, you have a Dualshock 4 in front of you in the game that represents yours. It does nothing. That is until you put on a sweet gadget. The gadgets range from grappling hooks to a fire hose. Controlling these things show you that this game is about one thing: just having so much damn fun. And it succeeds in every way. It takes silly little VR gimmicks and turns them into grin churning machines. If this game had gotten a bit more attention, it would’ve become the Super Mario 64 of VR. Regardless of that, it is that for me.
2) Guacamelee 2
Drinkbox Studios. You’re all geniuses up there in Canada. [insert joke about maple syrup, canadian bacon, and canadian mannerisms like eh. Oh what’s that? Kevin Smith? You want to hire me to write on your sweet film franchise? Sure! You’re trying to turn Tusk and Yoga Hosers into the the first phase of a cinematic universe? Awesome! I’ll get to work on the second phase.] You went from making Guacamelee a spicy blend of platforming and 2D beat-em-up-and-toss-em-out action to Severed, a game that took Infinity Blade‘s main gameplay mechanic and made it theirs through the help of metroidvania level design, inventive monster design, and a heart felt story. Two hits of that caliber show that Drinkbox is the real deal, so I eagerly anticipated whatever they were working on next.
That next thing was Guacamelee 2. Personally, I felt the first game really wrapped up the story of Juan and his little chicken perfectly, so when I heard that you’d be playing as Juan again I was surprised. But I think that shows what Drinkbox had in mind for the sequel: do the same stuff that was in Guacamelee but go ham at it while also adding some new stuff. Boy, did they go ham with it.
Guacamelee 2 introduces you to the same mechanics it gave you in the first one, but it throws you into the deep end with them. This is because it knows you’ve already seen all of the abilities already, and it doesn’t want to bore you. So it gives you your old toys and quickly expects you to be up to par with the ability level that you had at the end of the first Guacamelee. And then it expects you to be even better.
They add a lot of other different things to this game though. They get sponsored by KFC to infuse the chicken even more into Juan, so, as a result, there are platforming parts where you have to constantly switch back and forth between Chicken and Juan. You really have to be in tune with your chicken. You gotta know how to make that little thing move.
What all of this boils down to is that this was one of the best times I had with a video game in 2018. The humor whether it be dialogue or trophy names had me be like, “LOL OMG that was so funny”; the platforming had a high skill ceiling that pushed me to my brink; and beating the shit out pinatas was just as fun as ever—you could say that they treated me like a pinata by dressing me up as a pinata and then sending in a group of little Mexican kids to wack your ass with a stick. Drinkbox: I’m ready for your next game you awesome developers.
1) Fortnite
Jesus. Where do I even start with this freaking game? Do I do some complicated storytelling that slips from modern day, historical text, and past day? Or do I just talk about how I started getting into Fortnite? I guess the latter. Sounds easier to write.
2017 was the year of PUBG for me. I played a couple hundred to maybe even three hundred hours of that beautiful game. Battle royale instantly hooked its claws into me, but PUBG‘s claws sank out of me eventually. So I thought I’d try out Fortnite given it was free. Nothing is like being thrown into a completely new game in a fresh genre. I got my ass handed to me so much in the beginning of Fortnite, but I kept playing because I liked it. I got one of my good friends from Full Sail to start playing with me, and that pushed me to get better. I eventually won some solo and duos matches, and I was hooked.
That initial skill gap between beginners and intermediate is immense in a battle royale. This gap is even more noticeable here though because it’s not only about getting good with the weapons Fortnite throws at you: it’s about getting good with building. You need to build in Fortnite because if someone pops a shot at you while you’re in the open, building a quick fort will save your life. You need to build because altitude is key. You need to build, so you can confuse the hell out of your opponents. You will be trash until building starts to somewhat click for you. The skill ceiling here is higher than any other battle royale. And that’s what I loved about this game. No other game has a build mechanic like this for a PvP game, and you can always get better at killing and building.
But there’s so much more to Fortnite. There’s the absolutely addicting battle pass system; there’s the robust crossplay system that allowed me to play hundreds of hours with my girlfriend who played on my PC in the other room; and there’s the tremendous support Epic gave and continues to give the game. The reasons behind this game’s success are many, and the reasons I played so damn much of it in 2018 were many.
Now, I’ve stopped playing this game, but it’s still a phenomenon. It’s got to be in my top five games of most played multiplayer games ever. It’s hard for a game to keep my attention like this. Not even PUBG had its hooks in me this long. While in the future, I’ll be talking about Fortnite with others just in regards to how much god damned money the game made—that Fortnite money is no joke fellas—this will always hold a special place in my heart as the best battle royale game ever.