This year I didn’t have a lot of time for games, so when it came time for GOTY I had to do a little bit of reflecting to put my list together. What’s more is that of the small library of games I did play, I felt that a lot of them were not on par with a game I would be confident calling great. So this year, while I enjoyed games like Titanfall and Dragon Age: Inquisition I had to keep my list to only four games which I felt really stood out.
4) The Walking Dead: Season Two
I didn’t play Season One of The Walking Dead until this year, otherwise it would have easily had a place on my Game of the Year list in 2013. Season Two felt like a much weaker entry but I still adored it. Telltale has basically boiled down the best parts of narrative-based games to make an experience that have everything I want from interactive fiction – Making choices and feeling really bad about them. Clementine’s story takes us through more human misery as the world falls apart, putting you in the tough situations which Telltale does so well, asking you to make very hard and sometimes uncomfortable choices about what to do to survive. If you haven’t played Season One you would be doing yourself a disservice to play Season Two first, but I hardily recommend you play both. And feel really crappy about yourself.
3) Nidhogg
These days I rarely play games with other people. With the exception of occasional co-op sessions, I mostly like to stick to single-player experiences and I’m fine with that. To find a game that I like to play with others is rare enough, but to find a game that I can be just as delighted with now as the first time I picked it up is almost unheard of. The first time I played Nidhogg I laughed, shrieked, cursed and had a great time with friends, and I still have that experience every time I play. For my money Nidhogg is the perfect multiplayer game – It’s fast and exciting, simple enough where the new player can still hop into the game and pose a threat to the veteran but with enough complexity that each opponent will make your play experience unique. As long as you have a few good friends you could play Nidhogg for ten minutes or all evening and have a kickass time.
2) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
I don’t care about Lord of the Rings. Really at all. So when friends started talking about Shadow of Mordor I thought it was something you had to be a fan to enjoy. But people wouldn’t shut the hell up about it. Eventually I had to bite and I picked up a copy and suddenly I had lost two days of my life. Shadow of Mordor is basically just a pleasurable, Uruk-killing mechanism and I love it. The lauded Nemesis system is one of the most exciting ideas I’ve seen in the past few years and I can’t wait to see where it’s going to be used next. While the game is not complex in any way, it has just enough depth to keep its small number of mechanics extremely entertaining. My favorite games are the ones with strong stories and lots of player choice, but I also really love these kind of games which are just the pure, distilled mechanics of fun – Sword-fighting, stealth kills… Jumping. It’s fantastic.
While I really liked both Seasons of The Walking Dead, there is no doubt in my mind that The Wolf Among Us is the best graphic adventure game I have ever played. Telltale’s adaptation of Fables is engaging, exciting and surprisingly touching. I honestly can’t think of a single complaint about this game, only praise. What TWAU does especially well, better than any interactive story I’ve ever played, is that I can replay the game many times (And I did) and no matter how many times I make different choices their impact never diminishes. Whereas with The Walking Dead my second playthrough made some of my more important choices feel very superficial, the big choices in The Wolf Among Us felt meaningful no matter how I handled them which is a testament to the game’s exceptional writing. Combined with an intriguing story, some great voice acting, and surprisingly engaging action, I put down The Wolf Among Us knowing I had played something exceptional. If you haven’t played, stop reading this article and go get it now.
