{"id":1101,"date":"2017-12-24T14:09:10","date_gmt":"2017-12-24T19:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/?p=1101"},"modified":"2017-12-24T14:09:10","modified_gmt":"2017-12-24T19:09:10","slug":"games-of-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/2017\/12\/games-of-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Games of 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

There were a lot of games released in 2017, so many that there are still probably 8-10 games that came out that I want to play that I haven’t gotten around to, and I probably never will get to some of them.\u00a0 Thankfully, many of the games that I did play turned out to be quite good.<\/p>\n

These days the toughest question I have to deal with when putting out this list is figuring out what exactly constitutes a game that was “released” in 2017.\u00a0 On some level the days of going to a store and buying a disc or cartridge that contains the final version of a game is over.\u00a0 This list includes one game that’s still in Early Access, another game that was in EA for a couple of years but finally saw its official “release” this summer, and a game that was released episodically throughout 2016 but wasn’t put together as a complete retail package until January.\u00a0 Then there’s something like No Man’s Sky<\/em>, which was so thoroughly changed through free DLC this year that it’s practically a new game.\u00a0 I didn’t include it since it was already my #2 game last year<\/a>, but it’s an interesting question.<\/p>\n

One big difference between this year and most other years I’ve done this list is that this year there aren’t nearly as many indie games.\u00a0 In previous years I’ve had games with small budgets but great ideas at or near the top of the list, with Game of the Year honours going to things like The Banner Saga<\/em> or Papers, Please<\/em>.\u00a0 I couldn’t say why that is, but for whatever reason this year’s list is dominated by games from big publishers.<\/p>\n

I make no claim to having an exhaustive list of the “best” games of 2017.\u00a0 I counted about 25 games that I played enough of this year to form an opinion, but there are plenty more I haven’t played and would like to (I hear Yakuza 0<\/em> is a lot of fun), or games that I started and enjoyed but got distracted from before I could decide how much I liked them (like Thimbleweed Park<\/em>).\u00a0 So these are just the ten games I got the most enjoyment out of this year.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

10. Assassin’s Creed: Origins<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Assassin’s Creed: Origins <\/em>is the most Video Games video game of 2017.\u00a0 It’s a platformer with an RPG levelling system, combat at least vaguely inspired by Dark Souls<\/em>, equipment divided into blue\/yellow\/purple coloured tiers in the way that World of Warcraft<\/em> pioneered, a completely extraneous crafting system, quest design that seems to be trying to mimic The Witcher 3<\/em>, fortresses that seem pulled from Far Cry, and an enormous open world that you can ride through on horseback.\u00a0 It seems determined to continually pull you out of the experience with reminders that this is software-as-a-service just as much as it’s a single-player game, that you can always spend more money, and maybe could you spend some more money?<\/p>\n

And yet despite all that, there’s nothing in the game that is especially bad<\/em> either.\u00a0 All of its components are competently executed (except the crafting, I think, which is just a lazily designed time sink).\u00a0 It is, on a technical level, extremely impressive.\u00a0 The sheer number of unique art assets in the game is absolutely staggering, virtually all of them at an impressive level of detail and quality.\u00a0 They’ve also fixed some of the problems that recent incarnations of Assassin’s Creed <\/em>have had; for example, they finally got rid of the god forsaken instant fail stealth sections.\u00a0 And in general the moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty fun.\u00a0 It’s almost never a bad game, but it’s never really a great game either.\u00a0 It’s pretty good, but unremarkable.\u00a0 And there is just way, way, way too much of it, and it makes me sad that we’re never going to get a really clever, tightly focused Assassin’s Creed<\/em> (like AC2) <\/em>again.<\/p>\n

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9. Fire Pro Wrestling World<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Fire Pro Wrestling<\/em> is not a game that everyone, even every wrestling fan, will enjoy.\u00a0 It’s completely lacking in terms of presentation, has very few match types to choose from, and features no real wrestlers (though it’s got a great character creator and it’s easy to download real wrestlers that other people have created).\u00a0 It also has no story or career mode, although they are apparently planning to add one in January.\u00a0 What it is good at is being a game about wrestling matches.<\/p>\n

One thing Fire Pro<\/em> captures that other recent wrestling games haven’t is the flow of a match.\u00a0 Grapples are divided into weak, medium, and strong, and at the beginning of each match anything other than a weak grapple will be countered.\u00a0 After a couple of minutes of wearing an opponent down you can start to execute medium grapples, and a few minutes later you might be able to land a big move.\u00a0 Strikes follow this formula too: early on you’re unlikely to land a large strike like a clothesline or a dropkick, but a simple jab or chop is a lot easier to land.\u00a0 It even includes some of the fun little moments that wrestling matches often contain, like tests of strength and back-and-forth strike exchanges.<\/p>\n

This means that every match has a real flow to it that roughly follows what you’d expect from a real (fake) wrestling match, with the early going being a back and forth of quick strikes, simple throws, and wear-down holds, progressing into bigger and more damaging moves, eventually building up to landing signature strikes and finishing moves.\u00a0 If you can put up with a game that doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles but does have excellent in-ring action, this one’s worth picking up.<\/p>\n

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8. The Long Dark<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Long Dark<\/em> is ostensibly a “survival” game, but it bears little in common with games like Don’t Starve<\/em> that probably come to mind when someone mentions the genre.\u00a0 While The Long Dark<\/em> does have hunger and thirst meters, as well as crafting, it’s actually a fairly gentle game once you get the hang of how it works.\u00a0 It’s relatively easy to have a single game that runs for several hours unless you stumble into a really unfortunate situation, like getting mauled by a bear.<\/p>\n

Instead, The Long Dark<\/em> is a much quieter and more contemplative game about trying to eke out an existence for yourself, alone in the frigid Canadian wilderness.\u00a0 I’m having a bit of difficulty describing what I particularly like about this game because it succeeds not in big moments, but in small ones.\u00a0 Walking up over the crest of a hill to find a cabin that will be safe and warm to sleep in overnight as the temperature drops.\u00a0 Trekking through a snow-covered, wind-swept valley in search of new horizons to uncover.\u00a0 Staring out at an aurora late at night (but not for too long, because you’ll freeze to death).\u00a0 Warming up with a mug of tea and a new pair of mittens.\u00a0 The Long Dark<\/em> is a game that succeeds not as a series of challenges or systems to master, but as an experience of the feeling of particular place and circumstance.<\/p>\n

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7. Dead Cells<\/strong><\/p>\n

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This is the first time I’ve included a game on one of my year end lists that isn’t even finished yet (it’s still in Early Access), but Dead Cells<\/em> is already a well-tuned game with a lot of content to play through.\u00a0 It bills itself as a Metroidvania, but I think it’s better to think of it simply as an action-platformer that happens to have randomly generated levels.\u00a0 It’s a game that feels great to get better at, to push yourself to reach new levels and progress further along.\u00a0 The moment-to-moment combat is incredibly satisfying, with a wide variety of weapons to use, each of which handles differently and has different attributes.\u00a0 At this point the game seems to be largely feature-complete, with the major changes being new content and balance fixes.\u00a0 I’m looking forward to seeing where the developers take it.<\/p>\n

If you want a bit more detail about what makes Dead Cells <\/em>great, Rock Paper Shotgun just named it their Game of the Year<\/a>, and they’ve got a good write-up about it.<\/p>\n

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6. Horizon: Zero Dawn<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Horizon: Zero Dawn<\/em> was the best photography simulator I played in 2017.\u00a0 It has absolutely gorgeous environments and a great photo mode, which I used to take something like 200 screenshots (the above image is one I took, and I shared some of my other favourites here<\/a>).\u00a0 As a game H:ZD <\/em>is a bit more of a mixed bag.\u00a0 I thoroughly enjoyed the combat mechanics – taking on the robotic dinosaurs that also happen to comprise the game’s central narrative mystery is great fun.\u00a0 And thankfully that excellent combat is the primary thing you’ll be doing in the game.\u00a0 It’s also a joy to explore the world, thanks to the great environments.<\/p>\n

But it also suffers from many of the same problems that Assassin’s Creed Origins<\/em> does, in that it is a very Video Games video game.\u00a0 There’s a lot of extraneous fluff that distracts from the parts of the game that I enjoyed the most.\u00a0 It’s way too big, it offers too many pointless quests, it has a needlessly complicated item system, throws in a largely unneccessary crafting system, and so forth.\u00a0 The writing is also not particularly good, and for the love of God, please stop using audio logs to deliver narrative.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, the things Horizon <\/em>does well it does very <\/em>well, and so it was a game I had a lot of fun playing, even though it would have been better if it was more focused and about 10 hours shorter.<\/p>\n

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5. Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Death of the Outsider <\/em>is the expansion\/sequel to a game that I think is criminally under-rated, Dishonored 2 <\/em>(I had <\/a>D2<\/em> as my 3rd best game of 2016, and the only reason it wasn’t higher is because two of my favourite games of the past decade also happened to be released last year).\u00a0 Death of the Outsider<\/em> takes place in the same world, even borrowing a couple of levels, and it’s more of what Dishonored 2<\/em> was so great at.\u00a0 It creates a series of interlocking systems and open-ended quests that really reward you for exploring, experimenting, and understanding how the game world functions.\u00a0 Here’s a story of something that happened to me while playing that highlights why I like this game so much:<\/p>\n

There’s a bar where the members of a gang hang out.\u00a0 I’d managed to get myself into the bar, but in the course of completing a side-objective I’d alerted someone in the gang that I was up to no good, and they began trying to attack me.\u00a0 With nowhere to hide, I sprinted down the stairs to the main floor and flew out the front door. As I went, the number of gangsters chasing me increased.\u00a0 They followed me outside.\u00a0 Well, as it happens, outside of the club there’s a checkpoint manned by the city guard.\u00a0 The city guard and the gangsters were enemies, so the guards attacked the gangsters on sight, giving me room to escape, and starting a big fight between the two AI factions.<\/p>\n

Now, that’s pretty cool on its own, but the real fun happened later.\u00a0 There’s another side quest that has you tail a gang member from another part of town to find out who they’re working for.\u00a0 So I’m darting across rooftops, trying to figure out where the gangster is going, when she walks into the intersection where the city guard and the gangsters have been fighting.\u00a0 The guards realise that she’s part of the gang they’re fighting with and attack her on sight, killing her, and causing me to fail my mission.<\/p>\n

Now, this might sound bad – after all, I’d lost the ability to complete a side quest.\u00a0 But the way the game’s systems came together to produce a coherent, emergent narrative was so great, and it’s a perfect example of why I enjoy Dishonored 2<\/em> and Death of the Outsider<\/em> so much.<\/p>\n

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4. Super Mario Odyssey<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Patrick Klepek of Waypoint<\/em> described <\/a>Super Mario Odyssey<\/em> as “a fever dream of creativity and pure joy” and that’s about as perfect a description of the game as I can think of.\u00a0 No game that I played in 2017, or perhaps in any recent year, made me smile as often as Mario Odyssey<\/em>.\u00a0 People who are seriously into video games often view the height of the art form as the ability to make players cry.\u00a0 But I think making people sad is easy.\u00a0 What’s harder and more rewarding is joy, and Mario Odyssey<\/em> is a game that channels every element, from its animations to its mechanics, from its sound to its structure, into joy.<\/p>\n

If Mario Odyssey<\/em> was just a game with a fun world and silly animations it would still be a good game, but it’s so much more than that.\u00a0 It’s a fantastic platformer, taking the formula Nintendo invented with Mario 64<\/em> and expanding upon it in some clever and inspired ways.\u00a0 It has a philosophy that is opposed to most big budget games in that it is absolutely packed<\/em> with fun things to do.\u00a0 There is no filler, no unneccessary systems, no wasted time.\u00a0 It’s hard to run 10 feet in Mario Odyssey<\/em> without finding something fun to do, some new power moon to uncover, some new test of Mario’s abilities to conquer.\u00a0 It follows the pattern of most recent Mario games in that almost any player could complete the main story and defeat Bowser, but there are so many optional challenges available that players of any skill level can find something compelling to keep them occupied.\u00a0 It’s also filled to the brim with great surprises (the twist in the moon level is a personal favourite).<\/p>\n

I’m typically most enamored of video games with coherent worlds and compelling systems, which is why there are still three games ahead on this list, but I can easily say this for Super Mario Odyssey<\/em> – it’s the game released in 2017 that made me the happiest.<\/p>\n

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3. Hitman<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Hitman<\/em> episodic game was released in six parts over the course of 2016, but it wasn’t put together as a full retail package until 2017, and I didn’t play it until then, so I think it qualifies for this list.\u00a0 It may be surprising to see this game so high up on my list, but I’m definitely not the only one who loved it – Giant Bomb<\/em> named it their Game of the Year last year<\/a>.\u00a0 But what makes it so great?\u00a0 I’ll repeat what I said about Dishonored 2<\/em>: “It creates a series of interlocking systems and open-ended quests that really reward you for exploring, experimenting, and understanding how the game world functions.”<\/p>\n

Each episode in Hitman<\/em> tasks you with assassinating somewhere between one to four characters who are going about their day-to-day lives across the fairly large levels.\u00a0 Two of the episodes also ask the player to complete one additional objective, and the second episode (Sapienza, the one pictured above) is my favourite.\u00a0 Each episode features a large, complicated location like an Italian villa or a luxury hotel in Thailand, and they’re full of people doing fairly normal things on fairly normal schedules.\u00a0 Some of those people are clearly related to the central quest, like security guards in the hotel, while others are merely there to make the environments feel more alive, like shopkeepers in Sapienza.<\/p>\n

The fun comes primarily from two things.\u00a0 The first is figuring out how to reach the target(s), since they’re never just wandering down an abandoned alley where you can assassinate them with ease.\u00a0 Usually this will involve some combination of sneaking as well as disguises – the best way to describe Hitman<\/em> is as a “social stealth” game where you’re trying to hide in plain sight.\u00a0 The second element that the game draws its fun from is the enormous variety of ways to interact with the world and characters.\u00a0 Each episode can be completed in a huge number of ways, and replaying the levels to try out different tactics is always a lot of fun.\u00a0 And once you’ve mastered each episode’s story campaign, there is a bunch of optional side content, like “elusive targets” with their own mini-stories that you only get once chance to complete.<\/p>\n

Like Dishonored 2<\/em>, Hitman succeeds at setting up a toybox and letting the player create their own kind of havoc inside of it.<\/p>\n

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2. Persona 5<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I went back and forth between the top two games on this list a number of times.\u00a0 When Persona 5 <\/em>is good, it’s really good.\u00a0 Most of my favourite games are turn-based role playing games, but it’s pretty rare to see a turn-based RPG released these days that isn’t a low-budget indie game (like The Banner Saga<\/em> or Darkest Dungeon)<\/em>.\u00a0 The easiest way to describe the Persona <\/em>games is that they’re like Pokemon<\/em> with demons instead of cute animals, and also when you’re not delving into dungeons you play as a regular high school student doing regular high school things, like trying to deepen your friendships or spend more time with that cute girl who’s teaching you to play shogi.<\/p>\n

Persona 5<\/em> has the best dungeon designs in the series, with each level having a great visual motif.\u00a0 In fact, the whole game looks outstanding, with what is possibly the best user interface design I’ve seen in a game.\u00a0 Everything in the game fits together, from the fonts used in the menus, to the music, to the level design, and so much more.\u00a0 The story also touches on some surprisingly difficult material for video games, like sexual harassment, and while\u00a0Persona<\/em> doesn’t always stick the landing, it does more often than not.\u00a0 It’s essentially a game about how rotten adults can be towards teenagers, and it’s pretty insightful about how little power teenagers really have and how easy it can be for adults to take advantage of that.<\/p>\n

The main reason this isn’t my #1 game is that it is just too damn long.\u00a0 Persona 5<\/em> tells a single linear story, and that story can take something like 80-100 hours to complete.\u00a0 I still haven’t finished it (I’m about 2\/3 of the way through).\u00a0 A lot of the content is just unneccessary.\u00a0 I can’t tell you how many times I had to sit through essentially the following conversation (dozens of times, easily):<\/p>\n

teenager 1: <\/em>we haven’t solved the problem yet!
\nteenager 2:<\/em> i’m getting really worried we haven’t solved the problem!
\nteenager 3: <\/em>guys, we’re going to solve the problem!
\nteenager 2: <\/em>but what if we don’t solve the problem?
\nteenager 1: <\/em>time is running out, we better solve the problem soon!<\/p>\n

My other issue with the game is that it has a save system ripped out of 1994.\u00a0 When you’re inside the dungeons you can only save in specified “safe rooms”, and those are generally about half an hour apart.\u00a0 If the main character is knocked out in a battle, it’s an immediate game over, so if you walk into a battle with a new enemy and you’ve got the wrong elemental affinity, it’s easy to lose 15-20 minutes of progress with no recourse.\u00a0 There’s just no reason for a game released in 2017 to have this problem.<\/p>\n

So Persona 5<\/em> is great, but flawed.\u00a0 If it was about 50% shorter it would have been my Game of the Year.\u00a0 Chrono Trigger<\/em> was about 20 hours long.\u00a0 Final Fantasy 7<\/em> took about 35 hours.\u00a0 You don’t need three times that long to tell a good story.<\/p>\n

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1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Breath of the Wild<\/em> seems to be everybody’s Game of the Year, so it’s probably no surprise that it’s also mine.\u00a0 I like it for the same reasons I like Dishonored<\/em> and Hitman<\/em>: it’s constructed from a coherent system of rules which combine in fun, often unexpected ways.\u00a0 If something should be able to catch fire, it can catch fire.\u00a0 If something should be affected by wind, it’s affected by wind.\u00a0 If something is metal, you can push or pull it with magnets.\u00a0 The systems go even further than many other similar games; for example, you can drop raw meat into a cooking pot to heat it up, making it better at improving health. But if you kill an enemy on a volcano, and the meat drops on the surface of the volcano, it cooks immediately.\u00a0 But you’ve got to be careful, because being on a surface as hot as a volcano is also dangerous for Link, the player character.\u00a0 Thankfully, the game gives you a variety of ways to deal with these situations, all of which make perfect sense systemically.\u00a0 For example, one way to stay warm when you’re high up on a cold mountain is to change into warmer clothes and eat a hot curry. But another way, which became my preferred way, is to simply equip a giant flaming sword.\u00a0 The heat from the sword keeps your body temperature up.<\/p>\n

One of my favourite things to do in games is to just explore<\/em>, and this is another area where Breath of the Wild<\/em> excels.\u00a0 Ever since The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion<\/em> was released, the idea that “if you can see a mountain off in the distance you can climb it” has been a staple in open world games, but Breath of the Wild<\/em> adds one simple mechanic that makes this idea better than ever: you can climb virtually any surface in the game.\u00a0 You’re limited by a stamina meter, and extending the stamina meter so you can climb to increasingly inaccessible areas is one of the great joys of the game.\u00a0 More than anything else I played this year, Breath of the Wild<\/em> makes it fun to just wander around and see what you can find.<\/p>\n

I do wish it had proper Zelda<\/em> dungeons, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There were a lot of games released in 2017, so many that there are still probably 8-10 games that came out that I want to play that I haven’t gotten around to, and I probably never will get to some of them.\u00a0 Thankfully, many of the games that I did play turned out to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1101"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1122,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions\/1122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}