Best Games I Played in 2015

2015 is the year that open-world games broke me. Remember a few years ago, when everyone was complaining about “shooter fatigue” because it seemed like every game we played was the same thing where you shot at things and the only thing that changed were the things that you shot at? That’s how I’m feeling about open-world games right now. They’re great if you want to spend days and days in the world of a game, but that just sounds like work to me. Personally, I’d prefer a short, authored experience. Anyway, this explains why there are some high-profile games that aren’t on this list¹ - they were probably open-world games that just didn’t get their teeth into me.

Rocket League

This is an unranked list, but if I was going to rank it, Rocket League would be the clear winner. It’s a football game, you hit the ball into the opponent’s net. But instead of controlling a player, you’re driving a car. A car with a rocket on the back of it. It sounds like a joke, right? Well, Rocket League was the most fun I’ve had in any video game all year. The local multiplayer is great fun, screaming laughing with your pals as one of you pulls off some ridiculous goal. Which is great by itself, but it’s also got a real depth to it. Watch some high-level videos and it’s like a whole different game. What I love most is that it’s genuinely the best football game I’ve played. All the other games, like FIFA, are trying to recreate the experience of watching football. Rocket League is recreating the experience of playing football. Favourite game of 2015.

Her Story

This is only the second ever video game (after Silent Hill 2) that my wife has ever played to completion. FMV is back!

The Witcher 3

Okay, so I realise it was only just a minute ago that I was complaining about open-world games. And here’s an open-world game on my list. What the hell, John? Listen, my main complaint with open-world games is that it’s a way for the developers to artificially stretch out a game, to make it seem bigger than it actually is. And they can use it to hide a lot of the cruft in their actual narrative writing, going “ooh, but isn’t the environmental storytelling so good?” The Witcher 3 had actually great writing underpinning it. It’s dense, but accessible. There are quests here that I’m still thinking about, months after I put the game down. The open-world nature of it was incidental to the actual game. I haven’t enjoyed being in a game’s world this much since Red Dead Redemption.

Panoramical

It seems like every year I make these lists, there’s at one entry that could be accused of not really being a game. This year it’s Panoramical. And sure, it’s not very game-like. It’s more like a peaceful, meditative toy. There’s no win-state to the game. You’re just presented with a series of landscapes with different visual and audio tracks, and you control the levels of these tracks. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Play away. You finish when you’ve had enough. There’s some real beauty here, if you’re into that kind of thing. I really am.

The Beginner’s Guide

For the first hour or so of The Beginner’s Guide, I was in awe at the inventiveness of the game. It seemed like creator Davey Wreden was just showing off. At the very end of the game, there’s a revelation. And this completely upended everything I’d just experienced. I immediately played through it again and, even though it was the exact same content, I had a totally different experience. That someone can do something ambitious like this and just fucking nail it so hard is pretty impressive. When you know the back-story and realise this game is actually about something so deeply personal? Yeah, maybe he is showing off.

Sunless Sea

Even though the two are nothing alike, playing Sunless Sea triggers the same part of my brain that is triggered when I play board games like HeroQuest. There’s this wonderful, tactile feeling to the game, like you’re playing with lovely hand-crafted miniature pieces in a world where anything can happen and there are million stories to tell. I’ve played a few different games of Sunless Sea now and they’ve always gone in different directions. I have a feeling I’ll still be coming back to this in 2016.

Super Mario Maker

Okay, let’s say you’re not interested in making any levels yourself. And let’s say you’re not completely won over by the most charming presentation in any game ever. Then there’s these three words: infinite Mario levels. You can just download other peoples’ creations and have an almost limitless supply of Mario levels for you to play and enjoy. If this still isn’t enough for you, then I just don’t know what to say to you.

Star Wars Battlefront

For a game that got fairly mediocre reviews, I had a fucking blast with Star Wars Battlefront. It’s not trying to be the deepest game ever made. It’s just trying to be a fast, casual, fun, and really, really ridiculously good-looking Star Wars game. And that’s exactly what it is.

When Amazon Dies

Siva Vaidhyanathan, media studies professor at the University of Virginia, talking about the worst-case scenario in an all-digital world:

“Amazon has done so much to bully both readers and publishers. And yet if it were to collapse, it would cause chaos.”

At the root of that chaos would be the immense loss of media, and the wholesale disappearance of works—not just from personal collections, but altogether. “At the start of the 22nd century, we are going to find ourselves in a situation with huge gaps in knowledge and culture. Because none of these companies will be around.”

P.T., an online-only game and one of my favourite games of last year, was removed from the PlayStation store by its publisher. You can’t download it again. If you want to play it now, your only option is to buy a second-hand PlayStation 4 with the game already installed on it. And once the hard drives die in these machines? That’s it, no-one will ever be able to play PT again.

The decline of ebooks

Craig Mod has some theories surrounding the apparent decline in ebook sales. TL;DR: he reckons it’s mostly to do with the physical experience of reading on ereaders (and let’s be clear, when we say ‘ereaders’, there’s really only one player in town, the Kindle). For me, he borders too much on the fetishisation of the physical form of the book. For example, here’s his description of the travel guide City Secrets

Bound in rust-coloured cloth, rough against the skin, with jet-black foil‑stamped lettering and a small key on the cover, City Secrets was skinny. The trim size was non‑standard, much taller than wide. It bent easily, fit handily into my jacket pocket, and was made with cover boards that had a reassuring springy resilience. The combination of the size and the cloth cover made it feel like a travel companion – a book that could take a beating, be dragged around the world, stored for years, and returned to, again and again.

It’s like Nigella-style food erotica for the lit crowd.

But I sort of agree with some of what he’s saying. As I mentioned before (and I’ll continue to mention at any available opportunity), I recently — finally! — finished Infinite Jest. Now, Infinite Jest is a goddamn doorstop. A thousand pages of some of the densest prose you’ll find. It should be the perfect candidate for Kindle-reading. But I read the entire thing on a physical book. I hauled that monster in and out of the city every day on my commute, even though it took up most of the space in my bag, simply because it was just a more pleasant experience than reading on the Kindle.

The worst part is that a lot of the things that keep the Kindle from being a genuinely great reading experience (as opposed to an entirely passable one) are fairly minor. They’re not insurmountable. They’re mostly niggly details like shitty font options and character spacing that could most charitably be described as ‘schizophrenic’. And these issues are getting addressed, albeit at a glacial pace. This June, almost eight years after the first Kindle was first released and seven generations into the Kindle product line, Amazon released firmware that finally fixed its shitty hyphenation and layout engine.

So the changes are slowly coming, but Amazon’s reluctance to release any information or suggestions of where they plan to take the Kindle is baffling to me. Especially when it’s their mealticket item. Apple called the Apple TV their “hobby” and said nothing about its roadmap (until they finally did). Amazon seem to be treating the Kindle in the same way. Is it any wonder people are returning to books? I’m sure they’ll be back to the Kindle when something dramatically enhance the experience on there, but who knows how long that will be?

Personally, there are two things I would love to see that would improve my relationship with the Kindle. First, release an updated Kindle DX. You know, the bigger Kindle. The “Kindle Pro”. My neighbour in Rome, an editor, used to have one and it was the cadillac of readers even then. The resolution of the Kindle Voyage is finally at a print-like level, but the size of the actual screen means it’s useless for anything but imitating cheap paperbacks. A slightly larger physical screen would open the device up to so much more.

Second, and this is a cheap, simple win - I’d love to see the Kindle display the cover of the book I’m currently reading instead of the Kindle’s shitty generic screensavers. When I read a physical book, I am greeted by its cover every time I look at it. I know the name of the author, I know the name of the book. On the Kindle, this stuff is hidden away from everyday view, so it’s possible to read a book and have no idea of its title or who wrote it. You’re cut off from a relationship with the book in favour of a relationship with its content. The cover, that singular piece of design that, let’s face it, we almost always base our initial judgement of a book on, is completely removed on the Kindle. Without it, a book is just a collection of photocopied pages held together with sticky-tape.