End-of-year lists are silly. Here’s mine.
Rocket League
Rocket League is a fun game that makes my insides feel poisoned. Likely because I don’t interact with strangers on the internet much, this was one of my (luckily) very few direct exposures to slurs in 2017. At least now I know that PSN allows you to report other players. I probably will not play Rocket League again.
Hearthstone
This is such a perfect game. It always has been. Silliness, strategy and randomness come together perfectly to create a game that I love even when I hate it. Dungeon Run, the new game mode released in a recent expansion, is utterly brilliant. It distills what is usually the most costly, time-consuming aspect of a collectible card game (building your own deck and strategy) into a 30–45 minute roguelike boss rush. This is such a perfect game.
Magic: The Gathering
Playing MTG reminded me why I love Hearthstone.
Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition
My favorite thing about D&D’s rulebooks is that they boldly proclaim their own flexibility: “The rules serve you, not vice versa.” There are lots of reasons I could be called a bad DM, but it can’t be because I don’t follow the rules. Thanks to D&D, I get to find out if I’m bad at designing and running a game, rather than just learning if I’m bad at memorizing things (which I am).
Destiny 2
Destiny 2 is predicated on the notion that you have friends who like you enough to play video games with you, that all of your schedules/time zones align and that you can all afford to spend several hours at a time playing Destiny 2. Its single-player campaign is pretty good.
Jackbox Party Pack 3
By turning your computer or game console into nothing more than the moderator of a game that largely takes place in the physical space you share with your friends, Jackbox found the perfect way to make a party video game without losing the magic of a party game.
Splatoon 2
A game that forces you to watch an unskippable cutscene every time you launch it is a game that deserves a finite number of plays.
Super Mario Odyssey
What makes Super Mario Odyssey special is its generosity. Its arms are wide open from the start, and they only open wider as you continue to explore. It is packed to the brim with rewards for mastering an astounding variety of perfect mechanics, including the single best jump I’ve ever felt in a video game. New Donk City is a masterpiece of level design, Glydon is the funniest thing I’ve seen in my entire life, and Pokio deserves a standalone game.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2017 was the year Nintendo surprised us by giving us systems that behaved as promised. I speak of both the Switch and of Breath of the Wild, the former of which still feels like a parlor trick and the latter of which has blessed me with countless half-hour vacations. Breath of the Wild is a treat, a perfect storm of escapism, difficulty, tedium and reward. It impresses both with its commitment to its own rules (metal weapons attract lightning, meat cooks when dropped on the ground near a volcano) and with the love it has for its own world’s inhabitants. It is a game about forgetting and remembering, planning and improvising, climbing, falling, dying, helping strangers, chasing the unknown and traversing a beautiful, hostile environment. It is a game I refuse to finish so that I can always come back to it.
Tumbleseed
At an arcade bar in Seattle, I once played a game called Zeke’s Peak, which had the exact same mechanics as Tumbleseed (minus the powerups). I have never had as much fun playing Tumbleseed as I had that night.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Ocarina of Time is clunky, ugly and full of chores. Revisiting it in 2017 was an exercise in patience.
Solitaire
When our consciousnesses live across a network of quantum computers, and the sensation of shuffling a deck of cards is recreated at 99% accuracy in a real-time physics simulation, all of which is powered by the energy released from our unnecessary bodies as they’re consumed by a hyper-intelligent fungus we found on the dark side of one of Saturn’s moons, will we still play solitaire? I hope so.
Euchre
New euchre players can learn the basics quickly and pick up on the strategic edge cases within a round or two. After that point, euchre’s drama is tied to the innate drama of a deck of cards, and the story of each game is a story of luck disguised as triumph.
[Settlers of] Catan
How satisfying it is for a board game to really deserve its cultural status. Plenty don’t live up to their level of fame, but Catan does. It is neither quite as punishing as Monopoly nor as slow as Risk. It has become emblematic of the state of modern tabletop games for good reason, and if you still don’t have a copy at home then you’re wasting your time.
Secret Hitler
By introducing uncertainty into the primary mechanic of the game (passing policies) and giving players nothing but their word to stand on, Secret Hitler delivers an insanely consistent experience. Almost every game I play ends up being dramatic, tense and hilarious. Its rulebook leaves enough breathing room for lies to get creative, which means almost every round is going to get uniquely rude.
Avalon
Avalon is slightly less fun than Secret Hitler, but it causes slightly less discomfort after a year which had its fair share of genuine signs of fascism. I’ll let you decide whether that tradeoff is worth it.
7 Wonders
I walked away from the only game of 7 Wonders I played this year feeling like the game just happened to me. I made a series of mostly blind decisions optimizing for short-term gains, and then the game ended. Greedy algorithms are boring, and so is 7 Wonders.
Set
Set is Solitaire for smart people. I am not very good at it, but I really want to be.
Dutch Blitz
Card games should not be about reflexes or speed. Dutch Blitz is about both, and for that reason I will never enjoy it.
Google Chrome’s T-Rex Runner
There are likely product analysts at Google who know exactly how many people disabled their computer’s WiFi in order to play this game. I can say with certainty that at least one person has done this.
Tennis
A tennis match is a patient, violent, cerebral boxing match. It is a test of composure, creativity and stamina inside four imaginary walls. It forces you to converse with both yourself and your opponent, often in silence. It is a perfect game whose every point tells a compelling story and whose best players exemplify curiosity in their play. Every shot is a question with an immediate answer: “Can I do this?”
Soccer
“The beautiful game” is an almost ridiculous nickname for any sport to have, but the more soccer I play and watch the more it makes sense. Those who are skilled at the game make the beauty easy to see. But for those of us who are mediocre, soccer’s beauty is in its social nature: to be good at soccer without being skilled at soccer, you must learn to find, encourage and celebrate the strengths of your teammates. Soccer is played best by those who recognize and pursue beauty. The rest of us try our hardest.
Golf
At the end of 2017, I remain convinced that golf is actually an easy sport.
Putt-Putt
Rounds of miniature golf are much too short. A proper game of putt-putt should last 2 hours and should force you, towards the end of your grueling campaign, to combine what you learned from the windmills, the bank shots, the shortcuts and the bridges from the first 18 holes. I would kill for a truly taxing mini-golf experience.
The Witness
To play The Witness is to learn a new language, a new way of describing the world. In more words, I would compare The Witness to Duolingo. They both teach vocabulary and grammar by way of increasingly complex examples and expect fluency in return. This year, I learned that the reward for completing a game like this is the process of getting to the end, not the end itself.
Firewatch
There are many good things that Firewatch does: it teases a massive conspiracy only to reveal a well-scoped narrative conclusion; it utilizes some of the best voice-acting performances I’ve ever heard in a game; it manages to be both strongly authored and personal to the player; it puts you inside a layered, believable, human conflict. The very best thing it does, though, is give you a disposable camera, a means of encouraging and teaching the player to actually look at the environment. Regardless of what a video game purports to be about, video games on the whole are usually about space or a set of spaces, and I’m ecstatic that Firewatch recognizes that in itself.
Volume
I wanted very badly to like Volume, because I enjoyed Bithell’s prior release, Thomas Was Alone. Its early-game difficulty curve and lengthy monologues left me feeling a bit lukewarm, however, and I bounced off of it without much desire to return.
Night in the Woods
Some notes I just found on my phone from my playthrough of Night in the Woods:
- the game’s cuteness can wear thin, and Mae can wear you down, but maybe there’s a point to be made there
- pointlessness in the micro leads to pointlessness in the macro
What I didn’t write down that I want you to know is that this game has a massive heart, which it lays on the line for communities upended by the “progress” of the information age. Burnouts and layoffs, depressions and depression: this is the stuff Night in the Woods is made of.
Horizon Zero Dawn
Playing Horizon Zero Dawn feels a bit like playing through a homework assignment. It checks all of the boxes on the open world rubric, and does so with occasional flair. But this game does not lead me to believe that its developers respect me or my time. I feel I should revisit it at some point, but for now I am uninterested. Is this what all AAA games are like now?
Super Smash Bros. Melee
What is lost when we talk about Melee as a thrilling esport or as a mechanically fine-tuned brawler (and it is both) is that it is also a fundamentally absurd and deeply funny concept. Getting some time away from Smash Bros. over the last couple of years helped me appreciate it this year for all of its positives — both the intended and the unintended.
Mario Kart 8
Perhaps even more than Breath of the Wild, I am ecstatic that Mario Kart 8 came pre-bundled with my Switch. It has validated the purchase many times over, providing some much-needed harmless competition to my apartment. I can’t imagine a game this fun being more accessible, and I can’t believe that it looks as good as it does.
FIFA 2014
FIFA is a window into the uncanny. It brings you into a world where clay-faced machines with human likenesses sprint back and forth in an effort to kick a ball past each other. When you play FIFA, you exert control over these automatons, who usually and imperfectly do what you ask them to do until a whistle blows, at which point they all stop on a dime and stretch their legs in perfect unison.
Small World
Small World is composed of an emotional journey that starts with optimistic resignation and ends with a cold farewell. It is a game about making the best of what you have, leaning into the strengths of the tools at your disposal and throwing away everything you built with hopes of creating something better. It is a blast.
Alto’s Adventure
The designers of Alto’s Adventure had exactly the right priorities in exactly the right order: they placed feel and style above everything else, and it paid off. This is a game for folks who (correctly) thought Tiny Wings was a better game than Angry Birds.
Codenames
The core mechanic of Codenames is a thousand times more fun than the secondary mechanics of Codenames. This is the sign of a game that would be more fun to play uncompetitively on a road trip than in its present state.
Charades
The only game of charades I played this year was at a weirdly high-pressure birthday party. I was on a team with several strangers, and I disappointed them profoundly. Charades has a very bad ratio of embarrassment to payoff.
Apples to Apples: Jewish Edition
The problem with Apples to Apples is that its goal line moves. Does it call for random answers, clever ones, accurate ones? That last option, in particular, was something I felt altogether unqualified to judge when playing the Jewish Edition earlier this year. I try to avoid playing Apples to Apples.
Gin
My girlfriend very kindly teaches me the rules of Gin every time we play. I can’t remember them right now, but I have a strong impression that when Gin is played with two people, each hand is decided by the shuffle of the deck. You don’t play to win so much as to find out what order the cards were in. I like playing Gin a lot.
Topsoil
Topsoil was, in many ways, a relief. Its gameplay feels wholly unique at a time when puzzle games feel overrun by remakes, remixes and clones. It also has a surprisingly thoughtful way of asking for money (or ad views) that feels completely out of place in mobile gaming. Topsoil surprised me with kindness, and you should download it.
Desert Golfing
If you have not yet sold your soul to Desert Golfing, I encourage you to do so. It is the mobile golf game to end all mobile golf games.
Duolingo
Perhaps a stretch, but it uses enough game-like interaction models to qualify as a game in my book. To be honest, it may be one of my favorite games I played this year, due to the very obvious care its designers put towards creating an ideal bite-sized language-learning experience.
Bingo
Bingo, more than any walking simulator or visual novel, challenges my understanding of what counts as a game. It’s a boring lottery, a series of events with only one “mechanic.” Recently I played it during a Japanese class at a local community college and won a Kit Kat bar, which I did not eat.
n++
I played n, a slippery, inertia-based platformer, in my browser in middle school. Earlier this year, I played its grandchild on my PlayStation 4. I file it among many other middle school memories I wish had not stuck around.
Spelunky
Derek Yu’s recent publication for Boss Fight Books, a documentary of the entire development process for Spelunky, is a revelation. I really wish I could enjoy his game as much as I enjoy the way he talks about his game.
Fantasy Football
As I write this, Wario’s Boys are 5–8 for a respectable third place in their division.
Universal Paperclips
Universal Paperclips is the manifestation of a thought experiment about AI, a demonstration of the dangers of naive optimization and a profound instruction manual for empathizing with machines. Incidentally, it’s also a kickass clicker (a compliment I never would have expected to write).
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
Bennett Foddy makes it his business to distill the essence of frustration into a sweet nectar. In a year full of players being mad at developers, Getting Over It is a timely reminder that we are in charge of our own time; we should relish whatever activities we fill that time with, regardless of how those activities make us feel.
QWOP
QWOP is lightning in a bottle. It is totally stupid and totally joyful. If, miraculously, you’ve made it this far without experiencing QWOP, you owe it to yourself and to the rest of society to go play it right now.
GIRP
GIRP is both less compelling and less funny than QWOP. It did not captivate me.
CLOP
CLOP delighted me for 5 minutes, because it has a unicorn in it. Unfortunately, the horned horse is both easier to move and harder to laugh at than the Normal Human Person in QWOP.
Loudest Shortest Noise
This was taught to me by my friend Parker. In Loudest Shortest Noise, you and any number of friends take turns attempting to make the loudest, shortest noise. It is best played during a late-night walk home from a neighborhood bar.
Chess
I seem to enjoy wishing I was good at chess a lot more than I enjoy chess.
Checkers
“Chess is like looking out over a vast open ocean; checkers is like looking into a bottomless well.”
Luftrausers
Well-made, arcade-style games are timeless. I will teach my kids about Luftrausers the way that others teach their kids about Pac-Man.
Fire Emblem Heroes
There is every chance I did not play long enough to get to an interesting part of this game, but from what I can tell, Fire Emblem Heroes is a rote exercise in giving instructions to anime children.
Super Mario Run
Mario had a soul, once. He played golf and tennis; he started a fight club with Fox McCloud; he formed a one-man anti-pollution militia on a tropical island. But in 2017, Mario, like the rest of us, was enslaved to a rectangle. For a few bleak months before he blasted invasive French rabbits and boarded a hat-shaped airship to the Luncheon Kingdom, he acted out his own cartoonish episode of Black Mirror, running endlessly inside a technological prison. This is a game that is neither interesting nor mindless, neither poorly built nor well thought out. It is a game in which Mario runs away from smartphone users in fear or shame or both.
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is a bad game.
Infinity Loop
Infinity Loop is more or less an interactive wallpaper for your phone. It is the lowest level of challenge that can still qualify as challenge. It is as satisfying as cracking your knuckles. I highly recommend it.
Stack
What I find endearing about Stack is that it strikes me as the kind of game I could have made. It is a very simple, arcade-y idea that is neither particularly easy nor particularly interesting. It is also a very good example of how most mobile games are completely ruined by ad placements.
20 Questions
In college I learned about binary search and, more broadly, algorithms that find answers to questions by ruling out a percentage of possible answers over and over again, rather than just trying one attempt at a time. 20 Questions is a great example of the way we already unconsciously use this kind of thinking.
Never Have I Ever
This is not a fun game to play by any means, but I respect it for being a reliable mainstay among a group of people who only sort of know each other.
Biggest Smile, Deadest Eyes
How wide can you smile while still being dead in the eyes? Entertain yourself and your friends for minutes on end by finding out.
The Last of Us
I feel a strong desire to dislike The Last of Us. The way it’s pointed to as some sort of validation for the medium, a poster child for games that can make you Feel Things, makes me stupidly bitter, almost jealous on behalf of every other game ever made. I started it this year, but I would like to wait to play it until I can approach it more honestly. Someday, when I am less pretentious, I will probably enjoy it.
Resogun
A PS4 launch title, Resogun scratches the Geometry Wars itch but does not quite cure the rash.
Munchkin
I have a suspicion that the rulebook that came with my copy of Munchkin is incomplete or misprinted somehow. I remember playing long ago and finding it fun, but I have not yet had fun playing my own copy. I must be doing it wrong.
Monikers
Monikers is a boxed version of a party game that has been around forever. I see no reason why anyone should buy it.
Heroes of Sokoban
Heroes of Sokoban is a free crate-pushing game about learning and mastering a new logic, a list of six axioms. At no point are the rules broken, and at no point do they change. You either work within them or you stop playing.
My own shitty game prototypes
I spent several nights trying to make a jump feel right. I spent weeks making a room with walls that expand as the player moves, making an identical prototype in first person, third person and finally in 2D. I touched up some games I worked on in college, updating fonts to compensate for clunky mechanics. These were the worst games I played in 2017.
Beer Die
This is one of those drinking games that I would rather play without the drinking. I tend to come away from a loss at beer die (and it is always a loss) wishing I had played cornhole instead.
Beer Pong
Beer Pong is the best drinking game. Others (especially others on this list) lean too heavily on chance or on twitch and reflexes. Pong strikes a divine balance between drinking and game. It’s accessible to new players, readable to spectators, and flexible enough for varying house rules to keep it fresh under different circumstances.
Boom / Slap Cup / Rage Cage
Boom, unlike beer pong or beer die, lets you choose who will drink. It gives you the agency to decide whether you are playing because the game is fun or because you want to see a friend or acquaintance or coworker lose their composure. It invites you to be cruel.
Irish Poker
If Boom is a game for cruel people, Irish Poker is a cruel game. Combining heartless survival instincts with ice cold randomness, it is a game in which four or five people silently decide to ruin another person’s night, and then later say something to that person along the lines of, “Hey, you should probably drink some water.”
The Evolution of Trust
I usually roll my eyes at rhetoric about games as educational tools. Generally it brings to mind tone-deaf empathy experiences or gross disaster tourism (e.g., a cheery Mark Zuckerberg using Puerto Rico’s flooded streets as a PR opportunity for Oculus). Nicky Case is smarter than all of that, though, and uses computational interaction to teach concepts it is well-suited to teach: the ways a few simple behaviors can develop into a full-fledged culture or system through iteration and scale. It’s a deceptively delightful way to learn something new.
Ping Pong
The experience of improvement is the experience of repetition and failure. It is the experience of identifying weaknesses through introspection and, rather than ignoring them, shining a spotlight on them. It is the experience of asking questions about a task whose answers won’t be known for dozens or hundreds of iterations on that task. Getting good at ping pong requires, likely more than any other skill, a willingness or even a desire to be bad at ping pong for an indefinite amount of time. It is a joyous game.
Overwatch
My girlfriend’s brother once asked my which character was my main in Overwatch. I told him I liked playing as Mei. He called their other brother into the room and told him what I said. They both then laughed at me, together. I don’t believe I have played Overwatch since then.
Nidhogg
A game that would be tailor-made for arcades if arcades were still a thing people went to, Nidhogg is a tiny, perfectly balanced argument replacement for good friends who like to yell.
Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley was on so many end-of-year lists in December of 2016 that I felt obligated to buy it in 2017. It is exactly as adorable and twee as every review says it is. It is also completely exhausting if your taste in games doesn’t amount to a love of chore simulators.
Go
Like every other comp-sci major who spent more than 5 minutes reading about deep neural nets in 2017, I attempted to learn to play Go. I did not succeed at learning to play Go.
Reigns
Playing Reigns is (hopefully) the closest I’ll ever get to using Tinder. It’s a monarchy sim by way of binary, swipe-based decisions. The variables you manage as you try not to be murdered, overthrown (and murdered), or cursed (and murdered) are surprisingly well-balanced, but the way it necessitates a trial-and-error based learning process can be pretty tedious. From what I gather, it is slightly more fun than using Tinder.
Mancala
Mancala is one of the all-time greatest games. Its feel is inimitable, its sense of delirium and excess and economic instability a thrill to submit oneself to. This is a game about scooping, holding, and dropping. It is not, as some would have you believe, a game about numbers. If you play Mancala on a phone or a computer, you are dead to me, for you have chosen convenience over ecstasy.
Words with Friends
I recently walked past Zynga’s office in San Francisco, and I am 80% sure I saw a massive sign hanging in their lobby that said “What will our kids remember us for?” Dear God, don’t let the answer be Words with Friends.
A Brief Note on Pippin Barr
Pippin Barr is extremely clever. He seems to find
game design either so easy as to be laughable, or so fun as to be essential.
Maybe it’s both. Barr’s games are what I would consider truly experimental, in
that they aim to ask questions and observe results rather than to entertain.
Because of this, they tend to share a sort of raggedness that can make them hard
to approach. Starting with Snakisms and ending with v r 3, I’m going to rank
Barr’s games from most to least accessible. After that I will return to my
previous haphazard game ordering methodology.
Snakisms
Snakisms is Pippin Barr’s funniest game, a sort of intro to philosophy course whose only instructive techniques are the mechanics of snake. It reminds me of the coffee table books at Urban Outfitters: impressively committed to a single theme and fun to flip through, but way only interesting the first time.
Indie Bungle 2: Breakout Indies
This game is both a reminder that breakout is a dope game and a kind-hearted homage to several successful independent games. Also, its title is a solid pun. It is exactly as fun as breakout has always been.
Sibilant Snakelikes
“I’ve always been a big fan of doing creative work that is repetitive and premised on exploring a possibility space through variation and determination,” Barr said in a recent blog post. That helps to explain Sibilant Snakelikes, which follows in the tradition of Snakisms by attempting to recreate the experience of several other games using only snake mechanics. The results (“Sssuper Mario Brosss,” “Msss Pacman,” etc.) are more fun to discover than they are to play.
It is as if you were doing work
This game is a great joke that makes me feel sad. It is an attempt to recreate the experience of a menial office job, claiming to be a psychological support structure for those who will miss working in our fully automated future. I am embarrassed to admit that it felt sort of good to play.
It is as if you were playing chess
This game is a good joke that genuinely made me wonder whether I like chess or I just like the experience of feeling like the type of person who likes chess. I find that to be a really interesting question, though I admit this is not going to tickle everyone as much as it tickled me.
Best Chess
If you want to be 100% certain that you will lose a game of chess, this is the game for you. If you want to play chess, this is most definitely not the game for you.
Game Studies
Game Studies is a collection of dry, abstract references to topics that often come up in game studies discourse (e.g., flow, ludology vs. narratology, immersion). Each vocab word gets a borderline slapstick treatment, as if Barr is less interested in critiquing these ideas themselves as he is in mocking people who want to talk about them.
v r 3
Unless you would like to visit a virtual museum displaying several dozen implementations of computer-rendered water, I would not recommend this game. If you, like Pippin Barr, find genuine humor in the idea of countless individuals and companies needing to come up with new names for marginally different water shaders, here’s the source code.
Jigsaw Puzzle
Jigsaw puzzles are an oddly commonplace example of gestalt. It makes me very happy that children are introduced to the challenge of context switching between meaningless shapes/colors and a meaningful cohesive whole at young ages.
Tokaido
My friends and I have taken to saying the phrase “that’s Tokaido!” when something slightly unpleasant or surprising happens. Like Vonnegut’s “so it goes” and Nietzsche’s “amor fati,” “that’s Tokaido!” is a way of verbalizing our desire to resign ourselves to the vast majority of our experiences that are out of our control. Tokaido is a great way to spend an evening.
Rubik’s Cube
To someone who has not memorized The Algorithms, a Rubik’s Cube is a loud fidget spinner.
No Man’s Sky
If No Man’s Sky had 50 planets instead of 18 quintillion, it would be an immensely better game. Its developers, in chasing computational scale, seemed to have completely missed what was interesting about this game — the experience of being in a particular place at a particular moment — and chose to add in a bunch of tedious systems that require endless rote button-pushing just to get to visit one of those godforsaken planets.
Threes
Roughly once a year, I lie in bed and wonder when I’ll find a truly perfect mobile game. Then I remember Threes exists, and lose a couple hours of sleep before uninstalling it again for my own safety.
Typeshift
Typeshift is the word puzzle I’ve been waiting for. It rescopes the discovery experience of something like Boggle or SpellTower (see below) in a fresh way that allows for both trial-and-error and eureka moments.
SpellTower
When I was angry that Typeshift wasn’t out on Android, I downloaded SpellTower out of desperation. It is not as good as Typeshift.
Flipflop Solitaire o
I’ve frequently stolen my girlfriend’s iPhone just to play this. It’s adorable, easy to pick up, and satisfying to play. I can’t recommend it enough.
Sage Solitaire
Sage Solitaire is not as good as Flipflop Solitaire.
100ft Robot Golf
A misguided purchase that stemmed from my desire to support the McElroy brothers, 100ft Robot Golf is best forgotten. I thought about buying both Everybody’s Golf and Golf Story this year, but memories of 100ft Robot Golf prevented me from pulling the trigger — it is a golf game that scared me away from golf games.
Perplexus
This is a good toy and a great game. It seems like the kind of all-or-nothing challenge that would delight Bennet Foddy.
Crossword
Crossword designers are my heroes. Their creativity within such rigid, traditional confines means that I can approach an endless number of near-identical grids and reasonably expect a unique challenge from each.