Welcome to Waypoint's End of Year celebration! This year, we're digging deep into our favorite games with dedicated podcasts, interviewing each other about our personal top 10 lists, and reflecting on the year with essays from the staff and some of our favorite freelance contributors. Check out the entire package right here!Few games connected with me in 2018 the way they did in 2017. When I look back at my list from last year, I see a lot of games that conjured specific feelings and moods that pulled me out of my world and into theirs. I find characters whose stories resonated with me, and whose ultimate fates I still sometimes wonder about. There are so many places and images that haunt me from 2017. When I was writing up my 2017 list, I was reflecting on a year full of unforgettable journeys.
Advertisement
That rarely happened for me in 2018. This year I found far more games this year that I admired and appreciated, without ever really having that moment where I realized that I am all in.Yet I was surprised, as I began listing memorable games this year, when I realized how many terrific new experiences I had. It turns out I had been enjoying myself a great deal, despite feeling let-down by this year as a whole. That probably has at least something to do with the fact there was almost no moment in 2018 during which something awful or scary was not happening in the background of all this play. But I think it’s also somewhat reflective of the fact that the flood tide of immersive sims and their descendants ebbed away this year. If 2017 was a year of worlds I could investigate and interrogate, 2018 has been a year of expansive artifice. Little wonder, then, that I ended up turning to a mix of expertly inventive genre games and offbeat narrative experiences.
Typifying this was a game that I didn’t feel I could include, but absolutely would have been one of my games of the year: Night School’s Oxenfree. It walked right up to the line between charming and twee, and occasionally may have put a toe over that line, but by and large it was one of the most absorbing games I played all year. It’s not just that it’s well-written and acted, successfully making you feel like you’re eavesdropping on life-as-it-happens. It’s also a game that captures the horror of the way relationships can change and curdle, and the various forms that hauntings can take. Not only was it exactly what I needed, but my reaction it tells me a lot about what this year left me wanting more of.
Advertisement
Other near-misses for the list this year were F1 2018, The Banner Saga 3 (I think if we consider the whole trilogy, however, it might be one of the best complete experiences of this decade in games), Nantucket of all things, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which ended up being just gorgeous enough and charming enough to get me past my disappointment with many of its game design decisions.I didn’t get enough time with Unavowed or Hitman 2 to reach a conclusion about them, and I’m not going to even address Mutant Year Zero until next year (though I increasingly suspect I’ll love it). I fell off both Spider-Man and Red Dead 2: I mostly enjoyed the former but lost my way in the aimlessness of the open world, and I was mostly indifferent toward Red Dead Redemption 2 with the exception of life in camp.With all that said, these were the games that I liked the most this year, the ones that occasionally left me stunned, and the very few that gave me the feeling of another reality worth exploring.
'Frostpunk' screenshot courtesy of 11-bit StudiosSometimes it’s enough to create an atmosphere and a tone, maintain them, and then intensify both over the course of game. I still don’t think there’s a whole lot to the actual city management game happening inside Frostpunk, but that’s also not really the point. The point is in the relentless ratcheting of the tension, the worsening storms, the dimming colors of the heatmap, the grim discoveries and narrative vignettes that interrupt the action.Frostpunk is also a game that hasn’t fully thought through a political decision tree that pulls you towards authoritarianism or theocracy, and probably doesn’t impose enough trade-offs to any decisions to make their cost feel particularly resonant. On the other hand, I tend to think that Frostpunk’s endgame message is resonant: There comes a point where crises end, but the choices you made in the face of them tend to linger and shape what’s to come.
10. Frostpunk
Advertisement
When I beat the campaign without having resorted to heavy police repression or state-sponsored worship, it felt like I’d helped a hard-pressed society survive in a form that left it capable of recognizing itself. I’m not sure that moment was fully earned, but the experience was so intense and absorbing that I’m not going to deny it.
9. Sea of Thieves
Advertisement
Your friends, vomiting on you and each other while you have to do every God damn thing on this ship yourself and still you wouldn’t trade this crew for anything.
8. Return of the Obra Dinn
Advertisement
7. Armored Brigade
Advertisement
It’s also, despite its spartan appearance, a frighteningly vivid wargame. All the dynamics that defined modern warfare since the invention of truly long-range artillery and repeating rifles are still present on the late 20th century battlefield, they just happen with a speed, precision, and lethality that is truly shocking and upsetting. The minute a unit breaks cover to open fire, it has only moments before enemy artillery begins zeroing-in on their position. A tank platoon caught in the open when a pair of A-10s swoops onto the battlefield will be dead in seconds… but if there’s a surface-to-air missile system lurking nearby that hasn’t been scouted, those A-10s will fall burning to earth only moments later. Cluster munitions erase entire forests in an instant, rapid-fire cannons raze villages to the ground in only a few minutes of combat, and somehow soldiers keep fighting despite knowing that literally any mistake or misjudgment means instant death. With every scenario, a new alt-history horror story unfolds.
6. Northgard
Advertisement
5. Valkyria Chronicles 4
Advertisement
4. Forza Horizon 4
Advertisement
3. Tetris Effect
Advertisement