#goty2016

#3. Hyper Light Drifter

This year, no single moment compared to the rush I got from my first chain-dash in Hyper Light Drifter. There's a primal satisfaction to the accelerating timing it demands, as each flash of pink and teal raises the pressure of the impending button press. Eventually I learned that it's not that good in combat and it's only one of many means of survival, yet it was at that precise moment that the game won me over.

I say this without exaggeration: Hyper Light Drifter is a visual masterpiece. Fans and Kickstarter backers have been drooling over screens for years now, and the reality seems to have even exceeded expectations. Environments overflow with lightly muted colors and all kinds of mystery, like enormous Evangelion-inspired beasts, esoteric symbols, and ruins of a civilization long since past. Animation is beautifully handled frame-by-frame, highlighting the tension in each action and closing off with a shimmer of vibrant neon.

It's not an easy game by any means, but success becomes its own reward. Every battle is a fury of bullets and blades with far more dead bodies than dead air. I found myself often getting lost in the chaos, only realizing a room was clear when my darting eyes couldn't find anything new to shoot at. What's unusual, though, is that I didn't find the boss fights to deliver the same sense of exhilaration as the average encounter along the way, but as a capstone to a difficult journey, they work well enough. Maybe I should just be grateful I was never tempted to chuck a controller.

Hyper Light Drifter is enthralling, both in its hectic gameplay and its unwordly atmosphere. I know without a doubt that I'll be back for another shot at deciphering what the hell happened to this world.

#2. Kirby: Planet Robobot

If you've ever daydreamed about what you'd do with your own giant super robot, Kirby: Planet Robobot is a game you need to play. I mean this in the best way possible: it seems like the game was designed by a 6 year old with complete creative authority.

"Give it a giant drill! No, saw blades! Give it flamethrowers! Make it transform into a car! AND a jet!"

Yep, those are all things you can do, and it owns!

The heart of Kirby games has always lied in their diverse power-ups: fire, ice, spark, hammer, bomb, and dozens of others. This time, the sizable set of abilities is doubled by applying not just to Kirby, but his huge, face-shaped armor suit. If Kirby gets a sword, his mech gets two massive beam-sabers. If Kirby gets a jetpack, his mech transforms into a jet! Discovering all of the ways these forms could be used was a joy that lasted me the entire length of the game.

With so many power-ups there's a staggering number of game mechanics at play, which HAL Laboratories take full advantage of in the level design. Whether its a puzzle requiring a certain power-up, a rare boss or ability, or simple visual flair, each stage has some kind of "gimmick" to separate it from the last. Ideas reappear only seldomly, and not without being somehow altered and built upon. Sometimes the game even pretends to be something else entirely, like the shmup style stages that utilize the "Jet" version of the robot armor, or the auto-scrolling stages in the "Wheel" armor. All of this leads to a collection of stages that feel memorable and worth revisiting.

Between its game design and its vast possibility-space, Planet Robobot executes on its concept almost as perfectly as I can imagine. I know Kirby isn't the top Nintendo franchise for most people, but given the run the series is having right now, I'm starting to seriously question how long my little pink creampuff will go underappreciated!

#1. VA-11 HALL-A

VA-11 HALL-A is a visual novel that sounds extremely good in theory - just read its tagline: "cyberpunk bartender action." You play as Jill, who works at a bar called Valhalla in a futuristic city of perpetual darkness, poor people, robots, androids, and most of all, strife. It operates pretty differently as a video game, though. It's often assumed that gameplay exists for the sole purpose of fun, but even for a visual novel, VA-11 HALL-A's simple mechanics took me more than a few drinks to warm up to. Kinda' like in real life, the process of mixing "Brandtinis" and "Bleeding Janes" isn't especially exciting after the first few times, and almost everyone visiting the bar seems to have way more going on in life than you. I just wasn't seeing how it came together. It took some time and careful thought, but by the end of the game it had shaped into something incredible.

It's all thanks to the bar's atmosphere that I stuck around at all, and man, did they nail it. First and foremost, this soundtrack is phenomenal. What woud otherwise be your average cyberpunk setting becomes a wondrous dystopia thanks to Garoad's deft, moody composition. Its implementation is sharp, too. Instead of having music set to match each scene, you're handed complete control over the playlist while on duty. There's a palpable realism to incidentally having serious talks over loud, upbeat music, or joking during an ominous buildup. It helps to give Jill some believable agency as a bartender, too. You can always decide what drink to serve, how strong to mix it, or what music you want to play, but not who comes in that night or what to talk about. Details matter, and the developers at Sukeban Games were paying careful attention.

While Jill herself doesn't seem to bring much nuance to the story (...at first), the rest of the cast handily pick up the slack. The pixel-based character portraits are surprisingly expressive and go a long way in realizing the game's zany, reference-loaded dialog. Dorothy is a definitive fan favorite - she's an android that was specifically engineered to have weaker emotional responses to things that humans often find traumatizing. This trait colors every one of her conversations with typical humans, especially once you figure out that she's a sex-worker. Her career is almost completely inconsequential to her and she LOVES to tease people about it, so the scenes that ensue whenever she meets someone new at Valhalla are pretty entertaining, to say the least. In general, though, Sukeban Games have a firm grasp on how to both play into tropes and subvert them, which allows them to hit their punchlines without compromising any drama during more serious scenes.

My favorite part about VA-11 HALL-A is how much of the narrative the player is trusted to piece together. For a visual novel there's suprisingly little exposition - almost none, actually! It's basically all conversations, and not even ones explicitly about current events. Your only glimpse at what's happening outside of the bar is limited to what you happen to hear, what you choose to read in the news or on shitty forums, and most importantly, what connections you can draw between them. It's amusing to talk to some of the bar's customers, for sure, but your impression might completely change when you realize what they're up to before they stop in or finish their last drink.

Titanfall 2

The existence of Titanfall 2 is miraculous: it's the smoothest first-person movement of all time alongside a painstaking single player campaign. The combination of flavors that fill its gameplay is like peanut butter and chocolate: you alternate from frantic sprinting, wallrunning, and double-jumping, into a massive robot with hefty movement, powerful weaponry, and cooldown-based decision making. It's designed throughout for tiny moments of bliss: flinging yourself from building to building, launching hundreds of rockets from your Titan, narrow escapes, and outplaying your enemies through planning and execution.

After my massive falling out with Halo, I didn't think I'd ever feel the same about a competitive FPS, but holy god was I ever wrong. I've already hit the level cap twice and have zero intention of slowing down. There's been talk that it's been underperforming in sales, which is tragic, because from where I'm sitting this is one of the best first person shooters ever.

Pokemon Sun / Moon

As a lifelong Pokemon fan, I think it's fair for me to say that it's been a long time since Pokemon has been this good. While it has its issues (hello reinforcements, hello new Pokemon being rare), the things that I loved about Sun and Moon are far more prevalent. The Alolan Pokemon designs are universally great, the characters are surprisingly well-expressed, and exploring Alola felt like a true escape from the tension and hatred rearing its head this year.

My favorite thing about Sun and Moon, though, is easily the villains. There's Gladion, the coolest rival in the whole series. There's Team Skull, the most hilarious villains to show up in a game since Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon. And then there's [pretend that a spoilery name is written here], the craziest anime-nonsense supervillain of 2016.

If you've been sleeping on Pokemon for a while, make this your road back in.

Mystic Messenger

Mystic Messenger is an otome dating sim that invades your life. From a mechanical perspective, there's not much going on - you sit in chat rooms, make dialog choices, and respond to text messages from a group of young, stylish anime guys (and one girl!). The twist to all of this is so obvious that it makes you wonder why it hasn't been attempted in the genre before: everything happens in real time. Certain characters are more active late at night, others early in the morning, and if you want to win them over, you'll have to find a way to make real-world time for them.

Getting fake texts from fake game characters honestly felt like magic. Mystic Messenger perfectly captures the sense of pleasant surprise I feel when I get text messages from real people. For a few weeks, it was almost like I had a brand new group of friends to hang out with online all day. It's especially exciting to see this kind of innovation come from a mobile game, too. Mystic Messenger is a non-conventional game made for an atypical video game audience, and developer Cheritz killed it.

Oxenfree

I'm kind of a sucker for supernatural thrillers, so Oxenfree had me hooked early on with its intriguing setting, soft visuals, and believable vocal performances. What ended up standing out to me, though, wasn't even the plot, it was just the game's many ordinary conversations. It's an adventure game about five teenagers going camping, so there's a good amount of chatter between characters of varying levels of friendship. You participate in conversations by making dialog choices, but Oxenfree differentiates itself by emphasizing when you push a button. Your character immediately starts talking after you make a choice, even if that forces you to cut someone else off. Sometimes when the pressure's on, you might not be able to decide what to say in the appropriate time, and other characters will react to your silence. Along with some exceptional writing, this highly flexible system props up each character and makes them feel authentic.

At around 5 or 6 hours it's not an especially long game, but it held my attention strongly enough that I nearly finished it in in a single night. Given how many games I tend to juggle, that has to count for something!

Salt & Sanctuary

Is it possible to screw up a combination of Dark Souls and Castlevania? I'm sure with time someone will find a way to prove me wrong, but with Salt & Sanctuary as my only evidence, it seems like the perfect recipe. I played the entire game alongside my brother, and I couldn't recommend the experience more to co-op players. Between platforming puzzles, vast 2D exploration, and Souls-style bosses, there's a wholesome variety to all of the game's challenges. And unlike the Souls series, I feel that S&S is short enough and provides enough build diversity that it's both practical and rewarding to play through more than once.

World of Final Fantasy

If I had an award for "Best Localization," World of Final Fantasy would take it hand over fist. This game's writing is so well-done, its voice acting so well-delivered, that it managed to make me laugh out loud with the words "what the honk."

WoFF is an addictive, briskly paced RPG with more than just nods to classic Final Fantasy, but some strong characters of its own, too. Main leads Lann & Reynn are legitimately funny together - I don't make a habit of expecting much from Tetsuya Nomura Teenagers™, but their chemistry turns a solid monster collecting RPG into a great game all its own.

Doom

I didn't think I would be convinced to play an extremely violent, gorey game about demon massacre (I'm kinda' squeamish, to be honest), but Doom was just that good. It's been pretty much a decade since an FPS has been anything other than a gun-toting romp through set pieces, and while Doom is certainly romp-worthy, its gameplay is a different type of beast. The intentional balance of low HP and high movement speed forces you out from behind cover and into the fray. This "never stop moving, never stop shooting" ethos works incredibly well with the game's vast arsenal and numerous weapon mods. Doom takes all the right lessons from both classic shooters and modern shooters alike and turns them into a path forward for an often stagnant genre.

Ratchet & Clank

There's something pure in R&C that felt so noticeably absent from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Games were so overwhelmingly serious back then! Even games like Portal that focused on comedy had to work so hard in a narrative sense to make those ends meet. Ratchet, though, just is what it is. You run and you jump across platforms, and you feel satisfied. You shoot the guys, you club a box with your wrench, and an explosion of gears and screws pour out. That's all there is to it, and that's all I really needed.