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Prey
Prey is amazing. The Talos 1 space station where most of the action of the game happens is the best environment ever done in a game. The level design is sooo good, both visually and structurally (secrets, alternate routes, sequence skips, etc). And then it’s filled to the brim with juicy audiologs and emails, detailing the lives and schemes of the 100+ people on the station. I had to find out everything I could about all of them. There was very little about this game that I didn’t love.
Having Prey possibly be the swan song for the immersive sim just makes it hit that much harder. To me, the tepid response to Prey is the biggest crime in games this year.
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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
It’s been a couple of decades since I’ve been able to play a multiplayer shooter for more than half an hour. They just don’t hold my interest at all. I couldn’t stop playing PUBG. It’s like a proper old-school roguelike: you put all this effort in for a buildup, and then throw it all away in one ill-considered move. It feels like there’s actual stakes involved. So once you reach the top 10, the tension is just unbearable. The first half a dozen times I got to the top 3, I just totally froze. Everything I knew about the tactics of the game and everything I’d learned about actually shooting a gun just went out the window.
It’s been something like 4 months since I won my first game, and I could still retell the story of the last 5 minutes of that game. I could probably retrace my movements pretty exactly.
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Horizon: Zero Dawn
H:ZD nails the core gameplay loop of fighting giant robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow. It feels so good. They also have the most likable protagonist in a game this year, and an epic and gripping sci-fi backstory. I absolutely had to know what had happened to create this fucked up world. The best part is that they actually both deliver the full story, and have it make perfect sense; every time I thought they’d just slipped up and left a massive plot hole in, it got resolved in an hour.
The main place where it falls down are the side quests; the writing is good enough that you’ll probably want to do them, but the actual implementation tends to be just tedious Witcher-visioning.
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Opus Magnum
The best Zachtronics game so far. It’s a programming puzzle game. Unlike a couple of their most recent games, it returns back to the SpaceChem roots of having to fight awkward physical constraints. And unlike all of their previous games, they’ve finally removed the artificial restrictions on solution size. So it’s now usually trivial to make a solution that works, and then you can start to iterate on it. That’s a lot more compelling a workflow than having to spend an hour just trying to get something that passes the tests in Shenzhen IO.
A big thanks to all the players in the Qt3 community: the game would be just a shadow of itself without the friendly leaderboard competition.
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Dead Cells
Incredibly fluid 2d movement and combat, that never got old for me. I know the early access label has turned a lot of people off this game. But it’s really good. It’s been really good starting from the first release.