Okay, this took some time for me - and if you ask me to do this again in a month, several items may move from the Top 10 to the Honorable Mentions and vice versa. With some of these a decade in my rear view and others fresh on my mind, it’s difficult to really gauge their overall impact on me as a person, but I gave it a college try.
TOP TEN OF THE DECADE
Note - these are in no particular order (well - alphabetical):
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Batman: Arkham City - These kind of quasi rhythm-beat 'em ups showed up this decade, and I discovered I enjoy them a great deal. From the Batman games to Mad Max to Mordor, I played and had fun with a bunch of them. The one that I think I loved most, however, was Arkham City. I just really dug the challenges, the depth of the combat and situations, the density of things to do, and the story. While it didn’t have the transcendence of attacking a convoy in a dust storm that Mad Max had, when you got into combat with like twenty dudes and took them all down in a smoothly flowing string of combos, you felt like fuckin Batman.
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Diablo III - When I first played this on PC, I was kind of meh on it. Then we got the console version. While we’d played co-op on PC, couch co-op transformed this game, and I became convinced that this was the definitive version - the title Blizzard had really meant to create. It felt so much crunchier and immediate. I no longer felt the strange distance I feel from most ARPGs. I was involved, and part of the action. Playing it with my wife just made it even sweeter. We played this one f o r e v e r.
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DOOM - I thought I was too old to play fast paced FPS games. I’m right - I am. But due to some pretty generous difficulty settings, DOOM made me feel like maybe I wasn’t. The music was amazing, the visuals were spectacular, but most importantly, the action was dead on. Tearing up a room filled with demons was so satisfying. The game made sure you never stopped moving, and encouraged you to teeter on the brink of death in order to reach your highest success. Great combat design.
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - There’s not a lot to say about this that hasn’t been said by others. It’s really easy to get lost in a Bethesda game, and Skyrim was definitely one of those. I’d sit down to do a quest or explore, and find out a couple hours had passed and all I’d done was some enchanting and crafting. Did I have fun? I dunno, but I enjoyed myself, so maybe that’s really what’s important.
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Gone Home - It was really hard to figure out which walking simulator (gah) to put on here, but in the end I’ve got to go with one of the first I played. What a revelation. A lot of other titles have taken inspiration from this one and have put their own spin on it, but Gone Home is still better than all of them. From how recognizable and familiar the setting was to me (lucky, I suppose, due to me being the right age) to how the game approached its narrative reveal, I was completely sucked in. Edith Finch may have better “gameplay” (and art), Ethan Carter may be prettier, but Gone Home is still the most memorable for me.
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Mass Effect 2 - I’m gonna admit something that’s likely not popular here - I kind of disliked Mass Effect 1. It had some good world building, but the construction of the game itself felt incredibly sloppy. It was a bunch of pieces that didn’t really fit together well, like there was a strong vision for the tone and world of the game, but none for the gameplay itself. Due to the heavy lifting of the narrative done by part 1, however, ME2 found it’s gameplay voice and could focus on delivering a really tight game and story on top of the foundation they’d already laid down. I was completely wrapped up in this one.
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Portal 2 - I played a bunch of first person puzzlers this past decade. I really enjoy all of them. But Portal 2 is so much stronger than all of them in all the ways that matter. Strong puzzles, strong visuals, strong narrative, strong “non puzzle” gameplay (exploration - or at least an imitation of it that’s good enough to fool the player if they’re really wrapped up in it). All of these things make Portal 2 the first person puzzler I’m gonna stick on this list. I think I got more obsessed with Talos Principle, and Witness was wonderfully weird and engaging, but Portal 2 had it all.
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Red Dead Redemption II - Egads, what an accomplishment. Like several of the Rockstar games before it, the narrative gets waaaaaaay to bogged down in the middle, but with a world this wonderful I’m fine with it. Anything to keep me in the saddle with this game longer. This wasn’t really an action game, or an open world game, or anything - it was an experience. Odd controls, a meandering pace (in every aspect) that’s quite clearly purposeful - all of it designed to make sure you’re completely committed to the game while you play it. I was so impressed with the craftsmanship of this game, but also with how much I ended up adoring Arthur. It took me a while to warm up to him - but that’s just who he is, and that feels completely natural now.
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Saints Row: The Third - This was the fourth game I worked on, and it taught me more about myself as a game dev than the preceding three. I finally got a sense of the “big picture” when developing a game as opposed to focusing on my single piece of production. I learned so much about the process, and how to define vision, tone, and player experience, and I still use all of that today. What makes this a really easy choice for my list, though, is that I also adored playing this game, even when it was all temp art and shit animations.
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - If I been forced to rank my list, this would be sitting at the top, not the bottom. Fortunately, that’s not required, because while it would have been simple for me to crown this with the number one spot, getting the other nine into some kind of ranking would have made me sweat. I’m not one for replaying games; because I want to play a lot of games, my time is usually better served (in my head) moving on when I’m done with a game, whether it took me 200 hours or 2 hours. I’ve replayed this one, a couple times. And it’s a big one, so that’s even more surprising. I can’t specifically point to any one thing to roped me in, but I think (like RDR2) the attention to details matters to me. The world they built is wonderful, and engaging to explore. The characters seem to have a life that exists outside of the quests. Even more than that - unlike most other RPGs, if you find a character before a quest, they’re doing what that character would do. If you find them after, you stand a good chance of having a conversation, not just getting their generic lines. I dunno. There are too many things I could say about this one, so let’s just say I love it to bits.
RUNNERS-UP (Again, in no particular order)
Alien: Isolation (totally nailed the visuals and tone), Dishonored (my favorite first person stealth of the decade), Fallout 4 (mostly due to context of how I played it), Grand Theft Auto V, The Last Door (just made me feel like I was a kid in the 80s again), Life is Strange, Opus Magnum (my extremely late entrance to Zachtronics, which I now love), Overcooked! (so much fun in couch co-op), Plants vs. Zombies HD, The Room, Tomb Raider, The Walking Dead: Season One.