GameSpew’s Game of the Year 2015
Kim: Life is Strange
Spread over five episodes, Dontnod Entertainment’s Life is Strange has had me hooked from start to finish. Never before with an episodic game have I been so desperate to play the next part; on tenterhooks between each release, dying to know what’s going to happen next. You could argue that the game didn’t exactly do anything new – after all, Telltale have been doing the story-driven episodic thing for years; and a teenage protagonist in a typical small-town high school isn’t exactly the most inspiring of starting points. But it was just how well Dontnod threaded the story together that made all the difference.
Main character Max and her best friend Chloe were extremely well-written characters, believable in their quirks and mannerisms; having once been a teenage girl myself, many years ago, I could empathise with them. Despite the story dealing with the supernatural, it was the game’s very grounded sense of reality – dealing with difficult subjects such as drug use and suicide – that made it so very hard to put down.
Whilst I found the last episode rather underwhelming, the experience of Life is Strange as a whole is one that will stick with me for a long time, and one that I’ll certainly revisit time and time again. If you haven’t yet played what is certainly my Game of the Year 2015, make sure you find time – and with a physical special edition coming out in January, it’ll be the perfect opportunity.
Joseph: Darkest Dungeon
Darkest Dungeon is definitely my Game of the Year 2015 – partly for the personal reason that I had been on a long hiatus from video games before 2015, and this rogue-like, Lovecraftian love-affair with horror and madness drew me back in for good. There are so many reasons it is deserving of the title; number one is that it takes us back to some of the most important basics of video-gaming: addictive and enjoyable game-play.
So many games now are lost in graphical design. No substance, all colour. Darkest Dungeon is the opposite, which is not to say the art isn’t beautiful – it is – but it is also simple. So too, are the animations and design. From this simplicity comes immense complexity and thought. It takes the rogue-like and indeed RPG genre to a new realm: that of the mind, adding a spin on the genre by immersing us in the psychological implications of dungeon exploration. This has since been copied by numerous subsequent titles, but Darkest Dungeon was there first. It also made procedural dungeons a popular trope by acing the formula – creating labyrinthine ways that are just random enough to be unpredictable but linear enough to feel like you are on a journey and that your task just might be solvable. Marry this with a return to real difficulty (something many of us felt no longer existed outside of Dark Souls) and you have an artful, horrifying masterpiece.
Gammon: Rocket League
I would have liked to have picked Fallout 4 for my GOTY but that would overlook the stand-out game that is Rocket League. It deserves to be on this list… even if I am not very good at it.
It is a very simple premise – football with cars – but it is polished to make an excellent game. This is a game that you can pick up and play. Easy to start but hard to master. A beginner is able to have fun trying to nudge the ball around the pitch and bobbing themselves around, while a master can create some truly marvellous goals when they use their boosts perfectly and time their jumps precisely.
Every five minute match counts. Whether you are playing offline on the sofa with friends or online in a ranked solo match, Rocket League‘s simple mechanics instil you with a competitive spirit and that’s what makes this game brilliant. Pick up and play or e-sports; this game is perfect for anyone… and that’s coming from someone who’s rubbish at it.
