The Ten Best Games of 2018
2018 was a garbage year for so, so many reasons, but one of the few highlights in this increasingly dark, horrendous timeline happened to be the myriad ways in which we could disappear into digital worlds. Putting it simply, videogames were potent sources of both escapism and engagement for me this year, moreso than they’d been in years past. With experiences big, small, and every step in between, I feel like this year’s list ended up being far more delightful and diverse than I expected it would be at the start of the year. Also, for the first time in a while, I think this constitutes almost every single game I actually managed to play this year when I wasn’t still dragging my feet through the World of Warcraft mud.
A few call-outs that don’t quite make their way into the final list, and then we’ll dig in.
2018's Timesink of 2019:
Into the Breach
I only picked up Into the Breach a few days ago, but I’m already more than a little afraid of the amount of time I’m going to sink into this Hellraiser cube of a puzzle game. I liked, but didn’t love FTL (the previous release from developer Subset Games). This seems like an entirely separate, far more insidious beast. The ways it displays (almost) every possible threat each turn makes the gear-grinding deliberation of where to move your three-mech squad to keep the insectoid Vek from toppling your archipelago’s power grid a taxing but satisfying loop.
2018 Honorable Mentions:
There were a few stand-out games from this year that were good, but didn’t quite make the list when I finally tallied up everything I played. This year being unbelievably long as it is, I had sworn several of my actual 2018 games were late 2017 releases. Either way, here’s three games you should still check out.
Beat Saber
One of two VR games I’ve played on more than one headset (the other being Space Pirate Trainer), Beat Saber is a really simple concept done exceptionally well. “Rhythm game with lightsabers” is really all the pitch I need for someone to say, “oh, that sounds rad.” Turns out, it is rad! The soundtrack selection is a little slight right now - the PC version has custom song support, so you can play Basshunter’s “Dota” if you really want to, I guess? - but a few songs have been added in the time since I got it around Black Friday, including this year’s bizarre k-pop League of Legends song “POP/STARS,” which is secretly the most fun track in that whole game right now.
Runner3
You’d be forgiven for looking at Runner3 and thinking, “this looks a lot like Runner 2,” because...it kind of is? As it turns out, though, there’s nothing wrong with that formula, and enough time has passed since R2 came out that I was fiending for another rhythm runner with my good friend CommanderVideo. The mildly uncomfortable-to-look-at character design continues unabated, and the level design is still crisp as hell.
LUMINES Remastered
Confession time: this is actually my first real LUMINES game. I played the demo of the Xbox Live release a hundred years ago, and thought “this is cool, I guess?” I don’t think I was really paying attention to the delightful balance between music and gameplay on display here. Every click, twist and drop of the four-piece squares into your Tetris-esque well is represented in the music track, which changes every few minutes as you progress through the game. It’s not radically deep, and unless you really start screwing up, you can kinda play forever, but there’s something genuinely entrancing about LUMINES that I lost hours and hours playing it this year.
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Okay, let’s do this.
The Actual 10
#10: A Way Out
...So, A Way Out isn’t what I’d really call a “good videogame.” The plot is threadbare, the voice acting is janky as hell, and there are some embarrassing design decisions that really just don’t hold up if you think about them for more than a second.
...HOW DO THE PRISON TOILETS WORK? THEY JUST CHISEL AWAY BEHIND THE TOILET AND THERE’S NO PLUMBING THERE, THE TOILET JUST MOVES.
Despite all this, playing through A Way Out with a buddy was one of the most hilarious and genuinely enjoyable co-op experiences I’ve had in a long time. It’s got a ton of style, even if it’s borrowing liberally from every crime/heist/prison break trope you can think of. Some of the back-and-forths between the two main characters are enjoyable and fun to play through, and I really dug the ending. If you maybe lower your expectations about whether or not it’s going to “move you,” which...it won’t, you might have some fun with a friend.
#9: Spyro Reignited Trilogy
2018 brought us remastered collections of two seminal Playstation mascots in the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. There’s one glaring difference between these two releases, and that’s that Spyro is lovingly crafted and made me remember how much I enjoyed those games, and the N. Sane Trilogy made me question if Crash Bandicoot was ever good at all. Fun fact: the first game doesn’t have analog support. Running around a 3D world with a d-pad is not fun!
Spyro Reignited is a gorgeous love letter to the type of exploration-focused platformer that doesn’t really exist anymore. It still plays well, and it’s really shocking how much work was put into making the original PSX trilogy look as good as it does in this package. There’s no crazy challenging platforming to be done, just a lackadaisical romp through bright, weird worlds. A few bizarre design decisions notwithstanding (no subtitles? Really, Toys for Bob?), Reignited is a fantastic value.
#8: Vermintide 2
One of two games I genuinely thought was a 2017 release because of how fuck-off-long 2018 has been, Warhammer: Vermintide II is a rat-bashing simulator Charlie Day would be proud of. One part Left 4 Dead and one part loot grind, with a dash of Warhammer weirdness, Vermintide II makes a compelling case for getting buddies together to just blow off some steam. The classes are all fairly different and I really dug the Witch Hunter’s balance of range and precision swordplay. Hunting down grimoires and tomes adds an extra level of difficulty spiking if that’s your speed, and the fairly rapid drip-feed of loot and upgrades makes it really easy to say, “Alright, one more mission.”
There’s also a boss named Burblespue Halescourge. How can you dislike this game with a name like that?
#7: Slay the Spire
The product description for this roguelike deckbuilder(!!) might as well say, “Hey, we designed this game for Dylan.” Pick from three different classes with fairly similar starting decks (and reasonably different playstyles), and scale three different levels full of monsters, odd events, and a myriad of cards to augment your deck. Slay the Spire takes all the things I love most about deckbuilding, including finding absurd, borderline broken card synergies, and pairs them with extra items and occasional shops to further refine your deck for your current run. The daily challenges are always interesting, and some of my favorite runs have risen from completely nonsensical decks that just shouldn’t work as well as they did. Of all the games on this list, it’s probably #2 on my “most played,” and I really look forward to seeing where they take the game in the future.
#6: Marvel's Spider-Man
A licensed superhero game doesn’t exactly scream “game of the year” material, but from the moment you start Marvel’s Spider-Man, it’s an exhilarating experience. I was going to write “spectacular” there, but it seemed a little on the nose. Realistically, this year’s Spider-Man is one of my favorite renditions of the character, and moving around Insomniac’s vision of New York is just so very satisfying. The game has a fast-travel system that I might’ve used twice over the thirty-plus hours I spent with the webslinger, because it’s just that effortless and enjoyable to move around. The combat can be a little fidgety and forgettable at times, and the additional powers you get from unlocking extra suits are almost all inferior to the very first one you get, but Marvel’s Spider-Man makes up for that with a compelling story, well-defined characters, and hands-down the best locomotion in any game I’ve played this year. It’s a shame this is a PS4 exclusive if only because I bet it would look amazing on PC.
#5: Donut County
In Donut County, you play a raccoon named BK who controls a hole in the ground with a tablet app, who’s dropping things into said hole because he wants a quadcopter.
I feel like that’s all I need to say about it to explain why I loved this bite-sized experience, but I can elaborate a little bit more. There’s an undeniable wealth of charm going on in Donut County, from the characters, to the writing, to the duck sticker you can just press forever in the game’s text conversations (and you can actually unlock it if you play the iOS version). It’s incredibly approachable, just deep enough mechanically, and made me smile and laugh from start to finish. The writing is superb, the music slaps and will be on my writing playlist for a long time, and there’s just something magical about a game that never outstays its welcome.
bk squaaaaaaaad
#4: AstroBot: Rescue Mission
I am a pretty big fan of VR at this point: it’s still not perfect, but when a VR game hits the right vibe and that immersion factor really kicks in, there are few things that replicate the truer senses of wonder the medium can evoke. With that in mind, AstroBot: Rescue Mission might honestly be my favorite VR game, because it evokes that childlike sense of wonder on a minute-to-minute basis.
At its core, it’s nothing more than a pretty by-the-numbers 3D platformer, but the way the worlds envelop you in the VR headset is grin-inducing. You’ll bash girders with your head to reveal new paths, tilt your head around vines to see hidden robot friends in need of aid, and be pleasantly surprised every time the world just reimagines itself around you. AstroBot is overflowing with charm, joy, and color, and I can’t believe it took this long for VR developers to make a platformer that feels like both a good game in its own right and something that is truly elevated by putting you inside that world.
#3: Tetris Effect
Cool Tetris. Case closed.
okay i’ll say more about cool tetris.
Tetris Effect is Tetris, perfected.
Literally everyone in the world knows how Tetris is played these days, which gives designer/synesthesia architect Tetsuya Mizuguchi free reign to build worlds and landscapes with so much vibrancy and emotion that it elevates the simple act of playing one of the best games ever to another plane of existence. The fact that it’s also VR-capable is almost secondary to just how engrossing the different skins and visual treatments for each level of the game’s central Journey mode are. Beyond that campaign, there are a ton of different modes designed to either really rev your block-busting engines or lull you into a much more tranquil experience. You could argue “it’s just Tetris,” but I think you’d be missing out on not only an incredible version of Tetris, but an incredible game.
Up until now, Puyo Puyo Tetris’ madcap anime nonsense was my favorite version of Tetris, but Tetris Effect so effortlessly claims this throne that I can’t imagine anything coming close to toppling it, unless we see a Tetris Effect 2 somewhere down the line.
#2: God of War
I couldn’t summon up the effort to care about any God of War game prior to this year’s reimagining. Sure, I played through them for the sheer spectacle of it all: the Colossus fight at the start of God of War II is still pretty damn impressive, and God of War III’s intro is a visual feast, but I didn’t care about Kratos or his rage-fueled murder-coaster ride through Greece.
2018’s sort-of-a-reboot changes all that. They make Kratos somewhat likable, and the shift in mythologies as he’s traveled to the Norse pantheon’s Midgard makes for a stunning transition. God of War is one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen, and it plays incredibly well to boot. The redesigned, Souls-ian combat is engaging and so much deeper than it lets on at first, and the ways in which Kratos’ own abilities are augmented by his capable son, Atreus, make the combat puzzles far more satisfying than anything in the original trilogy.
The story itself is good but nothing to write home about, and I was pretty bummed out by how the game treats its women (or, realistically, woman) characters. Despite this, I was captivated by the many characters that do get substantial screentime, and was propelled from start to finish. It’s a rare example of a series that gets to rewrite itself and do it remarkably well, while still maintaining a throughline and callbacks to what it used to be. I never thought I’d say it, but I’m really looking forward to the next God of War game.
Game of the Year:
Destiny 2: Forsaken
In 2014, Destiny came out, and by all accounts, was a compromised videogame that felt absolutely incredible to play, but had one of the single-worst examples of a loot-game core loop that I can think of. I fell off of it pretty quickly, but my dad got in deep. I spent three years lovingly snarking at him for liking Destiny as much as he did, even when the Taken King came along in 2015 and made a lot of substantial changes for the better.
Then, Destiny 2 came out in 2017, and made a bunch of steps backwards. People hated it. My dad kept playing it, but even he was voicing some dissatisfaction with it. I continued politely making fun of his choice in games, as its first two expansions - Curse of Osiris and Warmind - came out in early and mid 2018 to resounding revilement...and then Forsaken happened.
Forsaken takes all the best parts of Destiny - the crisp, crunchy shooting; the steady flow of loot; the weird ancillary bullshit that’s equal parts worldbuilding and bizarre hidden missions - and pushes all of it to the forefront. The campaign is weird and different in its structure and the two new locations introduced are incredibly dissimilar from each other in good ways, but it’s the core ideological changes they’ve made that are the driving drumbeat that not only made Destiny finally click for me, but allowed me to see the game my dad has seen for four years now. Revamping loot to encourage you to keep searching out better gear and restructuring the ways in which you can get that gear has given the game a constant carrot-on-a-stick feel.
The new PvEvP mode, Gambit, is a ton of fun, and my favorite new idea for a first-person shooter mode in some time. The game’s ongoing, bizarre meta-story that tries to justify the daily/weekly structure of its endgame missions is fascinating and flies in the face of every tepid attempt at storytelling Bungie has made in previous expansions. Last Wish, this expansion’s raid, is maybe the most satisfying multiplayer shooter thing I’ve done in years, an incredibly tense experience from top to bottom.
To top it all off, the shooting is still best-in-class: crunchy, heavy, and oh-so-satisfying when you snipe a Fallen Dreg’s head off from a mile away and watch as its life-sustaining Ether geysers out of its neck stump.
For the first time in four years, Destiny feels like a product that is actively growing, changing and evolving, and as I sit here and look at the 400 hours I’ve put into D2 since Forsaken dropped, I am simultaneously horrified and thrilled by where they’ve taken the game and the plans they have for the future.
Destiny’s really good, y’all!
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So, that’s my list. 2018 is over, and thank God for that. I hope 2019 brings cool, new videogames and continually weird experiences in this medium that I love so very much.
I also hope that Riven drops a Thousand Voices for me real soon. Gimme my gun, ya damned space dragon.
