The 10 best video games of 2015: 'Bloodborne,' 'Fallout 4' and more
There were no six-column headlines in the world of video games in 2015 — no new consoles, no new online hideousness — but there were a lot of games. A lot of lengthy, enormous games. And a lot of hours spent playing them. Here are my 10 favorite video games of 2015:
(For: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Microsoft Windows)
It's impossible to resist comparing Arrowhead Game Studios' top-down shooter to "XCOM," but this alien bug hunt is terrifying for altogether different reasons. Its difficulty is kinetic, predicated on your ability to not only shoot and think straight in clutch moments, but to do so in concert with up to three partners. Things will go wrong. Whether it's a suicide squeeze between enemy swarms, friendly fire or getting crushed by an equipment drop like some Looney Tunes character, death doesn't mean do-over, it means do-around. Thankfully, the massive galactic conquest metagame of "Helldivers" will give you plenty of chances.
(For: PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One)
Of all the open-world games to release in 2015, I don't know if "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" has the most surface for you to travel. It rises above the fray, however, because it has the most beneath that surface. It has the most lore, the most politics, the most sectarian and racial strife. Those forces, and the stories they gird, are also written with a moral grace unmatched by the game's peers. "Wild Hunt" doesn't have much in the way of combat, however, and for that reason Geralt of Rivia's quest to save daughter figure Ciri tumbles down my list. Breathtaking as its Nordic isles and Slavic cities are to see, pleasing as its balletic dialogue is to hear, the game can get sort of dull to play.
(For: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Windows)
A new point-and-click adventure not made by Telltale, Dontnod's five-part series thrives on the smallness of high school protagonist Max and her disaffected classmates at Blackwell Academy. Where Telltale's games are also guilty of hedging their narrative branches, though, "Life is Strange" harvested big, affecting moments to its divisive end. It also thumbed its nose at Telltale's nearsighted design by letting you see the immediate outcome of your decisions, then rewind and maybe choose differently. By the end of the first episode, you'll learn the limits of such a device in story so truly splintered.
(For: Wii U)
Bright, buoyant and altogether fresh, "Splatoon" wasn't just the new shooter tired players needed, it was the new world the also-tired Nintendo needed, too. But "Splatoon" is traditional where it counts: True to most of Nintendo's games, its multiplayer paint gun wars are accessible enough to get good quick, but deep enough to only get great with time. So, it's also sort of like painting for real.
(For: Windows, iOS, Mac OS)
Open-world or not, no game I played in 2015 was anything like Sam Barlow's "Her Story." Searching this database of a widow's police interviews — searching for the magic term that'll produce the truth of her husband's death — is like autopsying a word cloud. And Barlow's vision and Viva Seifert's acting make it as compelling as anything I played all year.
(For: PlayStation 4, Windows, Linux, Mac OS)
Frictional Games' follow-up to its "Amnesia" series is as heady as it is horrifying. The derelict ocean floor research station PATHOS-II, a knot of auxiliary crimsons and steely echoes, is a sensory thrill. Cat-and-mouse games with the WAU, the corded flesh sacs that call it home, will slice right to your amygdala. Then your frontal lobe will light up at the existential what-ifs this dark descent forces you to weigh.
(For: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Windows)
Maximalist as ever, Hideo Kojima hits his highest highs (exhilarating stealth, a silkily realized open world) and his lowest lows (Chapter 2, Quiet) in what, likely, will go down as his last effort in the series that made him a legend. It's also incomplete — another result of the falling out with publisher Konami that exiled Kojima from making another "Metal Gear." But that imperfection, that irreconcilability of its extremes, may be what best qualifies "The Phantom Pain" as the polarizing developer's swan song.
(For: PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One)
Familiar but frontier-like, clumsy but well-crafted, "Fallout 4" moved Bethesda's post-apocalyptic money bomb franchise forward safely but significantly. In particular, its punchier shooting, colorful Bostonian ruin and even more colorful companions (I heart Nick Valentine) make The Commonwealth as rewarding a landscape to roam as any in games this year.
(For: PlayStation 4, Windows, Linux and Mac OS, and eventually Xbox One)
"Monster truck soccer" sounds like a novelty, like shovelware — not like the most reliably fun multiplayer game of 2015. It's also the one I still return to most, almost six months after its release. With a control scheme you can master in seconds but physics you couldn't map with a Ph.D., plus frictionless online, it's a wondrous model of teamwork colliding with chaos. All these games later, every goal still feels like a triumph.
(For: PlayStation 4)
There remains no rush in games as intoxicating as the one that follows the slaying of a difficult boss in FromSoftware's "Souls" series. "Bloodborne" isn't literally a "Souls" game, but its name is the only disqualifier: The storytelling is still cryptic and the specter of instant demise is still everywhere. Further, Hidetaka Miyazaki's latest hastens the die, die again ritual of "Souls" by removing shields and all but requiring you to dodge or parry with perfectly timed gunshots. That and "Bloodborne's" look — Lovecraftian viscera splattered on cobblestone and spiry Gothic corridors — make it a wholly fresh kind of nightmare.
David Wilcox
I edit The Citizen's features section, Lake Life, and weekly entertainment guide, Go. I've also been writing for The Citizen and auburnpub.com since 2006, covering arts and culture, business, food and drink, and more.
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