As I wrote earlier, this year’s video gaming retrospective involved limiting myself to 10 games. I listed a handful that I Was able to disqualify on some technicality or another, but this list of 5 games are those that I played in 2018, really enjoyed, and just hated cutting from my final 10. This isn’t a ranked or numbered list, but it is ordered in a certain way. You’ll find out why when you get to our final game.
First up is Don’t Starve Together, a 2016 release I’m making a special exception for. I played this for the first time in 2018, and I played it on stream and with my close friend Patrick. We don’t do that enough anymore, mostly because we live several time zones removed from each other and he’s an adult with a family and career and I’m me. This is a third-person, isometric survival game and I’d have hated a lot of its obtuseness if Patrick hadn’t been along to sherpa me through the early parts. We did a lot of cool things in our 3-4 hours playing, by which I mean Patrick built cool stuff I asked “Wait, what? What does that do? I need what? Where do I find [thing I need] to [do thing] so I don’t die?” Then I died. But the loops got longer and I eventually remembered how to build an axe, so I consider it a good time.
Next up is Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, or CODBLOPS IIII if you hate the English language and Roman numeral convention. There have been a lot of years where I grabbed the latest Call of Duty game on a whim, played through the campaign, and had a perfectly fine time while barely or never touching the multiplayer modes. That wasn’t an option this year as developer Treyarch shipped the game with 4 modes: Zombie Horde mode (which I’ve never played and have no interest in), traditional multiplayer, Specialist HQ, and Blackout. Specialist HQ is as close as there is to a single player mode, presenting players with short tutorial segments on how to use each of the game’s classes. You’re forced to choose one of these in traditional multiplayer, but playing through the HQ mode made me feel comfortable enough that I had a few clear cut favorites and didn’t feel out of place choosing amoung them and understanding how to “play my class.” But the real draw has been Blackout, Call of Duty’s take on the BAttle Royale genre made popular by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnight. In my experience, it plays like Call of Duty, with the best engagements coming at short to medium range, guns having a distinct feel, and the same tension I associated with Battlegrounds after dropping to the island unarmed, un-kitted out, and needing to find weapons and aid to survive. I’m not good at it, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had fun playing.
Two Point Hospital brings us to the middle of the list. This PC hospital management simulation and plate spinner probably gets by just as much on its sense of humor as its gameplay. I never get tired of seeing someone suffering from “lightheadedness” walk into my hospital and I know what they’re suffering from instantly because their head has been replaced by a lightbulb. Or when you have an outbreak of Mock Star Syndrome and there are people queued up in your psychiatric area’s waiting room all looking like Freddy Mercury. Two Point Hospital struggles a bit with layering systems on systems and not communicating, at times, how they interact to help you reach your goals to advance to the next scenario. Fortunately a sand box mode was introduced post-launch, so you can play around in that and cure people of Bogwarts. I just got that that’s a play on “Hogwarts.” This game is very British.
When I look back at 2018, Into the Breach may be the game I wish I’d played more of, and the game I’m most hoping for an iPad version to release in the future. This is a puzzle game masquerading as a turn based tactical strategy game with some rogue-lite elements in how you build your mech squad an unlock pilots. Those pilots and mech squads are then used to protect 2-4 islands from an invasion of alien bugs in turn based combat, but Into the Breach’s real genius that there is no guess work in how a turn will play out. You know when every action will happen, how much damage it will do, what the enemy movement, response, and attack will be, and can spend an hour looking for the perfect solution to save a damaged mech or a civilian building. It’s a fantastic game, and I’d be even more excited about the apparently excellent Switch port if I wasn’t so far behind on half a dozen other Switch games.
Finally, we have Octopath Traveler. This is one of the aforementioned Switch games I need to finish, but it has a clear gameplay loop I’ve really enjoyed through eight chapters and look forward to continuing. It’s a throwback to 16-bit Japanese Role Playing Games in look, in combat, and in story. There are eight characters to recruit, each with their own story, and some characters and stories are far more interesting than others. I’ve had a such a good time playing around with party combos and how their special abilties allow them to interact with NPCs in towns that this was on my final list of my Ten Favorite Games of the YEar right until I gave it my final review. In fact, it was number 8. And that happened through my own organic numbering of the list; it wasn’t a cute contrivance for Octopath Traveler, the game about eight protagonists, to be at number 8 on my list. But I realized that in my editing and moving titles around, I’d left a game off that absolutely, positively, no doubt in my mind, had to be on the list. But so did, oddly enough, my number 9 and 10 games. And everything else. So here we have Octopath Traveler, relegated to the also-rans due to my own carelessness/stupidity.
In my next (Probably?) post, I’ll list my Top Ten Favorite Games of 2018, in reverse order, with somewhere between a few sentences and a dissertation-length manifesto about what they meant to me. And I’ll reveal which game I so stupidly overlooked to knock Octopath Traveler out of its perfect spot.