I don’t know how to put this but I’m kind of a big deal. People know me. I’m very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany. These are my 11 favorite games from the past 11 years.
RimWorld
I’m not one of those people that plays a game 8 times to see all the endings and get all the achievements. When I tell you I have played 643 hours of RimWorld, I know it’s not as impressive as those guys that spend 36000 hours on a game, then rate it thumbs-down, but it’s by far the most-played game in my Steam library. The next-closest is Dragon Age: Origins at 188, which includes a full playthrough from me and several by a completist friend using my Steam account to play. I’ve played the hell out of RimWorld.
And I’m not any good at it! That’s the best part! My colony usually gets wiped out by raiders, fuzzy animals, or colonists gone mad. I only recently figured out how to go trade or explore other parts of the map. I’ve never actually escaped the planet. There’s entire chunks of the tech tree I haven’t survived long enough to go through. There are entire biomes I’ve never tried because I’d fail instantly.
Rimworld is a testament to me spending 700 hours marinating in utter futility and I love it.
Untitled Goose Game
HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK. Everyone is talking about Untitled Goose Game and it touches me very deeply. I’m a troll and I always have been. Not the Nazi kind of late, the classic internet kind of screwing with people to drive them up the wall. Untitled Goose Game is how I feel on the inside all the time: a relentlessly irritating thing that befuddles and annoys everyone for no apparent reason.
Rule The Waves/Rule The Waves 2
The Rule the Waves series is what makes PC gaming great. It’s made by a single guy that churns out obscure wargames and sims. It’s a simulation game. You buy it from the dude’s storefront and he emails you your key. There’s no Steam or Epic or Origin. No cheevos. No console integration or cloud saves. It’s entirely advertised by word of mouth, as far as I can tell. It’s hard and obtuse and you have to read the manual. And it’s the best.
So, you like boats with big guns? It’s perfect. The first installment is set in the age of the battleship, while the second one brings us into the age of carriers. You pick a nation and become their Naval Secretary. This means everything from managing the research load, handling fleet deployments, dealing with the whims of your government, trying to provoke or prevent wars, and the other day-to-day as part of the military industrial complex.
The real meat of the game is designing ships: from armed merchant cruisers and minesweepers to battleships and carriers the size of several city blocks, you can pick hulls, determine armament load and configuration, arrange smokestacks, and build the elegant creations or hulking abominations of your dreams.
Then, you go pick a fight to see what happens in an incredibly robust and finicky real-time battle engine where you find out if you’re any good at designing ships.
Rule the Waves is the sim equivalent of building model boats and smashing them together to see what happens.
Out of the Park Baseball 15
As someone who’d be perfectly fine turning a sport into spreadsheets and moving numbers around on them for my amusement, The Out of the Park series is the finest baseball sim running.
They try, oh my god do they try, to build an Actual Video Game Worthy Game Simulation Engine for the games on the field, and it’s not great. The real meat of the game is the endless spreadsheet management, tweaking everything from the players on your team to your team strategy to your ticket prices to your team colors and logo. You can work with existing leagues or set up entirely custom leagues. Sometimes, it’s fun to pick a random country and build an entire baseball system, from Rookie Ball and every tier of minor league to The Show. Sure, it’s The Madagascar Show, but it’s still The Show.
I picked 15 because it’s the one I played most, because I was in a league with colleagues from around the industry and I am STILL pissed it fell apart just as I’d finally gotten my ramshackle team rebuilt and ready for a playoff run. IT WAS DEADWOOD’S YEAR, YOU SONS OF BITCHES!
They Are Billions
I like base building and because of that, I am terrible at RTSes. I’m terrible at They Are Billions, too, but it scratches that base building itch for me. The game loop is simple: Build a base, zombies inevitably attack, hope you survive. The constant pressure of incoming zombie attacks means you have to always worry about expanding and micromanagement the way you’d have to in Starcraft, but I don’t, which is why I’m bad at both Starcraft and They Are Billions.
What I enjoy is the slowly building pressure and the constant decision making: Expand or add more troops to your exploration party? Get more walls up or invest in that upgrade? Repair the building or demolish it and put something else in its place? OH MY GOD THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!
This is yet another game I’ve never managed to win but play anyway.
Rocksmith 2014
I tend to fall out of love with a game when I hit the point I go “Wait a minute, why am I doing this when I could actually be doing a useful thing?” I quit playing EVE Online when I went “Why am I spending hours every night running a space business for space money when I could run an actual business and make actual money in that same time?” Rocksmith 2014 neatly solves that dilemma. I got tired of Rock Band and Guitar Hero when it was clear spending hours pressing buttons was just going to make me better at playing a toy guitar…
Sidebar: can we discuss how much those games destroyed the party scene when they came out? Because we went from everyone talking and having a good time to watching everyone sitting around playing songs on plastic guitars and that killed a lot of the vibe for me…
…but Rocksmith neatly solves this by being a really fun game with a ton of built in mini-games that helps you learn or stay sharp on an actual guitar (or bass!).
As someone who initially learned to play when you had to print out tablature and then go sit in your room trying to figure out what exactly this stoner idiot was smoking (weed) when he tabbed out Of Wolf And Man (so much weed), Rocksmith teaches you to actually play actual songs you care about and gets you to practice by having fun. It boggles my mind it isn’t 10 times as huge as it is. PLAY ROCKSMITH, EVERYONE! LEARN TO PLAY ACTUAL GUITAR! CHRIST!
Knock Knock
I’ve mentioned this before but I think about Knock Knock all the time and it’s how I met *Borat voice* MY WIFE.
Story time! Several years ago, I was working as a game designer at a shitty no-name startup in Alabama. Times, they were not so good. The state of Alabama is terrible if you’re any living thing, but even worse if you have allergies. I have allergies. I had such intense allergies and was on so many intense medications just to survive that I still have lingering organ damage. No, really.
One of these medications gave me insomnia. Now, people talk about insomnia in that kind of ha-ha way, like you drank too much coffee before bed and stayed up all night, or binged a show on Netflix and couldn’t get to sleep. That can suck, but the real deal is literally hell. You can’t sleep but your body wants to sleep more than anything. But you are physically incapable of sleep. Your brain starts to break down. You start to hallucinate. You may just microsleep at random times and jerk awake. You hear things. Your sense of what’s real and what’s not starts to break down. There are entire chunks of my life during that time that I don’t remember, because my brain was broken.
And that’s what Knock Knock is about. One guy in his cabin being tormented by visitors that may or may not be real. It’s probably the closest you’ll ever come to a psychotic episode unless you’re really unfortunate, because you’re never quite sure what’s actually real in the game and what isn’t. Like, is that a bug or an intended effect or did that not really happen at all? I love it. It is genuinely upsetting and I couldn’t finish it because it was messing with my head too much. If there is need for help from a psychic, one could go on https://www.clevescene.com to get personal reading done and tread in the right direction.
So naturally, since I was handling its PR at the time, I sent it to this cutie goth I was flirting with–let ye who does not want a goth gf cast the first stone–to see if she’d be interested in writing a review of it. I don’t remember if she ever actually wrote a review, but several years later we’re married, so mission accomplished.
Except for the client, probably.
SORRY, CLIENT.
Contrast
There are games I love that I am bad at, then there are games that are bad that I love.
Contrast is one of those games that isn’t that good, but it was a launch title for one of the consoles and I promoted the hell out of it (yeah, another title I worked on, wanna fight about it?), so you had no choice but to buy it because there are like 6 games for a launch console. But, really, the puzzles weren’t great as the game wore on. And the game was glitchy as hell and I wooed you in with atmosphere.
But what atmosphere! Contrast is full of noir and Art Nouveau and sad jazz music and the shadowy streets of dreams with high-concept gameplay involving jumping between our world and the world of shadows to solve problems and help a sad little girl. God, I spent so much time running around in the demo and basking in it.
What can I say? Jazz, noir, pretension, goth gfs, I have my weaknesses.
Disco Elysium
It takes a lot to knock Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines off its throne as my favorite RPG, but Disco Elysium managed to do it the first time I had a detailed conversation with a mailbox and sympathized with it. Role-playing games tend to be all about stats, leveling up, and loot, but Disco Elysium is all about roleplaying in the actual sense. You’re a drunk cop that wakes up with a severe case of retrograde amnesia and a murder to solve. From there, you explore a run-down and very unique world, talking to other people, fighting small children, interrogating mailboxes, and otherwise acting like a noir cop undertaking an investigation. I feel like it was written expressly for me and I enjoyed it tremendously. You can’t go wrong with a game where one of the default character options can easily go insane. It’s what Planescape: Torment was trying to be.
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine
I am a pretentious doofus and Where The Water Tastes Like Wine hits me right in my sweet spot. You’re talking Americana, folk music, being a wandering skeleton roaming from town to town, there’s tarot cards involved, everything’s unsettling and weird.
The main gameplay is meandering around a stylized map of America as a skeleton, tracking down story icons to hear about the mundanities of life in this basically-The Grapes of Wrath world. It’s like a visual novel where you have to work for the reading part and there’s no smutty anime girls.
YEAH MAN YEAH, THAT’S MY JAM, which is why it’s no surprise it was “a huge commercial flop,” per Polygon.
But if you give it a chance and accept it’s an experience, not a game per-se, it’s wonderful. Sit and let the atmosphere wash over you. Trade weird stories with hobos. Enjoy an amazing soundtrack. Live, man!
