December 31, 2019|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured Content

Ten Games, Ten Years: Wolfman Jew’s 2010s in Review

Given that we’ve been in a reflective mood over the passing decade here at Source Gaming, I’d like to add my own thoughts on the tumultuous ten years past. It’s also a list, much like the ones Nantenjex has been making (and which I recommend reading) for his favorite games of each year. But this isn’t my top ten of the decade – at least two or three games would’ve probably come from 2017 alone – but my past ten games of the year, with the four runners up for good measure. These are great games, but I’m interested in looking at both them and the cultural soup in which they were made and sold. The past decade has seen unbelievable changes throughout the games industry, and these games show some of what has and hasn’t changed over the years.

I’d also like to state straight-up that this is only a list of games I’ve personally played, which means there are notable absences, odd choices, or culturally important games being snubbed. This is especially true for the last two years, in which I spent much of my time playing Switch ports of indie games and things I’d missed of years past. So a number of games that dominated or influenced the world of games like Minecraft, The Walking Dead, and Fortnite are not on here. I’ve missed the entire battle royale and loot shooter genres, and my dissatisfaction with open worlders happened early enough in the decade that I’ve missed many of Ubisoft’s more recent skinner boxes. I’m also ignoring games I only played for a short bit, so my difficulty with being able to read the text in Papers, Please gets me yet again.

Because of this, this list is a bit odd and nebulous. The games I’ve selected are my favorite of that year, but they aren’t necessarily representative of the year as a whole. However, I’d like to look at the way they did and didn’t follow in with the way gaming changed. It’s more…nebulous and reflective than I typically try to be.

2010: Mass Effect 2

It’s hard to think of a series that defined the seventh console generation – the mid-Aughts to the early Tens – like Mass Effect. Its use of high definition graphics, the way it “streamlined” classic RPG mechanics, the moral choice systems, even the attempts to greater explore romance and sexuality (and the goofy-ass way the latter was done). It even got celebrity actors, something that’s gotten less “important” over the years. And while I believe each game in the Mass Effect trilogy is great – to a degree where each counters and exposes the others’ many faults – the series’ high point is here. It puts all its cards in its characters, to a degree where it can get away with its only “functional” combat and occasionally limited plotting (and, admittedly, one beyond boring character). The graphics led to both great character animation and grandiose locations, one example of how technical improvements could work hand in hand with art direction. But in the end, it really is just about the friendships. My relationships with Garrus, Mordin, Jack, Legion, and the rest meant and still mean a lot to me, even after my enthusiasm for Mass Effect as a whole has quieted over the years.

When I think about the era of the Wii and Xbox 360, I think about the energy, but also the struggles. We had juiced up systems and online stores, and more types of players than ever had access to games for them. But it was also a bad time for games that fell out of the more “traditional” action genres, and publishers fusing them to shooters (or, less frequently, brawlers) was a frustratingly typical solution. Mass Effect was one of the happiest results, but even it was subject to more and more concessions of “marketability” over each game, including this one. The struggles of game design and production have always been here; it was just in this decade where it became a greater and greater part of our culture. We’ve been more willing to or active in talking about the relationships between every type of creator, programmer, publisher, and player, and a lot of that started in the spaces HD, Steam, and greater internet access were making. BioWare’s series was central to that, from how its writers became more public figures – and points of controversy – to how its latest installment was subject to a battery of terrible, eventually public developmental problems. I don’t know if Mass Effect would even exist in the form it took without the connection and tension between all of those parts at that span of time.

My four runners-up: Deadly Premonition, Fallout: New Vegas, Limbo, Super Mario Galaxy 2

2011: Dark Souls

I never beat Dark Souls. I likely never will. I gave up after bashing my head one too many times against the Four Kings, which came soon after (successfully) bashing my head against Ornstein and Smough. I think the difficulty spikes are weaknesses of the game, but I’m not unhappy; it felt like a well enough point for my gormless Hollow to give up and be inevitably subsumed by the darkness. While my feelings on how Dark Souls does what it does – its brutality, its trollishness, its obtuse nature – is mixed, I keep the experiences of playing it and its sort of spinoff Bloodborne close to my heart. When the challenge of some frightening boss works, which it does more often than not, it’s thrilling and legitimately empowering. The greater plot of endless cycles and dead lords isn’t nearly as interesting as exploring the scraps you get along the way, hinting at you being part of something cyclopean and terrifying. It’s painful and obtuse, and more than that it understands the way that failure can help make you stronger. While the game itself doesn’t always live up to it, the argument itself is valuable – and the kind this industry rarely likes to make. Dying is normal, failure is normal, and understanding them is a fundamental part of life. And so for all its bloodletting and cruelty, there’s a hope and humanity there, too.

Although the eighth generation came two years later, Dark Souls’ influence has absolutely dominated the way we think and talk about games in this era. It’s the nexus point for how we argue about difficulty and accessibility (qualities it’s both succeeded and failed), as well as a major example of nontraditional storytelling and the bastion of uncompromising design. Dark Souls helped expose a path where a game could just be what it “needed” to be or “should” be, and that’s valuable for far more than just painful action-RPGs. Convoluted puzzlers like The Talos Principle, “walking simulators” like What Remains of Edith Finch, and genre mashups like Crypt of the NecroDancer only work with their comparable focus, and while I doubt Dark Souls was an influence on any of them, it did help pave the way for how to sell and support works major studios used to throw out with aggression. Now, they mostly seem to do so with passive-aggression.

My four runners-up: Bastion, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Portal 2, Rayman Origins

2012: Journey

It’s hard to really describe what Journey actually is – a sort of co-op silent platformer? The game’s ostensible simplicity and kindness makes it wonderfully accessible; it is, to date, the only game my sixty-five-year-old father has beaten (though he did kill a Guardian in Breath of the Wild despite only having between six and eight hearts. He’s an awful player, so seeing that was nuts). And the vague story around it, as you collect baubles of light and fly over dunes and mountains, is really comforting. Between its dynamic score and its phenomenal art, it feels positive and…kind, honestly. It’s escapism, not exactly a rarity in this industry, but more gentle and uplifting as you float across sand and peak. I guess really, this is a game that can’t be adequately described without the feelings it engenders. And that’s cool in and of itself. This can be such a cold or tough industry, obsessed with vague ideas of player dominance and technological power. Having something that totally eschews that attitude, even while making use of all that cold tech, is special. Games like Journey really are special. Needed, even.

It’s not hard to see a game like Journey being made today (Abzû, partially made by several members of the Journey team, came out in 2016). The game “culture” is more acclimated to these kinds of experiences from games big and small. And while Journey is really only one step on the road to these kinds of works existing, it was a big deal. It was nominated for a damn Grammy, deservingly so, and was supported by one of the industry’s biggest publishers. It “mattered,” and I suspect the impact it had was important for alternative games looking for a place in the market. The year after its initial release, the seventh generation began to fully move into the eighth, with BioShock Infinite being a closing page and The Last of Us a new one. That one’s been far better for indies and oddballs. But Journey feels entirely comfortable in both eras, a game that pushes back on how we categorize and delineate these periods of time.

My four runners-up: Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Fez, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Spec Ops: the Line

2013: Pikmin 3

Nintendo really took it on the chin with the Wii U. And that was fair (terrible advertising, terrible name, the not terrible but not great GamePad), but the Wii U was also the start of Nintendo’s regaining a sense of deeper, consistent creativity. Nintendo got more invested in emphasizing the little details, making bouncing landscapes and tiny mansions worlds unto their own. They were able to better frontline their gameplay ideas, powered by squid kids and magic caps. And they’ve shown more interest in weirder, more offbeat environments. Pikmin 3 has all that and more. It’s gorgeous, dirty, kind of nasty, and possessing a near-perfect gameplay loop. Really, this game is not the one that led Nintendo to its current successes; it just didn’t have the impact or sales for that. Super Mario 3D World, Smash (For), and Splatoon were among the real jumps. But…I kinda wish Pikmin 3 could be a part of their number. It deserves that place, that respect. This road Nintendo’s been on has had all kinds of successes and failures, but Pikmin 3 might be the greatest, most tragic of the latter.

As for Pikmin 3 itself, it’s a damn delight. It’s inventive and fun and intense, expanding and exploring the great ideas of the first Pikmin in ways that seem impossible and yet obvious. The dynamic time limit, where you collect fruit to keep your team alive, is a brilliant touch that encourages exploration and gives players more room. And the visuals! We forget that there was a solid year or so where the Wii U had some of the most graphically sumptuous stuff around, and the tiny gardens of Pikmin 3 were bursting with life. It’s the kind of world that just invites you to fling plant monsters all over it, hoping to find the next grotesque animal or piece of fruit. Pikmin is probably just too “weird” to be a Nintendo A-lister, but that’d be a bad place for it anyway. It needs to be in the muck with the fire-breathing hogs and murderous frogs. It’s all about digging for something new, something beautiful.

My four runners-up: BioShock: Infinite, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Super Mario 3D World

2014: Wolfenstein: the New Order

Mea culpa, I did not expect this from freakin’ Wolfenstein. A nightmarish shooter about the horrors of Nazism, the inescapable pain of racism and authoritarianism, and one with a shockingly good sex scene to boot? Admittedly, The New Order didn’t start as a reboot of “that old FPS with Mecha-Hitler,” but it’s still a game where BJ Blazkowicz – now, somehow, one of the most well rounded protagonists we’ve had from a shooter in years – has 16-bit nightmares of his previous adventures. That meta discomfort never goes away, not even when you’re simultaneously dealing with the discomfort of a sequence where you, say, blow up a disgusting Nazi concentration camp with a hijacked SS mecha. The actual shooting and such is fine outside some mediocre in-game achievements, but it’s the tone that sells this. The horror, the uncomfortably catchy Nazi pop hits, and Blazkowicz’s trauma never let it be “just” a conventional heroic shooter.

Wolfenstein: the New Order is shockingly upfront even for one of our loudest genres about what it is and wants to say. The Nazi and Holocaust imagery it employs is legitimately horrifying, and yet it employs it in a way that never feels exploitative or tawdry – it’s not something I as a Jew ever really…expected from a modern first-person shooter, especially not one from this franchise. The 2010s was a time where gaming, which has always incorporated violence of various kinds, took things to unbelievable levels. It’s rarely been perfect or even “good” (the grisly, tonally off graphics of Mortal Kombat 11 being my current bugbear), but there are far more games that are able to explore grotesque and monstrous topics. There’s an avenue an interactive medium is uniquely equipped to explore, and it’s good Wolfenstein has bizarrely marshaled its iconography and name recognition to join that charge.

My four runners-up: Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8, Shovel Knight, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

2015: UNDERTALE

Look, I’m not really sure what to actually say about UNDERTALE that hasn’t already been discussed to death. It’s a brilliant, funny, tragic, compelling, wonderfully scored game that takes ideas from EarthBound and Mario & Luigi and Mr. Bean in a wildly new direction. It oozes character out of its every pore and creates a world that is captivating and energetic, and deeply human. For all the debates over its moral choice systems, its metatextual horror, and its bizarre meshing or JRPGs and bullet hell shooters, the fusion of these ideas is the real miracle. It may have started from a fan’s perspective, but it’s now something thoughtful and new enough to inspire a new generation of future creators. That’s what the goal should be. That it’s so full of kindness and sincerity is just icing on the cake.

While I have many indie games as runners up in this article, UNDERTALE and Journey are my only two main picks – and Journey had three years of Sony money behind it. UNDERTALE was the product of only a scant few people working on Gamemaker Studio as a Kickstarter project. It’s a not bad representative for the space of indie games: people working on things connected to what they loved, made partially for and supported by an audience familiar with that. Almost all of these games struggle, due to the crowded field or a lack of polish or just bad luck. Many of the ones that even get made often fail to add new ideas or even present their old ones. UNDERTALE is one of the lucky ones, ballooning into one of the most iconic games of this generation, and that’s for our benefit. It shows a newish, still difficult route for less experienced or supported game developers, and that being new and different and proud for it matters.

My four runners-up: Affordable Space Adventures, Bloodborne, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Splatoon

2016: Persona 5

It’s all about the style, isn’t it? Persona 5 is a game bursting with style, energy, and panache. Its blood red backgrounds and intense UI energize you from your first steps into each immaculate mind-palace to the capture of its treasure. Every fetish-friendly Persona to capture, each piece of flair, each sexy, bassy song is a bolt of lightning. It’s just so unbelievably cool. Hell, even the boring normal world Joker occupies feels exciting; there’s never nothing to do. It almost feels like turning on the game and starting up your next day sends you into another of the game’s Jungian dreamscapes. Is a game even allowed to look and sound and have menus like Persona 5? And yet, it’s still all in service to a tragic, absolutely enraged story of a broken system and the kids stuck in it. The game never loses that anger, no matter how many adorable talking cats or nuclear-powered bikes it has. Even its stilted, at times comically awkward translation can’t hide that.

Persona 5 was a 2016 game, but it only made it outside Japan a year later. Fans gnashed their teeth, but it ended up being the right time. 2017 was the year where Japanese games, which had spent almost a decade losing clout and importance in the industry, got real big real quick. Zelda topped sales charts and review scores. NieR: Automata made Yoko Taro an international celebrity – albeit of the C-list video game variety. And Persona 5 brought all of its hardcore JRPG energy to the west for a raucous reception. At no point does it feel like it’s compromising its ideals (which isn’t always a good thing, certainly not when its sexual politics come up), and at no point does it ever feel like anything other than a frenetic and beautiful product of one of gaming’s most historic areas. It helped disprove the idea that the Japanese games industry was anything less than essential to the medium, and that alone is great.

My four runners-up: DOOM (2016), Inside, Firewatch, Stardew Valley

2017: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I’ve spent so much time discussing my favorite game of all time on this site, so let me just repeat this: Breath of the Wild is a game in which seemingly every single part works in near-perfect conjunction with every other single part. Its physics and chemistry systems, its temperatures and Runes; it’s a truly holistic game. And it’s a holistic game in search of the power of exploration, a value and ideal with whom the games industry has had a complicated relationship. Every climb up a mountain and glide off it are sagas in and of themselves; they are all earned. And the idea to front load exploration and discovery and the physical challenge to simply get somewhere is a quiet rebuke to what open world games are and have been. If “the journey matters more than the destination” is a cliché, it’s one this game proves to be paramount as a value. The challenge and fun of the journey and its odd stops is a breath (not a pun, I swear) of fresh air.

I don’t care about open world games anymore. I hate to say it, I really do, but I feel like the genre has spent the decade eroding into nothing as it’s become almost a default Triple-A genre. The games are bigger than ever, and not just in size, and yet, they stylistically feel all but dead. It’s sad, since these also take more programmers than ever before working worse hours than ever before, with huge budgets and time going into them. But Breath of the Wild rekindled the love I once had for games like Skyrim and New Vegas, and I think it did so for a lot of players frustrated by the state of big sandboxes. It’s ostensibly part of the same genre, it has the same mechanics, but the details all work to push the exploration and discovery further and further. It feels essential, and I think it is essential; though I doubt many major studios will bother to learn from it, it stands as a sort of testament to the value of what you can do with massive landscapes and sandboxes.

My four runners-up: Prey, Super Mario Odyssey, NieR: Automata, Hollow Knight

2018: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

This would be on my list even if I didn’t find it an example of top-notch game design, given how dang much time I spent writing about it – literally hundreds of posts on various sites, culminating with a mammoth series retrospective. But Smash deserves it no matter what. It’s a game that struggles internally with the relationship between old and new, between its massive gang of old characters and its small roster of newcomers. I don’t think it ever fully “answers” that, but it does use its wealth of old and new ideas to cater to as many types of players as possible. Part of that comes from content – a Brobdingnagian amount, with over nine hundred songs and over a thousand special battles representing unique Nintendo characters – but it also comes from energy and polish. Every character feels “right,” each attack an explosion of power and energy. The forty-plus years of (almost exclusively Japanese) gaming history allow it to feature both world-renowned icons and welcome, forgotten oddities. There’s something beautiful about how all that history can stand together, and it follows how the game works to support so many different types of player and types of play. If it isn’t the most accessible game (and Smash never quite is), it’s one of the more friendly and supportive ones.

Half a year after its release, Ultimate managed to become the best selling fighting game of all time (depending on how you count Street Fighter II releases, though that’s a whole other beast). It’s a game that attracts vitriol and energy and fan intensity, and I think that goes beyond just bullish Nintendo fan pride. For all its silly presentation, Smash is a true marquee series, a crossover that’s oddly prestigious. Ultimate cements this, not just from its absurd selection of fighters but the immaculate, brilliant elements of its design. Its footstep is huge, to the point where it often inadvertently – and sadly – pushes out other great games. Even if we ignore the game’s actual quality, it’s truly inescapable. And honestly, there are far worse choices for inescapable.

My four runners-up: Donut County, God of War, Gris, Picross S2

2019: Control

To an extent, I find it odd to give Control this position (really, it was between it and Luigi’s Mansion. Interestingly, both are about being trapped in a horrifying, hilarious building and using multi-purpose tools). Going just on mechanics, I kinda think it’s a slightly weaker Prey, with less imaginative abilities. The actions are less interesting, the upgrades less exciting. Where it exceeds, though, is in style and tone. It’s a spooky game set in a spooky place, with odd noises and voices and distorted visions. But it’s also deeply funny at points, as you explore a secret conspiracy just as plagued by bureaucracy and corporate politics as it is with the gangs of possessed soldiers. And the audio! The ambient noises are thrilling, the inexplicable sounds and voices chilling, and the sudden bursts of wild music incredible. The song choices at a couple points in the plot are some of the best uses of music I’ve heard in a game in a long time, and they turned some of the game’s climaxes into moments of intense power. The X-Files is one of its biggest (though by no means only) inspirations, and it often feels like a great mashup of that show’s best claustrophobic, scary, but also funny episodes – a far cry from the series’s most infamous foray into video games. It’s hard to find legitimately funny games; it’s even harder to find them working in the same space as a sci-fi thriller. So in a lot of ways, it’s a game that’s almost made for me.

Control is also an odd choice specifically as a 2019 game. It lacks so many of the tropes we’ve seen in modern games: no multiplayer, no micro-transactions, no open world, no sudden downsizing of its staff (it does have the upgrade trees and some announced DLC, though). But I think that’s valuable as an example in and of itself. Control feels like the kind of game that should’ve been made in the last decade but rarely was, due to developer limitations or executive indifference. Remedy’s previous games weren’t failures, but they often felt more limited or constrained by external forces (Alan Wake, which Control alludes to directly, retroactively feels almost like a ten-year-old test run). Control just feels…stronger, healthier. And that it and the prior nine games can find a home here suggests to me that the 2010s were partially about evening the space just a little bit. It’s not to say that struggles aren’t happening or that the worst parts of the business have gone away – in many ways they’re even more entrenched – but there are more options, more avenues, and more ways for games to be made.

My four runners-up: Cadene of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer feat. The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019), Luigi’s Mansion 3, Untitled Goose Game

Looking through the lists of games by year, there are also a number of potential omissions here. And while I’m looking forward to the next decade of video games, I’d be remiss to not mention the ten games of the 2010s I’m looking forward to trying the most:

Celeste
Cuphead
Disco Elysium
Dishonored
Her Story
Hotline Miami
The Last Guardian
Resident Evil 2 (2019)
Return of the Obra Dinn
Transistor

…And that’s just a fraction of them. But that’s for another time. For now, it’s nice to remember these games, and what they gave me. And what they gave us, too.