Tatty's Two Thousand and Eighteen GOTY of the year list!

Honourable mention:

The Shapeshifting Detective (PC, Xbox, PS4, Nintendo Switch)



Full disclosure - I know the guy who made this along with 3 or 4 of the cast, but that's got no bearing on it making this year's list. If I'd hated it, I'd just have omitted mentioning the thing.

Shapeshifting Detective is an FMV Whodunnit, and 2018's strongest entry in this curiously British revival of the genre. If you've played the studio's previous title, The Infectious Madness of Dr Dekker, you'll find this one a little different.

It's a lot more streamlined, with conversation trees instead of the great-in-theory but frequently maddening text input system of Dekker. This design choice gives proceedings a slightly more constrained feel but the story moves along at such a pace that repeated playthroughs are enjoyable if you're at all invested in the characters. The murderer is randomly chosen for each playthrough.

Better writing, better acting and better design compared to D'Avekki's first game, then, and I'm super excited for what they do next. Hint: Tim and Lynda are already writing it...

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

That's interesting, about the random murderer. Seems tricky. On one hand, the benefits are obvious. On the other, it presumably means there are a lot of red herring variables that switch around, so while there's probably always a good reason to suspect a person, there's probably equally good reasons to suspect a few others. Unless there's some crucial wrinkle in there.

Looking forward to it, regardless, and glad to hear they're iterating and polishing what they've been up.

Not a gamer so won't know anything you discuss here but do love the Irishness of the thread title and wanted to say so

There's enough to the writing that, at least in the first couple of runs, you're not running into anything that's obviously a red herring.

10: Lumines Remastered (PC, PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch)



Synesthesia: a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

Until late 2018, the closest a video game has come to 'hearing colours' has been Lumines. There have been a few missteps in terms of sequels but Tetsuya Mizuguchi's original version was the most joyous, the most profound fusion of puzzle and music that I'd played, and it only came about because he couldn't get the Tetris license.

This year's remaster brought all those feelings back.

Miz (who also made another of my all-time favourites, Rez) is kind of a genius.

The last game I played properly was a tetris type thing on the Commodore 64. I used to play it while the kids were at school. Proper good it was. I tried a driving game a while back but it made me feel sick, and one of those VR things which was too bloody freaky . Games do look amazing these days tho

Tetris eh? Stay tuned.

9: Dead Cells (PC, PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch)



I'm going to coin the term 'post Roguelike' now.

Dead Cells is still run based, with a persistent levelling system, but everything else feels like a 2D action game of old like Castlevania SOTN. In fact, if Dead Cells had the same intricate (and static) level design as Konami's finest and not an admittedly impressive looking, and connecting, randomly generated one, the game would have easily cracked my top three.

It controls beautifully, better than any game of its type that I've played.

Dead Cells is also a celebration of Early Access done properly - Regular updates, a 1.0 release that is polished and substantially different to earlier builds and developers who are in constant contact.

People talk about Rogue Legacy and, most of all, Spelunky as shorthand for the run-based 2D action platformer. They really should replace those with Dead Cells.

8: Into The Breach (PC, Nintendo Switch)



The ingredients were all there - The new game from Subset, creators of FTL, one of my all time faves, and one which promised less randomness, the one regular FTL complaint. Also, a soundtrack by Ben Prunty - A big plus for me.

Into The Breach isn't higher on my list because I am not a clever man but, that sad fact aside, I'm having a blast with it.

You control a trio of Mechs, saving the world from an alien menace. The world has a somewhat flexible timeline so if you happen to fail (and you will), you'll start again with the option of taking one of your Mech pilots (who level up) back with you.

Essentially, Into The Breach is Mech Chess with one important difference, you can see your opponent's next move in advance and that mechanic is key here. Do you sacrifice the skyscraper and hundreds of lives, or do you place your badly damaged mech in the way of the shot, leaving you a man down for the next round?

The game is fair, something which you could never level at FTL, looks great and sounds immaculate. It's a shame I suck at it because Into The Breach is stunning.

Nice. I snagged that in part because the SP people went nuts for it and it just seemed like it was so obviously good, but I haven't played it yet. I fully expect to suck as well. "Mech chess" is great.

There's a dash of Battle Chess from Star Wars too.

7: Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (Playstation 4)



2017 saw a revival for Sega's longstanding Yakuza franchise with the release of not one, but two full length games. The first of those, Yakuza 0, ended up being the game I enjoyed most last year, and I've been playing through it again on Steam thanks to Sega's new found love of producing good PC ports.

Yakuza 6 has everything we know and love from the series - A fast moving, labyrinthine main story, satisfying (more satisfying than ever, actually) combat and more weird and wacky side quests than you could possibly imagine. And mini games! Oh, the mini games!

Yakuza 6 plays its trump card fairly early - A central role for Takeshi Kitano, who's as well cast as you'd assume.



Oh yeah, there were two Yakuza games released in 2018 as well...

6: Hitman 2 (Playstation 4, Xbox, PC)



The sequel to my 2016 game of the year isn't higher on my list for a couple of reasons - I've not finished it yet and, essentially, it's just more Hitman.

Don't get me wrong, it's better more Hitman - Graphical, UI and other quality of life improvements are welcome, as is the option for owners of the previous game to play the original maps in the new engine, although that takes the download size of the game to over 100GB. Have some room on your hard drive, this one's bigger than Red Dead 2!

I heard Hitman described as part action game, part stealth game and part sitcom. It's totally accurate.

The game embraces the incongruity of Agent 47 being a master of disguise and turns everything up to eleven. When you see your painfully white assassin dressing up as a local in a Mumbai slum and fooling everyone you've got to chuckle, and the game leans into it in a big way.

There's never been a better time to experience the joyous nonsense of Hitman, and to think Square let the studio go and kept pushing ahead with The Quiet Man...

I still need to try hitman 2

I still need to try Hitman.

I really do love what the series is doing, though.

Im with you, I never tried either. Watching the giantbomb crew play it though makes me want to try.

Yep, watching Brad, Vinny and Dan convinced me to get Hitman 1 and it was every bit as nuts as they made it seem.

I finished Hitman 2 last night. The only real negative I'd have is that, while the maps are of an overall higher standard than the first game, none of them reach the heights of Paris and Sapienza.

5: Red Dead Redemption 2 (Playstation 4, Xbox)



So, where to begin?

The first game was one of my favourites from last generation, vying with Oblivion and Journey for top spot most of the time, but news of its sequel didn't exactly set my world alight. I loved RDR in spite of it being a Rockstar game, not because of it, and my experience with GTA 5 left me distinctly lukewarm towards their whole style of game.

Red Dead 2 both confirms and confounds my suspicions.

At its best, the game is the most lovingly recreated open world I've seen. Its story and characters (so far - I'm about halfway through the main story, but have probably close to 100 hours in the game overall) are an order of magnitude better than anything Rockstar has done, ever.

The level of polish here is staggering - I heard a story yesterday of someone who was walking through the woods on a rainy day, in eerie silence. A few moments after the sun came out, birds began to sing. Little things like that, while neat in isolation, are constantly presenting themselves.

However...

Jeez, is the pacing bad. It's glacial.

I get that Arthur moves slowly (for a video game character) to drive home the feeling of immersion of the time in which he was living. I get that. Animation has always taken priority over immediacy in every Rockstar game since GTA 3 and if you allow yourself to go along with the flow you won't really notice it here, but it's a huge barrier to a lot of people.

While Rockstar's writing has definitely improved to me, their mission structure is still a relic of times past. Maybe it's because I've been playing so much Hitman, where there are multiple 'outs' for every situation, but when I load up RDR 2 again and find myself insta-failing a story mission because I've not conformed to the narrow scope of what the Housers consider correct, I roll my eyes. Again, the game is captivating enough that a lot of people can just go along with it, but me? There's a reason I've got so many hours in the game but have still so much of the main story to go.

And the controls? If, after those 100 hours, I'm still not totally au fait with which button does what in situations surely means the problem is the game's, not mine.

Red Dead Redemption 2, then. A phenomenally accomplished piece of entertainment and a high water mark for what can be done with a budget and staff unimaginable to practically everyone else in the industry. Parts of it just feel dated.

Really well put, on all fronts. I like the part about prioritizing animation. It does feel like some of these games (and AC games) care more about animations flowing smoothly from one into the other than they do letting players effectively take the actions they want to. Which is a bad-but-not-awful thing, but it becomes really ill-advised when combined with finicky mission parameters like the ones you describe.

I actually borrowed my brother's old Xbox for the second time, so I can make another attempt at playing RDR and powering through the control stuff, simply so I can get used to it, enjoy the previous game, and then get to bask in all the polish everyone's talking about here. I guess the fact that I'm willing to do that (and have to) really sums the situation up pretty well, for good and ill.

Much tougher question is whether this kind of game is good or bad for the industry on net, though.