My favorite 30 games, 2010-2019:
3D Dot Game Heroes:
Gorgeous voxel love letter to Zelda 1.
Ufouria:
NES game that was not released in North America until 2010.
Pac Man CE DX:
Combination of Pac Man and “Snake”.
Space Funeral:
A JRPG about platonic forms, soundtrack by Delia Derbyshire. Blood is dripping from everything always.
Uin:
To progress in this game you must always think the opposite of how games have trained you to.
The Clotted Island / Cities of Day and Night:
These break the idea of “mechanics” down to their atomic parts; the goal is to understand what the mechanics even are.
suteF:
There is a bear that is also a computer in it.
Spelunky:
I am still playing this game. I played it this week
Lim:
Uses mechanics alone to convey an idea about binarism and transphobia in public spaces.
Analogue / Hate Plus:
Nonlinear novel about generation ships, feminism, the descent of democracies into fascism and the toothlessness of the technocratic state.
Device 6:
A game made of typesetting, played by scrolling.
868-HACK:
Greatest of the “Broguelikes”, a compact, brutal trip through the kinds of “mainframes” that only exist in movies.
You Will Die Alone At Sea:
I made this, it is my favorite game I made this decade.
PT:
Closest I’ve ever seen to a game you live rather than “playing”.
Alien: Isolation:
Emergent situation generator that fully understands why the 80s can and will kill us.
Hack 'n' Slash:
Game you play by disassembling its own Lua scripts.
Splatoon:
Less a game than a place or an act of interactive theatre. “You had to be there”.
TIS-100:
Game you play by writing assembly within the interface of a nonexistent massively-parallel microcomputer.
Undertale:
Woshua is rinsing off a pizza.
Super Hypercube:
This is the game that convinced me VR deserves to exist.
Inside:
“Hold right to watch a story unfold”, an essential and devastating story.
The Witness:
A game that teaches you itself by playing it, about the concept of a world that teaches you itself by travelling through it. The dictaphones ruin it.
Breath of the Wild:
Maybe the only truly nonlinear game I’ve ever played. Every person who played this experienced a story but their story is no one else’s.
A Link To The Past Randomizer:
Finds an amazing new structure embedded in an older game by simply changing the angle of entry.
Yoku's Island Express:
Pinball Metroidvania.
Return of the Obra Dinn:
A four-dimensional structure you move through, trying to understand what happened. A story told backward, crawling from the present into layers of past.
Overwhelm:
A perfectly constructed reverse Metroidvania, the dream of TIGSource made real. Elements of speedrunning, roguelikes, the Zelda Randomizer and Robotron 2084.
Baba is You:
A game where the nouns you operate on are the game’s own rules.