My Top 10 Games of 2018: An Obligatory Year in Review - Part 3

In the home stretch now - here are my Top 3 Games of 2018! Prepare your best clutching-pearls for one of the most controversial lists of the year as I completely ignore Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Spider-Man, and the latest entries in the Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed franchises in favour of an indie darling, an obscure AA debut, and a free-to-play teaser demo for a much more famous title! So, now that I've well and truly spoiled the surprise, onto #3-#1.

3. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit

This one might be cheating a little bit because I actually got into Life is Strange for the first time in 2018, including playing the first game twice, and then sobbing my way through the prequel game Before the Storm like the disastrous Amberprice shipper I quickly turned into. So did The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit - technically the third game in the LiS franchise: a short, free prequel to the official sequel Life is Strange 2 - benefit from all that goodwill? OK, yes, unavoidably; but I also maintain that it really does stand up on its own as a brilliant game.

In response to a recent Twitter meme, I named The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit as the game I would recommend (and indeed have recommended) to a friend who wasn’t into video games but wanted to try one. There are a number of practical reasons for this: it’s a very short game (typically 2-3 hours), so a non-gamer who wasn’t enjoying the experience wouldn’t be stuck feeling obliged to plough through days and days of gameplay to please their gamer friends. It’s available on Xbox One, PS4, and PC, meaning that it’s about as accessible to all audiences as a graphically impressive modern game can get; and gameplay-wise it’s not challenging, so a novice would be unlikely to hit a frustrating learning curve. It’s also, I can’t stress this enough, available for free, seeing as it’s really a meant as marketing for Life is Strange 2. But it’s a game that stands up on its own, and since it introduces an all-new group of characters, someone who knew nothing about the rest of the franchise could enjoy it just as easily as an LiS super-fan.

For me, though, this game is made brilliant by the affection that I developed for the playable character, Chris. This was made all the more impressive by the fact that you only spend a very short amount of time inhabiting Chris’s world, and also that he’s a ten-year-old kid. Child characters in games often strike me as really, really annoying; so the fact that, by the end of the game, I would happily have fought a man, and then defended that action in court, to ensure Chris’s wellbeing, says a lot about how much I came to care about him. He’s just a great character: both in the sense that he’s pretty likeable and that he’s well-written, the latter of which is rarer - when adult writers are given the job of creating fictional children - than many of those writers seem to think.

The game takes place in a realistic, modern, American setting, but the events within are largely seen through the interpretation given to them by a troubled yet highly creative child. Nearly everything Chris encounters, however mundane - a broken water heater, a parked truck, a pile of junk in the front yard - is incorporated into his detailed imaginary world of superheroes and their villainous enemies. In Chris’s mind, a grand battle between good and evil takes place on an ordinary Saturday morning, while in the real world his difficult relationship with his widowed father plays out much more subtly. As the story unfolds, the player comes to realise the struggles many of Chris’s games represent, and it’s both heartbreaking and inspiring as his brave yet naive attempts to combat grief, poverty, and isolation become apparent. Like all Life is Strange games, it’s a shameless weepie, but I stand in awe of how artfully Dontnod wove Chris’s real and imaginary worlds together to create a simple, yet hugely impactful, narrative experience.

2. The Council

In the year that saw Telltale go out of business, in a shockingly sudden fall from grace for the seemingly untouchable titan of the interactive fiction genre, who would have thought that The Council would even make it all the way through its first season? Yet the first episodic game from Big Bad Wolf, self-declared specialists in narrative RPGs, not only made it to its season finale, but did so without ever slipping from its ten-weekly release schedule by more than a few days. (In fact, by my reckoning, the fifth and final episode landed a couple of weeks earlier than expected.) An impressive achievement when, at around the same time, the old hands at Dontnod were taking nearly four months to get the second episode of Life is Strange 2 ready for release.

In fairness to Dontnod, The Council was less populous and sprawling than their ambitious road-trip season: with the exception of the first episode’s prologue, the game takes place in a single location, with a fixed cast of characters clocking in at around the one-dozen mark. Full disclosure also compels me to add that the game did ship with some bugs which, while far from catastrophic, really ought to be ironed out in a post-full-release update; and that, depending on your choices, the final episode can run a little on the short side. But as a proving ground for Big Bad Wolf’s ability to craft a massive interactive story - one that encompasses a detailed alternate history for Europe and the Americas; plausibly interweaves real-world Christian mythology with the fictional eldritch religions of H.P. Lovecraft; and sets it all in an isolated country-house murder-mystery locale that Conan Doyle or Christie would have been proud of - The Council is a resounding success.

Very few modern games truly tax the player’s puzzle-solving abilities like the games of my childhood used to; and the ones that try often find themselves bogged down in the kind of impenetrable moon logic that many players believe ended the golden age of the adventure game genre in the first place. The Council’s puzzles may be its most outstanding feature: complex enough that, yes, you will likely need to resort to pen and paper if you want to be sure of solving them correctly, the answers are (with one minor exception) always ascertainable through the application of logic, deduction, and good old fashioned attention to detail.

The central story is a relatively straightforward one; but it takes place in such a complex global web of political intrigue (with a healthy dose of mysticism thrown in for good measure) that you will find yourself untangling its threads for days after finishing an episode. It’s a truly impressive feat of world-building to keep it all consistent, and the writers somehow not only pull it off, they make it look effortless.

The characters, by contrast, are cartoonish at times, both in their visual design and voice acting. But they are also refreshingly unstereotypical: from the buxom young English duchess, whose wealthy elderly husband turns out to have been sold into marriage to her; to the wizened, kindly old papal envoy, who simultaneously gives the impression that his loyalties lie with all God’s children and yet with nobody but his wealthy supporters; no-one is what they seem in The Council.

This game was so close to being my favourite of 2018, but it sits at the Number 2 spot for one reason: the ending. It arrives quite abruptly (at least from my perspective on my first play-through), and after the action every surviving character is given a brief epilogue… with the exception of the playable protagonist, whose fate is understandably the one everyone’s surely most interested in. Louis’s strange absence from the end of his own story is presumably intended to leave plenty of room for a second season, which was foreshadowed heavily in the final scene, and which I heartily hope the game gets. However, as we saw multiple times with Telltale, even the more popular episodic titles have often failed to attract interest for that elusive second outing; and I wouldn’t like that inconclusive non-send-off to be the final word in Louis’s story.

1. Monster Prom

Compared to many of the games on this list, Monster Prom is conspicuously low-budget: while its visual design is undeniably beautiful, you can’t deny that there is little-to-no character animation to speak of, and that the different environments are more implied in the mind of the player than presented on the screen. In short, it’s a visual novel: a sort of choose-your-own-adventure comic-book of the digital age. So what makes this tongue-in-cheek dating simulator my favourite game of 2018, beating out all those (at least moderately) flashy, action-packed RPGs that I was so excited about this time last year?

This is actually a really tough question to answer, because my initial urge is to just say that everything about this game is awesome, which is a passionate recommendation but perhaps not a very useful one.

OK, so to be sensible about it: firstly, the characters are all great. A game that’s entirely focused on building relationships between player and NPC can’t go anywhere without likeable characters, and Monster Prom doesn’t have a weak link anywhere in its roster. Each character combines a high school movie trope (jock, bad boy, princess, etc.) with a monster trope (werewolf, demon, literal mermaid princess…) to create a surprisingly deep backstory, all packaged in the form of an adorable and sexy humanoid abomination you’ll come to genuinely care about. The writing is intensely funny, bouncing from subtle satire to off-the-wall surrealism, depending on what the RNG throws at you and what you choose to make of the situations you find yourself in. There’s also lots of swearing, plenty of (off-screen) sex and violence, drug and alcohol use, and everything else the tabloids told your parents to worry about when you got interested in gaming. But it is genuinely all in good fun, with nothing dark or depressing (with the possible exception of some content added in the Halloween update) to sully your lighthearted pursuit of romance and/or sex with your monster of choice.

The gameplay is also surprisingly innovative: rather than just make another dating simulator, the makers of Monster Prom chose to shake things up and go the multiplayer route, with local co-op supporting up to four players. How much your friends’ shenanigans impact on your own romantic prospects and vice versa depends on your choices: you can be an upstanding wingman, sabotage a romantic rival, or just accidentally get underfoot from time to time. Thanks to the party-game nature of Monster Prom, each individual play-through is designed to last two hours at most, and the game’s replayability is a rightly celebrated feature, with dozens of potential routes through the game and thousands of branching dialogue strands.

Finally, it’s impossible for me to discuss Monster Prom without mentioning the creative team and community behind it. As an avid fan of gaming on YouTube it delights me that some of my favourite content creators - including Arin Hanson, Erika Ishii, Dodger, Cryaotic, and Jesse Cox (the latter of whom also came aboard as the game’s executive producer) - provide voices for the characters. But even though the voice talent attracted me initially, the continued involvement of the dev team at Beautiful Glitch in the game’s social media presence is hugely positive and highly visible. Actively welcoming fan fiction and fan art; engaging with players’ feedback to further develop the game, characters, and merchandise; and so far providing three sizeable free seasonal updates for summer, Halloween, and Christmas; Beautiful Glitch have done a brilliant job of fostering a thriving fan community centred around their wonderful, weird little indie dating sim. I don’t mind admitting it’s brought out the fangirl in me: I have framed Damien/Amira fan-art in my house now because I ship those two so much; while with creative uncertainty I’ve cobbled together my own (largely borrowed from Monster High, I make no apologies) monstersona to help me cope with my desire for a date with Miranda. And if any of that last sentence meant anything to you - congratulations! You’re probably obsessed with Monster Prom too! Let’s get together sometime and talk about how it was the best game of 2018!