7. The Last of Us
Naughty Dog, 2013. Playstation 3, Playstation 4. Action Adventure.
Naughty Dog, as a developer, was becoming stale. No-one acknowledged it yet [except for me-Tom Towers], but after producing top-selling franchises like Crash the Bandicoot for the original Playstation, Jak and Daxter for the Playstation 2, and the first two entries of the Uncharted series for the Playstation 3, the Californian developer was flying close to the Sun in terms of predictability and safeness. All they had to do was crank out the required third game of the Uncharted franchise and call it a generation. But shortly after the development of Uncharted 2, leadership within Naughty Dog decided to innovate by developing a second game simultaneously for the first time in company history – The Last of Us.
Everyone that was working on the Uncharted project was not invited along for the ride, either by necessity or choice, and the result was a triple-A game that had some semblance of gameplay as well as spectacle. A triple-A game that was dark, not in the spirit of Jak II, but one that touched on the grim mundanities of day-to-day survival raised by Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Road. And after four years of development, The Last of Us enjoyed unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success, but beyond that received universal praise from all segments of the gaming community.
Directed by Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann, they were able to make a story intended for adults commercially viable. Cutscenes no longer need to be cheesy, they could just be scenes, and feature actors who would influence the script in meaningful ways. The developers stated that they drew influence from Resident Evil 4 and Ico and like those games The Last of Us has a gravitas that is earned in moment-to-moment play. Everything the player does has an impact that is respected. My most memorable moment in the game, while lacking ammunition, was to perfectly aim a brick at an opponent’s head, surely leading to his instant demise. Instead, he took the hit and turned to fight his attacker, leaving me to run away while yelling, “Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!”
Every interaction with nature (including humans) is a threat to survival, and your means to overcome this is combat in some form or another, but also in providing support.
The last few moments of the game provided fodder for indignant gamers who months prior had successfully petitioned Bioware to change the ending of Mass Effect 3. That simple line of dialogue and the non-verbal response from Ellie has set the stage for the sequel, to see how that decision by Joel has played out.
The Last of Us deserves its place in this list through allowing triple-A games to cross into more mature and thoughtful content, while also leading other triple-A games into acknowledging that all games are meant to have some semblance of gameplay, and not just coast on appearance and reputation.
- Phil Fogg
6. Dear Esther
The Chinese Room, 2012 PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One. Exploration Game
The original Dear Esther was part of a PHD project on first person shooters by academic Dan Pinchbeck (not to be confused with this guy) and composer/radio presenter Jessica Curry (together they are known as the husband and wife sex-negative-developer duo, The Chinese Room). Doctor of First Person Shooting Dan Pinchbeck wanted to alter the academic discourse surrounding games from theoretical argument, to practical experimentation by taking academic questions, and making experimental mods out of them.
The first experiment aimed to answer an academic question (can the first person shooter structure be inverted, and still remain a visceral experience?) was the Doom mod, Conscientious Objector. Instead of encouraging the player with the positive reinforcement and moral support of a Cortana, Conscientious Objector featured a discouraging drill sergeant disparaging the player, and instead of levels becoming progressively simpler as the player killed more and more enemies (thus simplifying the environment by removing obstacles), the player’s gun fired rubber bullets allowing him or her to progress past a single enemy, but not reduce the number of enemies (and therefore obstacles) over the course of a level.
Several experimental mods later and we arrive at Dear Esther. Inspired by environmentally rich games like Shadow of the Colossuses, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and Metro: 2033, Dear Esther aimed to answer the question: Can you make a similarly rich environment in a game, yet remove anything resembling traditional gameplay mechanics, and still end up with an engrossing experience?
What makes Dear Esther inarguably the greatest experimental game of all time, and arguably the greatest indie game of all time, is that regardless of whether your answer is yes or no, you are participating in the experiment yourself: your own take on the merits of Dear Esther is the answer to the question Dear Esther asks.
The same cannot be said of even the most divisive walking simulators that came in its wake. It is very easy to love or hate Gone Home for political or moral reasons, or to dismiss or love The Stanley Parable on the basis of it being a trite stand-up comedy routine of it’s funny because it’s true-level observational jokes (or love it for the same reason), but because the narrative of Dear Esther is essentially meaningless outside of its lyrical content, the thematic content of Dear Esther remains purely experimental.
And this is apparent in Dear Esther’s reception. As stated above, it may be no more divisive than Gone Home, but read a handful of reviews of both games and you’ll find that the division when it comes to Dear Esther is indeed primarily about the validity of walking simulators as a genre, whereas Gone Home, while still being ridiculed for being a walking simulator, manages to attract even more vitriol on the basis of its moral content.
Ultimately, the experiment was undeniably a success, commercially and critically. And for me personally, the retail version is a beautiful little jaunt through the English countryside, even more enjoyable than Fable, for instance, because it allowed you the time to wander freely and enjoy the scenery which could also be rendered in much greater detail due to not having to dilute its visual and architectural design to fit more complicated gameplay mechanics. And the original mod, with its simpler audio design and musical accompaniment, as well as its starker, darker visual design, which allowed for one’s imagination to complement its aesthetic—just as the disjointed, incomplete writing style allowed for the imagination to complement its narrative—is a masterpiece of videogame lyricism and atmosphere, even greater than the retail version. But, alas, it came out last decade, so cannot make the list.
- Tom Towers
5. Dark Souls
FromSoftware, 2011. Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch . Action RPG
Souls fans are the worst. While the gaming press praised Demon’s Souls for its melancholy beauty, its intricate level design, its unique online features, its engrossing world and subtle storytelling, all that Demon’s Souls fans noticed was that it was hard. Ask them if there was anything else good about the game, and their response was, at best, yes, but did I mention just how hard it is? At worst, it was to interrogate you as to why you were such a coward as to want something out of a game other than a challenge.
By the time Dark Souls was released, all of a sudden Souls fans were engaging in some critical revisionism. Apparently critics had failed to properly appreciate Souls games, only noticing that the game was hard, whereas they, the connoisseurs that they were, had always loved the series for its melancholy beauty, its intricate level design, its unique online features, its engrossing world and subtle storytelling; sure it is indeed hard, they’d say, but there’s so much more to it than that!
In fact, Dark Souls’ reputation for being hard was such that soon any difficult game started to be compared to Dark Souls. And indeed, one of Dark Souls’ most divergent and ultimately influential design decisions was to focus on challenging the player. But more important than the difficulty, per say, was the decision to not avoid friction.
The greatest example of this is that there is very little instruction on how to play what is pretty much a rudimentary beat ‘em up in slow motion—a very weird combat system, let alone one for an RPG. Learning how long attack animations last, how far to roll out of the way of enemies, and the timing of blocks is entirely up to the player, and is by far the hardest part of the game. Once one has figured out how these basic mechanics work, then the rest of the game is as simple as learning the moves and behaviour of each new enemy one encounters. From this point on, the game really isn’t all that hard.
But the very fact that the hardest part of any Souls game is the very beginning of it, and that it is hard precisely because you must acquaint yourself with just how the game plays without any didactic hand-holding to make it any less of a frustrating experience, is an astoundingly original design decision in any decade, let alone one that prized a frictionless experience over any other consideration. The only other games that follow a similar structure are the most hardcore of sims!
While frictionless experiences still dominates the gaming landscape, Dark Souls nevertheless allowed developers to make mechanics more tactile and enemy attack patterns more complicated; there was even a little more wiggle room to make things more difficult—though not without a copious application of lube.
Shovel Knight is the quintessential post-Souls game, from the obvious aesthetic touches such as bonfires, to the more important things like its focus on precise control and complicated enemy attack patterns and intricate level design. But even though Shovel Knight was not much easier than a Souls game, it was still a frictionless experience, requiring very little time to learn how to play in spite of an unorthodox jumping mechanic and dangerous bosses; nor did it ever harshly punish the player for dying.
The revolutionary co-operative and competitive online system and the limitations it placed on player communication also paved the way for more dynamic online systems that could be adapted to fit games as diverse as Death Stranding, Sky: Children of Light and Forza Horizon!
Like the rest of our top 5, there is an argument to be made that Dark Souls isn’t just the fifth best game of the decade, but the best. However, we’ll leave that argument to be made by someone else.
- Tom Towers