Tom Towers' Top 10 Titles of the Twenty-Tens

In composing my top 10 list for games released between 2010 and 2019, my only criteria was that I remembered the games that would make it. Even so, I had to look back through my finished games list at thevgpress.com to remind myself of what games I’d played! The threads containing said lists do not go back to 2010, so some games may have missed out (but when you look at what games came out in 2010, that’s unlikely).

Nevertheless, while I may not have been able to recall what games I played over the last decade without prompting, these are the games that have permeated my subconscious and thus become a permanent part of me.

I also excluded remakes and remasters of games that originally came out earlier, so alas MDK2, Another World, Beyond Good and Evil and Dear Esther were disqualified; the fore and lattermost of the list would probably have made it.

The former, unlike any other third person shooter, managed to achieve what the best first person shooters do: be a hallucinogenic experience, which would probably have put it above Hard Reset as the most hedonistic game of the decade; if Hard Reset’s aesthetic was an acid trip, then MDK2 HD with its filthy hues of rusted metal and vomitus projectiles and explosives—not to mention the latex bodysuit worn by one of its protagonists—was the physical and psychological humiliation of a dominatrix.

Conversely, the Dear Esther remake is the only game to live up to the name of the genre it helped invent by literally simulating the joy of a countryside stroll; making it a solid replacement for any of the more ascetic games on my list. The narration, due to its ambiguous obscurity is really little more than the conversation of someone whom you are promenading with: you are here to enjoy the scenery, and the only game with greater scenery is the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.—but unlike the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you are never in any danger, and may explore at your own leisure with no interruption except that of the narrator; a slightly less intrusive narrative voice than the force that was time in Proteus—another contender in this category.

There were also several games that did not make the list that deserve mentioning as examples of pure personal expression: To the Moon, Duskers, Fran Bow, Cibele and Sunset; the last two, much like my favourite game of the decade, grew on me the more I thought about them so that they are now two of my favourite games, in spite of me being only impressed by the former’s technique and the latter’s sheer audacity at the time. We also mustn’t forget the just plain weird, like Zeno Clash, Hyperdimension Neptunia: Victory, Wattam, Papo & Yo and Untitled Goose Game!

Due to my own failings, I had not played enough Assetto Corsa or Dirt Rally [2] for them to be in consideration for the list, so no racing game was a genuine contender; but I had played enough of what was arguably the second best game of the decade and also the second best game not to make my list, Rocket League. Not so much a car game as a genuinely realistic simulation of indoor soccer. Some have compared it to basketball, but the joy in Rocket League comes from the awkwardness of hitting the ball around, not the ease with which a ball may be thrown; thus making it closer to the much more difficult sport of football: a difficulty which allows for players to show off some truly sublime simulated ball skills—in indoor soccer, or futsal, the Harlem Globetrotters of the sport are the best players not circus performers.

And last, but not least, though it didn’t make the final top 10, The Last Guardian must be mentioned.

In a decade dominated by the indie scene and the narrative (and to a degree even creative) freedom it encouraged in triple-a development, there is arguably no other game in history that is such an astounding achievement of the relationship between triple-a developers and the publishers without whom they could not exist. Nearly a decade in the making, Sony did not give up on Fumito Ueda, instead allowing him the time and money needed to complete his vision; and he more than repaid their faith. A technological mongrel of a game, The Last Guardian nevertheless managed to be a satisfying ending to what is without question the most powerful narrative in videogames ever; and one of the most powerful narratives of its age in any medium.

So it is without question that The Last Guardian is the greatest achievement of this decade and, if it weren’t for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, it would be the greatest achievement in a collaborative commitment to storytelling of the decade in any medium! Yet it does not make my list because to put it any place but first would be to do it a disservice, and in spite of all rational arguments that may be made to the contrary, my number one choice has permeated my consciousness to a greater degree than The Last Guardian did; it would win, just barely, even if my list could include games that weren’t released this decade (which would result in most of the other games on my list being replaced)!

That is not to imply it has been a bad decade, but it’s hard to compete with the likes of Omikron: The Nomad Soul, which was surely the first game that allowed you to urinate in a virtual toilet!

10. Hard Reset

While I have never taken any hallucinogenic or psychedelic drugs, I have never needed to to hallucinate or be entranced by geometry, so I am somewhat confident in saying that playing Hard Reset must be what playing Tetris on acid is like.

First person shooters, like Tetris, are hypnotic experiences. They force the player to focus on a very small field of vision then follow in that small field of vision a very limited number of visual stimuli; success is the disappearance of the repeated elements placed in this limited field of vision: the crumbling of Tetris blocks or the death of enemies. The only difference as a visual experience between Tetris and first person shooters is that the backgrounds of first person shooters are more varied and elaborate. All the better to hypnotise the player and induce hallucinations with!

If Metroid Prime—the greatest first person shooter ever—induced meditative hallucinations including not only the appearance and death of enemies, but even the backgrounds in which they appeared and died, then Hard Reset is more like the psychedelic and abstract metaphor for evolution in 2001: A Space Odyssey—yet even more intense; a weird blending of all the elements in the game, both background and the enemies superimposed over the background, running together into blended colours that are neither the background nor the animated foreground!

This makes for an unending kaleidoscope of various shades of neon blue, red, yellow and silver all dancing together in a mesmerising harmony courtesy of the combat’s mixture of both forward and backward momentum (whereas Doom, both the reboot and the original, have you moving almost always forwards and Serious Sam almost always backwards!)—this is a colour organ whose productions are as beautiful as you are able to make them. For the best results, make sure to raise the difficulty and run around as erratically as possible, first furiously into battle, then just as furiously into an improvised retreat—both to give you the greatest chance of survival, and also the most beautiful collision of colours.

9 Papers, Please

One might be tempted to talk about how there are more refugees in the world today than there were during the second world war, making the theme of Papers, Please fascinating and timely. But that would be a political analysis, and Papers, Please goes out of its way to avoid political themes, as most artworks today do; in spite of accusations to the contrary by critics and enthusiasts who gladly embrace subjugation by endorsing the substitution of morality for politics.

Set in a fictionalised member state of the Soviet Union, Papers, Please contains no commentary on the brutality or economic achievements of the Soviet empire, but it does present the player with increasingly more interesting moral quandaries to solve—but this is not why I love Papers, Please.

aesthetically, Papers, Please is a masterpiece. Every action is accompanied by a perfectly-timed sound effect, both reinforcing the player’s actions as well as rewarding them due to the satisfaction of the actions themselves, and creating a sense of tactility unmatched by anything other than Gran Turismo’s delectable menus. The navigation between separate screens transports one to different worlds: personal interaction with those who the player holds power over at the border checkpoint and the bureaucratic process which holds power over the player, nicely emphasising one of the most important yet oft-forgotten elements of disassociation and dehumanisation: the legalese and rituals of the bureaucratic process!

This may sound dreadfully simple an aesthetic achievement—it is. Papers, Please pips *Eufloria as the most beautiful minimalist game of the decade. One can practically smell the ink on the stamps, and the vodka on the breath of the migrants; it’s amazing how redolent a few hundred pixels and a few well-timed sound effects can be!

The Eufloria soundtrack is also probably the best of the decade; but you just can’t beat quality menu navigation when it comes to videogame minimalism! Plus, only the console port came out last decade.

8 Deadly Premonition

Deadly Premonition is a litmus test for aesthetic, literary and gameplay taste in games. If someone likes Deadly Premonition because they think it’s so bad it’s good, they are revealing themselves to be a self-isolating ignoramus. If someone likes Deadly Premonition’s narrative because they believe its irony is accidental, rather than the result of a meticulously designed post-modern digital decollage*, they are an illiterate philistine. If they think that aesthetically and thematically it is a masterpiece, but the gameplay sucks, then they are a middlebrow moron.

Not only did SWERY manage to take the work of someone who symbolises auteur genius in the modern film canon (David Lynch) and cut away its surrealism and pop sensibilities until it was even more idiosyncratic than the source material—if not quite as original—he also made a damn find sandwich of a game in the process, filled to overflowing with eclectic ingredients few would think to combine, yet ones that complement one another surprisingly well.

While both the Grand Theft Auto-style mission design and structure and tank-style horror levels (in place of GTA-style shoot ‘em up segments) lack the originality and skill of the narrative and aesthetic, the combination of the two is not only original, but more seamless due to the narrative and setting than the awkward mix of shooting, driving and cutscenes in Grand Theft Auto-proper. (But if we’re being honest, it is only inferior to Grand Theft Auto mission and world design in terms of its stiff mechanics and scope, respectively. And if one really thinks about it, its mechanics are “technically” superior to all 3D GTAs with the exception of V, anyway! Let’s also not forget that GTAV is an awful mess in how it tries to synthesise its technically complex mechanics and simplistic world and mission design!)

Even more impressive, the open world itself is an achievement surpassed only by the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The characters go about their daily activities as you play, and if you take the time to stalk them (err, I mean be a good detective), you not only flesh out their backstories and learn little titbits that contribute to the narrative, but you can actually figure out who the serial killer is long before the plotting as it unfolds in the main storyline intends you to.

As a mystery, it is Lord Edgar Allan Poe not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in that the joy is in you figuring out stuff yourself and if you are particularly astute, you will figure out things before the author openly reveals them—the protagonist is not the detective, you are!—and the author is not interested in showing off how smart his protagonist is, but in giving you a literary puzzle to solve (and thus showing off how smart they themselves are by coming up with a difficult, yet solvable, mystery).

And that’s not even taking into consideration the triple threat that was Riyou Kinugasa, Takuya Kobayashi, and Hiromi Mizutani’s magnificent soundtrack!

*I will admit my main motivation for referring to Deadly Premonition as decollage, not collage, is the alliteration, but I think it is also a fair description of SWERY’s technique. In many ways the disparate elements of Deadly Premonition do not feel as if they have been combined to form an aesthetic whole like the elements of most collages, but cut out of their source material to make de-contextualised juxtapositions instead, much in the manner of a decollage. But it is also true that the elements of David Lynch, GTA, Silent Hill and the cannibalistic sensibilities of indie cinema that have been whittled down to suit SWERY’s needs are then combined in the manner of a collage so, really, it’s both: a collage of decollages!

7 Metro: 2033 or Last Light…or Exodus?

Metro: Last Light would be substituted for 2033 if the ranger hardcore mode had not been DLC—as a result, I am yet to play it as it ought to be played. No matter how endearingly quaint the very Russian philosophical and political ruminations of Last Light (the author of Metro novels had a greater role in the writing of Last Light than he did with 2033; eventually turning his unused ideas for Last Light into another Metro novel!) and how cutely the metaphysical themes were personified in an adorable little darkling, Last Light simply could not compete with Metro 2033 without its own version of ranger hardcore mode.

Metro 2033, played on ranger hardcore, is the greatest stealth game of the decade (MGSV may be a better action game, but it never quite reached the heights of the Metro series’ stealth). The margin for error is almost zero: stand on broken glass, miss a knife throw, or breathe too near an enemy, and you’re probably dead. To make it through a level alive, the player is forced to plan out a complicated choreography of hiding and sniping, paying careful attention to the number of throwing knives available. And yet there is still some room for improvisation, resulting in some of the most frantic moments of quick thinking in any game, let alone a first person shooter, if you are not instantly killed for exposing yourself but given a chance to fight back or flee.

And as a first person shooter based on survival, it is nearly as intense an experience. Not only must all your ammo be counted and each shot made to count, if you are using a weapon with recyclable projectiles (and you will be if you want to survive until the end of the game), then you must also risk discovery by sneaking up to corpses to recover your unbroken gas gun bolts.

As often as not, whether sneaking or shooting, being equally careful not to suffocate by running out of gas mask filters; any area with irradiated air is a terrifying experience!

No other stealth game requires such meticulous planning and no other survival game is as much about memorisation and self-discipline as Metro 2033 is—two elements that really should be, but often aren’t, fundamental aspects of those two genres.

While my list gives no credence to influence, it’s worth remembering that two of the most well-received triple-a narratives this decade (The Last of Us and Wolfenstein: The New Order) owe a great deal to the Metro series, or at least followed in its footsteps. 2033’s combination of stealth, action and survival to explore serious themes may not be as personal as The Last of Us, but it is a direct precursor: a stepping stone from Metal Gear Solid to TLOU. The relationship between the Dark One and Artyom is not unlike the relationship between Joel and Ellie, albeit far less deep (though deeper in terms of its effect on gameplay, and certainly more philosophically interesting!); and the relationship between Artyom and Anna—with a touch of intrusive Oriental humour—predates the romantic relationship in Wolfenstein: The New Order. In Exodus this relationship is explored in more detail, with The New Order perhaps encouraging 4A games to in turn take what they started a little more seriously!

Yet even without ranger hardcore mode, Last Light will remain with me forever as a strangely meditative experience, nearly equal to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl. The ultimate hollowness of the themes it raises and the questions it asks then fails to answer—in a typically oriental manner—allows one to project whatever one pleases into the experience in a way that other shallow explorations of deep themes do not—Blade Runner immediately comes to mind, which undercuts its meditative atmosphere by focusing on a thematically meaningless mystery whose answer, while never given, allows for no projection and is revelatory if answered by the audience only in terms of plot; this is also in stark contrast to its source material which, while also ambiguous, is not concerned with the unanswered mysteries of plot, but the unanswerable mysteries of God.

Fuck it, maybe Last Light should be here, after all! I’ll retract my opening paragraph and leave this as an open question: pick either Metro mentioned here—or maybe even Exodus!

6 Life Is Strange

Life is Strange is strangest if you have played Dontod’s first game, Remember Me: a beautiful, super-polished, high-budget beat ‘em up in the vein of Batman (the combat is almost identical), taking place in a highbrow science fiction setting which nearly successfully disguises the pulpishness of the plot. This strategy is reversed in Life Is Strange: a janky, low-budget adventure game with an ostentatiously pulpy plot and lowbrow setting doing its best to make mass-marketable a weirdly authentic bildungsroman and a totally original gameplay hook—a time travel mechanic allowing you to explore all possible dialogue options, which is also written very well into the finale as the super power becomes self-destructive.

Inspired by Twin Peaks, Max returns to a seemingly idyllic yet downwardly mobile small American town to expose the rot at the core of American kitsch while also having her big city sensibilities challenged by the responsibilities and sense of community she discovers—she also witnesses the murder of the best friend from her past life, at which point she discovers her ability to rewind time and thus alter the future. While the surreal elements have, like her superhero power, some lyrical qualities, they are mostly decorative; and, unlike Deadly Premonition, the influence of David Lynch is, at best, window dressing—at worst, a cynical marketing ploy to make the low budget aesthetic easier to swallow. But, like David Lynch (and yet again unlike Deadly Premonition), the exploration of human relationships is painfully authentic.

Much has been written about the relationship between Max and Chloe, but the most interesting relationships in the game are the familial relations between Max, Chloe and her mother and father-in-law. Max, being Chloe’s bestest childhood friend, is all but the niece of Chloe’s mother, and her veteran (read: traumatised by the dehumanisation of basic and thus unable to cope without comrades to lose himself in shared victimisation and a paternalistic ruler to free him from the very same victimisation that they initiated, allowing for the total submission to another’s will and the relinquishment of all responsibilities) father-in-law has neither the social skills nor the patience to deal with Chloe who, in turn, has been unable to cope with the death of her “real” father. They’re also struggling to make ends meet—her mother a waitress, and her father a security guard at Max’s school.

In spite of everyone’s best intentions, it is an inherently tragic situation and, while seemingly being but a background element, forms the bedrock of both the plot and the themes of Life Is Strange. Sure, there’s a serial killer on the loose, an incoming metaphysical storm, and Max keeps getting nose bleeds, but what really matters is whether Chloe’s step dad can find a way to show Chloe that he cares for her, that Chloe can come to terms with her father’s death, that her mother can find a way to support both her husband and her daughter who are floundering due to trauma and grief while navigating their jealousies and the trials of wage slavery, and—most important of all—that Max can find a way of gently friendzoning Warren.

With as authentically a tragic depiction of human relationships as this, the hella awkward dialogue and jankiness of the gameplay become endearing—through pity and empathy one can’t help but to love Life Is Strange not in spite of its failings and foibles, but because of them: what else does pathetic humanity have to cope in the tragedy of life but empathy and pity? Wowsers!

5 Sky: Children of Light

Regular listeners of the Game Under podcast would know that I am an occasional churchgoer (and also, I hope, infer that in spite of this I am probably not religious); the very fact that one may enter and leave churches as one pleases with no one batting an eyelid makes them a strangely subversive institution in a society built on property rights. The inheritor of cultural communal property (at the discretion of the owners) is the shopping centre, and once one is in a shopping centre one is beset with even more propaganda than a church’s stained glass windows, friezes, icons and cross-inspired layout; all of which are a mesmerising, dreamy—rather than hypnotising, nightmarish—aesthetic experience.

But best of all, in my lifetime at least, one may enjoy the unique experience of being alone in a public place if one wanders into a church. Even if one has company, then it is likely to be the church’s organist practicing (Sky: Children of Light features musical instruments, and shockingly it’s not rare to run into another player improvising, in spite of the total commodification of art and thus the cultural rejection of performing music as a communal activity!), or a volunteer running the museum alcove in churches of historical importance. In a shopping centre one is drowning in a sea of stressed-out shoppers, advertisers offering free samples of things and charities begging for donations and the only musical accompaniments are the insufferable offerings of top of the pops or muzak. Unless one visits at night, in which case they are nearly as wondrous entities as churches, and blessed with many more mysteries! In silent isolation, not unlike churches, they even develop their own fascinating acoustic ambiences.*

I’m the one dancing; who the others are, I’ve no idea. Sky’s soundtrack is also every bit as good as Journey’s.

This may be why I did not enjoy Journey, at all. Jenova Chen was once interviewed by a priest who used Journey and Flower in active Christian worship exercises; on learning this, Jenova Chen commented that when he analysed That Game Company’s business model, he realised that they were working in the social service industry: Journey provided an experience in which one could trust other people; a rare feeling for gamers. However, in my own experience, while one was certainly not threatened by the presence of other players in Journey, one gained nothing from meeting them, pragmatically or personally; indeed, the mysteries of the desolate landscape of Journey became with the presence of others a church filled with people, and people filling a church obscure its architectural and, indeed, its spiritual marvels.

Sky: Children of Light is more like a shopping centre than a church. Full of useful and aesthetically pleasing things to collect, it is structured on the basis of material gain by motivating one to improve one’s status through the purchasing of expensive and/or fashionable clothing as well as useful or flashy accessories while simultaneously offering the perfect venue in which to show off the clothes one is already wearing and the accessories one is using. Hard work is rewarded in the same way it is in reality: very, very slowly; though it can eventually begin to build up (and even snowball with the right network!). Or, alternatively, if you are rich then you can skip the hardship of manual labour and buy the fanciest outfits without wasting hours of your life working your thumbs to the bone.

One way of making a candle without much effort or time invested is by hitching a ride on a random player in the Valley’s race! It’s all about the grind…

Yet this creates a strange sense of community. While one is not guaranteed to find help when one needs it, no one seems to be particularly annoyed by a player calling endlessly for assistance in opening a multi-player door so they can collect a few extra blobs of wax, and more often than not people are willing to help—at least when there is a reasonable reward on the other side of the door. The better one dresses oneself, the greater the contrast between one and newer players but, for me at least, instead of fostering a sense of superiority, one ends up feeling compassion for noobs (whose antics not based on collecting as much light as quickly as possible are often amusing to behold) and thus, unlike in many games, when a newbie appears and randomly befriends oneself (not realising the value of candles!), one might actually take them by the hand and lead them through the level, showing them where all the candles, winged lights and spirits are! And it probably isn’t just me who indulges in charitable works from time to time; when I was a newbie, savvy players in fancy outfits routinely helped me out—an experience unlike any other MMO I’ve played (though Koreans were usually surprisingly generous and helpful compared to their Japanese, European and Anglo comrades in other MMOs; perhaps because Koreans live in the closest thing to a micro-transaction economy this side of China).

That one can’t talk to other players unless one spends many candles on one’s friendship constellation or has a very expensive item that allows one to talk to random players also helps to make interaction with friends a very interesting experience. By the time one ends up talking to anyone, one is likely to have known them for some time, making talking to them for the first time an exciting experience, rather than a boring exchange of online platitudes (A/S/L?); even when one is talking to a group of people, there are usually one or two people who know each other very well, making breaking the ice a little less awkward! (Plus, friends of friends are usually very eager to befriend one another.) And even if one does talk to a stranger, it is usually a similarly exciting experience due to its rarity, although slightly more awkward and closer to A/S/L etiquette of standardised online interaction.

It is fascinating that, counter-intuitively, That Game Company has ended up making a much more wholesome community experience than Journey—which used the standard, less exploitable one-time payment strategy—in a game clearly structured around encouraging potentially exploitative in-game spending as its business model. But maybe it is their very exploitation and alienation that attracts teenagers to the carnivalesque horror shows of shopping centres: the desire to enrich one’s self materially and marinate in the envy and jealousy evoked by window shopping becomes the shared-suffering doorway to a spiritual connection to one’s peers**, just as, in reverse, a church’s spiritual beauty encourages the severance of one’s connection to other people and it is only in the shared punishment of a priest’s acerbic tongue that the community is put back together through a shared sense of sin.

I am reminded of another interview, this time regarding the Souls games. The inspiration for the Souls series’ strange online system—which clearly influenced Sky: Children of Life—was Hidetaka Miyazaki’s experience of adverse circumstances encouraging communities to rally together. The result was, on the contrary, one of the most immature and unhelpful communities in gaming: git gud, scrub! But, then, the Souls games are like Journey: they are churches, not shopping centres; no matter how melancholy, they are things whose architectural souls are beautiful and pure: other people merely dilute that beauty with sin. Sky: Children of Light, on the other hand, is as horrific and impure as it is beautiful: other people give it its humanity, not a god or its own aesthetic sensibilities—just as the redemptive and entrancing mystery of empty shopping centres at night is the fundamental absence of other people, and the joy in such an architectural experience is not in the architecture itself, but in observing and meeting the people stacking shelves and the tradies renovating—it is the little angels to whom we owe our heaven on earth who reveal the beauty that lies beneath the vulgar surface of shopping centres***; in Sky: Children of Light, anyone who has paid their dues for or bought a useful uniform may stack the shelves and renovate the shopfronts to improve the lives of other players.

Admittedly, I only know two of these people.

Indeed, if Sky: Children of Light has taught us anything, it is that “late-stage capitalism” needn’t be a boring “hellscape”—at least digitally; alienation, it turns out, is the key to turning strangers into friends: the immediate intimacy of social media is proof enough of that! (Or a caption above the final section? Probably a caption!)

*One night I must try singing in one!

**More likely, or in addition to, it is simply because shopping centres are the one public venue where teenagers are allowed the same freedom of movement as adults.

***Or, conversely, accentuate the conspicuous absence of others.

4. Bayonetta

The quintessence of the violence in the “West”’s epic romances is erotic, not heroic. From Dido to Dante to the dildo in GTA, the violence is driven by Eros, not Ares; the violent punishments in Dante’s Inferno are steeped in the eros of sadism (is 120 Days of Sodom so different to the Inferno?), making his depiction of endless copulation as a punishment neither horrifying nor nauseating by comparison, but merely a lukewarm inconvenience in the frigidity of an arctic hell. Yet in spite—or perhaps because—of his asceticism, Dante is also responsible for one of the greatest metaphors for lust: being driven about by the wind; though, again, who would not find joy in being a leaf (or more potently, pollen) borne by the wind? In the Western canon, only the likes of William Blake are willing to conceive of Dante’s orgies with the joy of abandon an orgy in hell would surely constitute; while elsewhere violence is usually seen through a kaleidoscope of orgiastic sensuality.

Even our own epoch’s great epic hero, James Bond, is an iconic character in film not because he is an incorrigible lothario but, on the contrary, because in spite of his seductive qualities, he is nevertheless the ascetic, masculine counterpart to the unrepressed, effeminate villains he flirts with in witty repartee—metaphorically saving not the world but his own anal virginity in the face of homosexual seduction, and proving always to be above even his own virile heterosexuality by rejecting as many amours as he engages in; showing a level of self-restraint that any self-flagellating saint would be proud of. (Though self-flagellation makes chastity pretty enjoyable; just ask Francis Bacon!) Indeed, when he makes the mistake of giving into his own sexuality and falling for a lady, it usually results in betrayal or disappointment. The literary Bond is a slightly more interesting character in that his womanising leads to a lonely life, and he experiences as much sexual frustration as he does satisfaction, but the moral is much the same.

Interestingly, in spite of Bond’s potent heterosexuality being contrasted with his enemies’ weening homosexuality, Ian Fleming’s ancestors mentioned above were saving themselves from seduction by women and finding sexual release in fucking their fellow countrymen. By the time Ian Fleming was being recruited by a rear admiral, the sodomy going on in the armed forces had been institutionalised to replace the more violent hazing practices of the homosexual glory days of the armed forces, so it’s no surprise that homosexuality in the armed forces is today suppressed, as initiation is by its very nature is taboo. The institutionalisation of prostitution (during the last two world wars, the imperialist militaries progressed beyond the ancient Greek sexual mores to the 19th century’s) probably has something to do with it, too.

Luckily Bayonetta isn’t the videogame equivalent to James Bond or epic poetry written by ancient pansexual soy boys and sadists, even though post-war Japan is as much a part of the Western as the Eastern canon. Bayonetta is The Avengers; a classic romance! While Kamiya’s first beat ‘em up, Devil May Cry, flirted with a psycho-sexual theme—very Oedipal in its complexes, too!—it never really expanded on it, and as the series continued without Kamiya at the helm, it soon devolved into the anodyne, cheesy homeliness of boy band erotica that teenage girls had to wank to until Twilight gave them something far more exiting than Justin Timberlake and co. with semen slicking back their hair. Not coincidentally, Stephenie Meyer’s action scenes are much more exciting than Ian Fleming’s, and her books’ erotic passages are not moments of sexual rejection and metaphors for sexual frustration lifted from Freudian dream analysis (e.g. Bond’s failed liaison and its violent metaphysical interruption on the beach in Moonraker), but the fantasy, anticipation, and even consummation of her romantic leads’ courtship; though Stephenie Meyer still cannot help but mythologise desire and lust.

The Avengers, with smarter writing, more sensual leads and more suspenseful action than the material it satirises was—much to the show’s producers’ chagrin—taken as seriously by its audience as the targets of its wit. (Incidentally, the image of all-powerful espionage agencies we are haunted by today is an invention of world war II propaganda and the spy-inspired pop art of the Cold War, whether the conservative 007 or the counter-cultural The Prisoner; the reality of espionage is closer to the farcical narcissism of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy vs. Spy.)

But The Avengers was aired during the peak of the Cold War, after all—Capitalist America was busy fighting the Vietnamese Communists in a highly-competitive and equally peaceful espionage and propaganda battle that somehow killed millions of people in spite of the war’s famous frigidity; but when propaganda consists of bullets, bombs, bayonets  and Bayer’s latest chemical blends, it does tend to kill many more people than it converts,—so the producers should not have been too surprised that their audience would have difficulty in understanding the difference between parody and what was being parodied.

The best seasons of The Avengers are after John Steed (Patrick Macnee) is transformed from a debonair spy who wore trench coats like the coolest noir private dicks—not serial killers and paedophiles, although already the practical trench coat was growing a bad reputation—into an equally debonair dandy (an even greater achievement in charm and costumery), and was joined by Mrs. Peel (Diana Rigg) whose outfits were even more ludicrous, not to mention cool, than his. All of a sudden, the witty repartee was shared not between villain and hero but between protagonists dressed in a variety of colourful and glamorous suits and catsuits. The Avengers soon outgrew parody—just as the James Bond film series grew more and more ironic—inventing its own psychedelic and surreal world every bit as engrossing and original as that of its counter-culture competitors.

The transference of the sexual tension from the violent struggle to retain one’s virginity (whether one is beset by the queens of antiquity trying to ruin your bloodline or the drag queens of international conspiracies trying to crush Western Civilisation) to maintaining a professional relationship in spite of your partner being irresistible and an endless flirt, also allowed for what had once been very competent and suspenseful espionage plots to find just as much excitement in the sensual joy of surrealism’s extension of aesthetic (sexual) experience to every sensory facet of life, without the shame that sublimates it to another expression (such as imaginary violence); albeit with an ultimately ascetic basis for its sexual tension.

It may seem like a strange comparison, but Bayonetta’s themes could just as easily summarise the greatest seasons of The Avengers: “sexiness”, “partial nudity”, and “fashion”. Bayonetta, like The Avengers, is committed unashamedly to the worship of Eros. There is no transference of sexuality to violence in Bayonetta either, albeit because the two are indistinguishable; which is a little different to sublimation, and one could hardly accuse Bayonetta of being an ascetic. Indeed, she revels in her seductive power, which is directly proportional to how naked she is. The combat also easily sidesteps the Protestantism of many beat ‘em ups. Although you do indeed grow more powerful and unlock more moves as you play, you almost immediately have access to all basic moves that affect the mechanics on a fundamental level, allowing you to enjoy the sensual mayhem as soon as you begin—almost as if it were a fighting game!

The contrast between the washed out, prudish neo-classical design of the angels and the high-fashion concept-art wantonness of Bayonetta and her colourful combos is hilarious—from the standard enemies to the bosses, the soldiers of heaven are hell-bent on stopping Bayonetta, encouraging the player to respond in kind by being as aggressive as possible; thus inadvertently encouraging her advances, while her own flagrantly-sexual beatings in turn further enflames the supposedly chaste angels desire to stop her! While Aeneas was grovelling at Mercury’s marble feet, Bayonetta would have been cutting them to ribbons, not committing suicide.

Technically, the fights against humanoid bosses are equal to anything else in the genre, and some are almost as fascinating a prospect as fighting against another player in a fighting game—something that is expanded on in the sequel, but Bayonetta 2 is not as pure an aesthetic experience as the original and, just like the sequels of Devil May Cry, it moves away from being an irreverent tribute to Eros; eroding its shameless sexuality with irony.

Bayonetta’s sexiness, partial nudity and fashion make for one of the purest expressions of action (the joy of the body) in any medium this decade, and aesthetically it is as delectable as Flowers of Evil—but unlike Baudelaire’s masterpiece, it is free of a self-pitying predilection with disease and death (the psychosomatic symptoms of shame); it is the naïve laughter of the living, not the cynical scoffing of the dying.

3. Antichamber

Antichamber is a fever dream of a game. Or literally a fever dream I had, I’m not sure which, as I played it while suffering from one of the worst fevers of my life; but unlike the worst fever of my life, the entire experience wasn’t magical (and didn’t result in the permanent brain damage that should be all too apparent to anyone reading this list): when I wasn’t playing or writing and editing my review of Antichamber, I was just in horrible pain and longing for the mercy of death. (Of course, the fact that I could play and review a game during it means it wasn’t really that bad of a fever in reality.)

But out of such a burning fiery furnace, the feverish colours, creative logic and total freedom afforded to the player have been burnt, like an encephalitis, into the soft tissue of my brain. Antichamber is the greatest puzzle game of the decade and one of the greatest ever (sorry pedantically-excluded Tetris remakes, but the only level on which you can compete with Antichamber is in your ability to hypnotise), because it is one of the very few, if not the only, puzzle game to allow the player to solve puzzles in any way they please, no matter how ridiculous.

It is not the logic of the puzzle one must follow, but the logic of the physics of the game world. Just like problem solving in reality, one can institute ridiculous, brute-force solutions (such as a laboriously building a bridge pixel-by-pixel to get across a gap, when the logic of the puzzle wants you do something more elegant, though no more effective) if it is more efficient than wasting time on figuring out one of the “correct” solutions. This might sound like a negative, but anyone who has ever built something knows that bodginess is next to cleanliness (as, as often as not, well-hidden bodigness is the secret of clean design)—and Antichamber rewards the bodgy just as much as it rewards the bougy.

Indeed, if Braid’s puzzles mimicked the creative process, then Antichamber’s allowed for its puzzles to actually be solved via the creative process!

P.S. Bonus Braid content.