2016 Games To Get To Eventually Hopefully

For all that happened in 2016, most seem to be in agreement that the year was very good for video games. Doom surprised everyone with one of the best single-player first person shooter campaigns in years, The Witness showed that Jonathan Blow isn’t a one-trick pony, Watch_Dogs 2 and Titanfall 2 acted as further proof of the ability of sequels to be drastic improvements over their forebears, independant games continued to surprise and delight, and for all its development woes Final Fantasy XV was shockingly not terrible. With all the great games that came out, I’m sad to say I ended up missing a lot of them, and even the ones that I did play I didn’t play enough to have a proper Best of 2016 list. So instead, I’ve decided to list the top 10 games I missed out on throughout the year but really hope to find the time for next year.
Please note: This list does not encompass every game from 2016 I missed out on and want to check out, just the ones that I’d most like to find time to play in the future, even if that means touching them for 5 minutes and realizing I don’t really like them. Also, for ease of creating this list, I opted to remove any and all games I’d played, regardless of the actual amount of time played. For instance, since I played the new Guilty Gear game, it’s not on the list even though I played for less than an hour and absolutely want to play it more eventually

With that out of the way, here is my list in no particular order:

Dragon Quest Builders

Being in early high school upon Minecraft’s initial release, it was always fascinating to watch the game’s progression. From a simple little thing about grabbing and placing blocks wherein craftable cakes was a major update, into a game where players fight massive enemies, build huge structures, and create functioning Atari 2600 emulators, the transformation has been bizarre. Through it all, I could never dive into it the way many could. It’s a common problem to hear, and every time I hear it lately it’s in conjunction with a recommendation for Dragon Quest Builders, Square Enix’s foray into the block-based construction and exploration genre with a dash of its wildly popular (in Japan, at least) franchise, Dragon Quest.

Dragon Quest Builder is third-person Minecraft with an important addition: direction. In a game typically bereft of any guide towards what to do, Builders has a main story which takes place after the bad ending of the first Dragon Quest games, strangely enough. As the only person in the world with knowledge of what “building” is, you are tasked with taking the rubble of the world and building it up anew. As such, you’re given objectives regarding what materials you need to find, and what you need to make with them. Odd as the concept is, it turns out many people enjoy the Minecraft formula quite a bit more with just a few directions in terms of what you can do, and combining that with an apparently-substantial story, I’d really like an opportunity to give the game a proper shot.

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

While Pokemon was the strict ruler of the roost in the video game realm, as a child I was always a Digimon kid when it came to cartoons. The story of the DigiDestined, trying to find their way home and save the world, was far more engaging to me as a child then Ash Ketchum bumbling his way through his Pokemon journey to get his ass kicked in the Pokemon League. Despite my preference towards Digimon in saturday morning cartoon viewing I never once purchased a video game from the franchise, save a poorly-made decision to buy a tactical RPG alongside Bandai’s WonderSwan handheld, a console which astute readers will note was not released in the US ever. So where better to start than the latest game in the franchise, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth?

It should be noted that I have little to no idea what this game actually is. I know it’s some sort of RPG, it got decent reviews, and there was a time in my life where I could name all the digital monsters on the box. Otherwise, basically in the dark. What kind of RPG is it specifically? Not sure. What’s the plot like? No idea. How does it tie into the stories of the cartoon, if at all? Hell if I know. I’d basically be going in blind, but I’d still love to give it a go.

I Am Setsuna

I’ve never been fond of the idea that we need to somehow “return” to the “good old days” of JRPGs. I love old Final Fantasy games as much as anyone, but with the Persona series holding onto the more traditional tropes of the genre and Xenoblade Chronicles X and even the latest Final Fantasy showing that the genre can expand and incorporate more western design philosophies, there really isn’t a need for something that’s just trying to looking like an old game.

Despite this, I still enjoyed Square Enix’s previous attempt at “old-school JRPG” in Bravely Default, and I’d love to dig into their second foray, I Am Setsuna. While I’m not certain how much I’d be up for the dark tone of the game (I’ve been led to understand the game opens with a character telling the titular Setsuna they’re her escort to the location she’ll be sacrificed at, which she’s ecstatic about because it means she won’t be alone when she dies), I’m very interested in the mechanics, which seem to be aping Chrono Trigger most of all.

Hell, I like Chrono Trigger. Why the hell not.

Superhot

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

(NOTE: Between writing this list and posting it, I have purchased and played through Superhot. It's very good)

Hitman (2016)

Common perception among people watching it’s development, including myself, was that the latest game in the long-running Hitman franchise was going to be a goddamn trainwreck. A scant two months before the game’s release, all pre-orders for Hitman were cancelled, with Square Enix suddenly announcing that the game would be made an episodic release. General consensus was that this was a sign of fear and lack of trust in the performance of the product; It seemed as if the game wasn’t shaping up well, but Square Enix wasn’t willing to delay the game (again) and was forcing whatever existed of the game to be released, with the rest coming later in further “episodes”. The episodic structure had worked out well for absolutely no one except for Telltale with their Walking Dead series, and even their use of “episodes” has been criticized for ruining the flow of the games, especially considering the often months-long wait between releases. Hitman, it seemed to many, was destined to be a failure at best, and an abject disaster at worst.

Wondrously enough for the team at IO Interactive, their apparently failure turned out to be a huge boon to the game: In a franchise famous for so called “clockwork levels”, with many moving parts and potential for fun and interesting interactions between all the NPCs going about their business, the mandatory break between new levels forced players to play through them multiple times, exploring the levels thoroughly and learning all of their ins and outs as they went about their assassinating business. This, in turn, led players to come to really appreciate the amount of work which went into the levels, as one could discover all of the various patterns and opportunities laid throughout the levels that you simply wouldn’t get from playing through a level a single time and moving on to the next.

While I’ve never been one for games where stealth and planning was a common requirement, it’s hard not to feel the buzz for Hitman. It seems as if nobody can stop talking about it, and I have a feeling from the amount of positive coverage I’ve seen it’ll be topping quite a few “Game of the Year” lists. The genre really isn’t my forte, and while Hitman may not be stealth in the same way as Dishonored, Thief, or Deus Ex, the simple act of staying incognito tends to grate on me enough to make me wary, hence why I never picked up the game throughout the year of loud praise.

Maybe my lack of experience with the genre will cause issues; perhaps the game doesn’t work quite as well when you’re not forced to stick around in a single location; maybe my lack of patience will cause me to give up the game in a frustrated huff. But hey, you can only see so many videos of people nailing a dude from across a room with a fire extinguisher before you wanna give it a shot yourself.

Quadrilateral Cowboy

My only prior experience with the works of Blendo Games is Thirty Flights of Loving, a self-billed “First Person Short Story” which I don’t recall much of. The only things I remember are a sequence where you eat oranges with someone and also that I didn’t like it very much. I’m curious if I’d be more open to the title now, given that I’ve developed a greater appreciation of games that aren’t trying to fit in with the mainstream perception of gaming, but at the time I wasn’t particularly happy with the couple of dollars I spent on a game I finished in 11 minutes.

Fast forward to now, and Blendo Games’ newest title Quadrilateral Cowboy follows the aesthetic of Thirty Flights, with it’s blocky people and surreal landscapes, but introduces a somewhat more game-y structure, tasking the player with pulling off various heists using a hacking interface and a variety of gadgets.

I’m not sure how much I’d actually enjoy Quadrilateral Cowboy. The programming in the game is actual proper programming and the minutiae of such things were never particularly interesting to me, and the application of it to logic puzzles in other games (which admittedly is only really Double Fine’s Hack N Slash as far as I know) never grabbed me. But the videos I’ve seen of Quadrilateral Cowboy hint at some crazy shit happening later on, and I’m up to crack some ice on a high-stakes heist.

…

Moving on.

Thumper

Thumper looks fucking rad. As a rhythm game fan, Thumper looks like an awesome change-up from the typical note maps and highways of your Rock Bands and your Hatsune Mikus. The oppressive atmosphere that permeates the look *and* sound of the game, combined with the strangest sense of dread, makes it unlike any other game in the genre, and the game definitely fits its self-declared “Rhythm Violence” tag.

For goodness sake, Thumper is a music game that dares to use the forbidden time signatures, barely recognizable from chaos unless you’re so immersed that you forget what typical music sounds like. Seriously, look up the later levels in Thumper and how long it takes to follow the songs. Games don’t do that. Hell, a lot of music doesn’t do that.

Thumper looks fast. Thumper looks chaotic. Thumper looks fucking terrifying at times, to be frank. I cannot wait to dive in.

ReCore

ReCore is a game that I’m disappointed didn’t review well. The action-adventure third-person-shooter game that casts you as a woman going on a desert adventure with a bunch of robots had a great look, and was one of the standouts in the Microsoft E3 2015 press conference. But as we inched closer to release, after delays, very little advertising, and the announcement of a lower price point, it began to seem like ReCore might be a little iffy.

From what I’ve heard, Iffy seems to be right on the money. While the shooting, platforming, and Cores (AI companions which could be slotted into different robots to fit different roles) were all routinely praised, it was widely felt that the exploration had too much backtracking, the atrocious loading times which reportedly lasted as long as 4 minutes broke the flow too often, crashes and other bugs occurred regularly, and the experience as a whole overstayed its positively-received welcome.

There’s not much deep thought to this choice: It looked neat, some people said it was maybe less neat than hoped for, but I still wanna check it out. I’m not sure why, the reception was cool at best, but I still kinda wanna see for myself, y’know?

Steep

Steep could not have had less fanfare as it was released. It was shown off in an extended demo at Ubisoft’s E3 press conference, then I feel like I literally did not hear about it again until it came out a scant few weeks ago. For those who missed it, which was incredibly easy, Steep is a freeform mountain sport game. In a mountain range, you can choose to descend via skiing, snowboarding, wingsuiting, or paragliding. There are races to undertake and a persistent online thing which shows other players around you, but there’s no real structure to the game besides messing around on a mountain and potentially dying horrifically by crashing into a rock while gliding down the hill in excess of 200mph.

My main reason for wanting to check Steep out is that I haven’t had a snowboarding game to play in a while. SSX Tricky was a regular choice in video game rental as a child, and I loved the over-the-top nature of the game, from the characters to the tracks to the tricks you could do. I messed around a bit with the 2012 SSX title when it was a free game for a while, but I could never really get attached to the title, since it abandoned the silliness of Tricky in favor of somewhat more severe gravitas which didn’t really work in my brief time with the game.

Steep represents an opportunity to have fun boarding down a mountain in a video game again, and go about it a few other ways as well. The lack of structure may cause me to lose interest fast, but given that the people who looked at the game seemed to feel positively, I’ll see what it’s all about. Just...not this year.

Headlander

I want to try out Headlander because it is a game by Double Fine. I will wholly admit that is the reason. I’m not a fan of Metroidvania-type games that require backtracking and exploration limited by slowly distributed upgrades. The game was led by Lee Petty, whose previous game Stacking I was not overly fond of. The look of the game, which draws inspiration from 60s and 70s science fiction, is not unappealing but as a born-in-the-90s Millennial I also don’t feel much of an attachment to the aesthetic.

What I do like, is supporting developers whose games I enjoy. Psychonauts is one of my favorite games of all time. My sister and I have many fond memories of Costume Quest. The Amnesia Fortnight events, where they spent 2 weeks building prototypes and livestreamed much of the process, was a fascinating and fun look into game development, as were the public livestreams during the development of Massive Chalice and the Double Fine Adventure documentary series covering the development, from Kickstarter campaign to concept to planning to delays to eventual release, of Broken Age. Not everything in Double Fine’s history has been so great: Their Broken Age documentaries are enlightening now but the “open” development was overly secretive to non-backers at the time, and I’m still a bit sour about how Spacebase DF-9 turned out. But Double Fine is still the studio to go to for entertaining and humourous games that feel special; that go their own way and have a unique look and playstyle, even if following the pack would likely lead to greater success for the studio.

Headlander is, in most ways, not my usual flavor. But Double Fine is a studio whose work I enjoy, and I’ve been surprised enough times in the past that I’m willing to give it another shot. Even if I end up disliking the game, I’ll have helped keep the studio afloat long enough for the next weird thing I love to be released. And that’s good enough for me.

HONORABLE MENTION: Mighty No. 9

I just...I just gotta know if they really screwed the pooch that bad, you know?