2017 Favorite Games

What I've learned from the games I played in 2017: I really want a cuddly death-robot for a friend.

1. TALES FROM THE BORDERLANDS

What seemed on paper to be a jokey choose-your-own-adventure using the Borderlands mythos was actually the best sci-fi narrative I've played all year. Girded by a framework of slapstick and capitalism-run-rampant-satire is a deft exploration of friendship, betrayal, rogue AIs, and finger guns.

Also, Loader Bot stole my heart forever.

2. SHADOWRUN: HONG KONG

The retro mechanics are passable, but where the Shadowrun games shine is their characterization and intricate noir plots (and the Shadowrun setting itself). Hopefully not the swan song of the series, I already miss my time in Hong Kong with the motley group of runners who became my friends.

3. REZ INFINITE VR

Rez is one of those games I've bought on every platform but VR is truly where it was always meant to make its home. Already a beautiful synesthesia in prior incarnations, being fully immersed in its digital-analog wonderland finally made me feel like a cowboy decker breaking ice.

4. PREY

A space station where Something Went Wrong becomes a playground for mind games and power fantasies that reveal as much about you as the terrors you face. The real innovation of Prey (and its sister Dishonored) is the way that morality isn't a matter of grand, branching decision trees so much as your moment to moment decisions in how to play the game.

5. TITANFALL 2

My K2D ratios in most games are somewhat embarrassing, but the tactical nature of Titanfall combat made death feel like a learning experience instead of a punishment. Coupled with some surprisingly solid military sci-fi in the single-player campaign, this is definitely my favorite shooter of the year.

And for the second time, my heart was stolen by a robot: BT-7274, I salute you ::sniff::

6. OXENFREE

Beautiful pixel art and a subtle, interesting conversation system, but what really sticks in my memory is the way it very specifically pings the feel of being a kid in the back seat of a car on a gray drizzly day and reading a spooky piece of YA that I found languishing forgotten on a library bookshelf.

7. MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA

Flawed and compromised, the main theme of building a new home after the boats are burned is still compelling and my crew eventually delivered a scruffy, goofy charm all their own. The design trips over its own feet at almost every turn, but Andromeda still captures the Mass Effect space opera of cruising among the stars and sexing the aliens you meet.

8. VOYAGEUR/SEEDSHIP

Hopping from star to star on a one-way journey into the unknown, these were the first games that really sold me on the promise of not just procedurally generated storytelling, but procedural writing. I felt real delight lying in bed, in the dark, never knowing exactly what my next jump into the void would bring.

9. VA-11 HALL-A

The game overlay is light and the narrative linear, but I was eventually drawn in by the quirky cyberpunk plot told through anime tropes and uplifted shiba inus. It's weird and strange but I love seeing a melting-pot of influences blend into something adorably unique.

There is also a cute, robot sex-worker who happens to be loaded with lethal hardware for troublesome patrons. No, I don't have a type.

10. INSIDE

No other game this year made me want to pitch my controller across the room as much as this one, but its vividly realized authoritarian fairy tale kept pulling me down the nightmare track laid in front of me. There is a deeply felt narrative here, but one that embraces ambiguity and refuses to give up its secrets all the way to the end.

RUNNER-UP: THE QUEEN'S MENAGERIE

A short but redolent game with echoes of Jack Vance and Lord Dunsany. I'd love to see the world expanded but suspect that would compromise its delicate grotesqueries.

GAMES I HAVEN'T FINISHED BUT COULD BE ON THIS LIST?

ECHO, BOUND, PYRE, HORIZON ZERO DAWN

GAMES I WANT TO PLAY AND SUSPECT WOULD HAVE BEEN ON THIS LIST:

DISHONORED: DEATH OF THE OUTSIDER, TACOMA, SUBSURFACE CIRCULAR, LADYKILLER IN A BIND, NIGHT IN THE WOODS, DOKI DOKI LITERATURE CLUB

2017 Favorite Comics

My biggest surprise: superheroes? I stay away from the line-wide and long-running epics, but tucked around the edges were some surprisingly diverse and interesting titles that kept residence in my head.

Also, spies are apparently in vogue, and I would have never predicted an Archie title on my list.

1. VELVET (Brubaker/Epting)

Atmospheric Cold War-thriller set in the British circus of LeCarre and Deighton, but in this spy game the female is far deadlier than the male.

2. VISION (King/Walta), OMEGA MEN (King/Bagenda)

Using disparate frameworks of AI superheroes and compromised cosmic rebels, these stories weave together themes of family, violence, and loss.

2.1 The explanation of P Versus NP in VISION is a quiet little masterwork of storytelling all on its own.

3. MOCKINGBIRD (Cain/Niemczyk)

A hilariously self-conscious feminist update of a C-list superhero structured as a non-linear puzzle box. Funny and timely, it deserved better than it got.

4. GRAYSON (King/Seeley)
5. MIDNIGHTER, MIDNIGHTER & APOLLO (Orlando/ACO/Blanco)

GRAYSON perfects a Prisoner meets Bond take on Batman's bestie, while MIDNIGHTER mixes exploded panels and slipstream sci-fi into a Tinder hookup. The results shouldn't work (or crossover) as well as they do, but both are immensely fun.

6. CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA (Aguirre-Sacasa/Hack)

Straight-up the best horror comic I read this year, mixing a heady blend of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE WITCH into a coming-of-age story with legitimately dark consequences.

7. I AM A HERO (Hanazawa)

Epic but surprisingly personal zombie manga about the titular antihero battling monsters real and imagined. Skillful action storytelling freighted with a downbeat, strange vibe.

8. MULTIVERSITY (Morrison/Quitely/Reis/Lee)

A graffiti of colorful and confusing hypertextual ideas gleefully slathered all over the walls of superhero continuity.

9. MS. MARVEL (Wilson/Alphona)

I was late to the party on this one, but it's got an enormous heart and witty storytelling to match.

10. LOCKE & KEY: SMALL WORLD (Hill/Rodriguez)

A minor note in the saga of the Locke family, but skillfully executed and adding some more twists to the nature of Keyhouse Manor.

RELIABLE FAVORITES:

GIRL GENIUS (Foglios)
BLACK SCIENCE (Remender/Scalera)
SAGA (Vaughn/Staples)

Hilarious, horrible, and touching. Which pretty much covers life in 2017.

2017 Favorite Movies

Ten movies that I enjoyed in 2017 with brief commentary. These may be in a rough order.

1. BODIED

An acidic, uncomfortable, and scathingly funny take on the border between artistic expression and just being an asshole.

2. BLADE RUNNER 2049

Visual tone poem that is (so far) one of the most vital science fiction films of the 21st century while also being problematic in several ways.

3. BAD GENIUS

Applies the tropes of a slick heist movie to a high school cheating ring with electrifying results, only slightly undercut by a turn toward moralism.

4. MAYHEM

A lawyer and a wage slave who aren't-zombies-exactly race against end-stage capitalism to exact revenge on a system built to exploit labor.

5. I AM A HERO

A blood-slick adaptation of the manga by Kengo Hanazawa that puts a socially inept nerd and his shotgun in the middle of a zombie uprising.

6. RAW

Vibrant, ugly, and sensual, this one really left a mark.

7. GET OUT

Most good horror is political -- but subverting your expectations of exactly how it's going to be political is one of the movie's most clever twists.

8. BABY DRIVER

FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE as a bouncy musical with William Friedkin callouts. I'd be hard pressed not to like it.

9. THOROUGHBREDS

An eyebrow artfully arched over Hitchcock's Rope by way of Shirley Jackson: two teenage girls smart enough to talk themselves into murder.

10. JOHN WICK 2/ATOMIC BLONDE

If the future is exquisitely choreographed martial arts against stellar art-directed backdrops then show me to your leader.

RUNNER-UP: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS

No, it doesn't work, but damn I could watch movies with this sense of wonder all day long.

2016: Until Dawn

Until Dawn was something I hadn't paid a lot of attention to when it was released -- my initial impressions were of a bloated, big-budget, QTE-laden rip-off of B-horror films intended to check a few marketing boxes for a PS4 launch exclusive, and then like so many other launch exclusives, sink beneath the waves of successive and more polished games.

But after the death of a friend, I found myself anxious and jittery, unable to focus for long on anything that might have once been relaxing; things that I used to take pleasure in felt flat and colorless, without point. I didn't want to invest in grinding loot collection or building complicated skill-sets or engaging with an emotionally resonant indie title. I just wanted to stare into space. And so a mindless horror game where I simply had to twitch the joystick or punch a button on occasion seemed like a way to fill up the time.

When I booted the game up, a couple things caught my attention. The first was the haunting cover of "O, Death" by singer Amy van Roekel. And because grief is an odd beast that takes refuge where it can, I began to play this song on a loop and found it helped in some way that I still can't articulate.

The other was the involvement of Larry Fessenden, a prolific actor/writer/director of off-kilter indie horror films (The Last Winter and I Sell The Dead are good starting places for his work). Fessenden is well-known in horror circles having produced movies like The Innkeepers, Stake Land, and The House of the Devil, as well showing up in countless others as a character actor, but not the kind of person I'd expect to see involved with a AAA videogame.

Then once the fourth-wall breaking began it quickly became apparent that there were meta-games being played in both the game and narrative structure. I've long been a fan of games where choices have ramifications that can drastically alter the narrative -- as well as a professional interest in seeing how they can be implemented in a dramatically satisfying manner -- so I kept playing, wondering exactly how subtle the game was going to be in playing out these decisions.

My initial reaction to the rest of the game seems to mirror that of many people. Stock characters who are little better than walking, talking tropes of teen horror films. Rote slasher setups and cat in the closet (or wolverine in the closet) scares. A mish-mash of horror cliches that didn't seem to offer much hope for a payoff.

But over time the game grew more layered and interesting. As my decisions stacked on top of each other my headcanon also developed. The meta-games grew more involved and I suspected there was a larger design -- or designs -- at work. The story began to reconfigure itself in interesting ways that made it clear the opening shenanigans were an intentional and fairly sophisticated bit of misdirection.

By the time the game reached its final acts I found myself genuinely invested in the characters and appreciating the unexpected levels of irony and pathos that lay beneath the cabin flooring of QTEs. It was one of the best game experiences I've had this year, and for a time it allowed me to sink my grief into a story of monsters and choices that still resonates deeply with me.