I kicked off my annual list season last week with my most disappointing games of 2012, but now I'm on to the fun stuff with the first part of my Top 10 of 2012 list. Here are my 10-8 picks:
10. Dishonored
Last year's Deus Ex: Human Revolution was something of a half-baked revelation. Truly emergent, open-ended FPSs had, up to that point, been few and far in between since the early aughts. But if Human Revolution served as a merely decent reminder of why this first-person subgenre is worthy of exaltation, then Dishonored makes a full-blown, inarguable case for it. This because Arkane Studios - a developer filled to the brim with veterans of this particular type of game - is so uncompromising in their delivery of a campaign driven by player creativity. Beyond its opening mission, the game is practically defined by its distinct lack of handholding. There are no restrictive setpieces to be found, and players are generally left to do whatever they please with a litany of cool gadgets and powers that are all backed up by rock-solid mechanics for both stealth and combat scenarios. This all goes to ensure that each and every approach to the game's free form missions will not only work, but feel uniquely satisfying in their self-authorship.
Dishonored's greatest asset, however, is its setting: the marvelously grim city of Dunwall. The compelling, largely implicit lore and eerie art direction gives this dying city surprising vivacity, making it a joy to explore its every nook and cranny. More importantly, however, this triumph in narrative and visual realization furthers the power of the game's sandbox level design. By filling every part of the city with wondrous secrets, Arkane succeeds in slyly encouraging players to go off the beaten path, avoiding the most obvious route through the game's environments at all costs.
Playing through Dishonored is a simultaneous display of developer and player ingenuity. Though the game's creators are the ones who expertly devised a superb set of missions and the tools with which we, the audience, navigates them, they wisely and humbly choose not to tell us exactly what must be done in order to accomplish impressive feats. Instead, it's up to us to figure out how to discover and use the game's innumerable possibilities to our advantage. Though this can sometimes lead to frustrating fumbling and failure, the feeling of finally executing on a master plan of your very own simply cannot be matched by an action game that simply funnels you from one soulless, made-to-be-cool construct to another, giving you no input in the proceedings but expecting you to be impressed nonetheless.
9. Mass Effect 3
A simple fact of life is that we aren't always who we want to be. Mass Effect 3 shows video games' capacity to eloquently speak to this inevitable facet of the human condition by sidestepping it entirely. Commander Shepard quite simply is who we all want to be; s/he is a person with immense wisdom, influence, and fortitude who everyone gravitates toward, seeks help from, and is willing to go to great lengths to assist. And if, at any point, Commander Shepard isn't representative of our most potent power fantasies, all it takes is a fresh save file and a new, decision-influencing worldview to get things back on track. Though players are given free reign to explore untold numbers of star systems, each with their own centricities, it's really Commander Shepard, and in turn the player themselves, who's at the center of the universe. This is an immensely powerful feeling, one that can't be replicated in any other entertainment media. And though the game's lackluster ending muddles this core ethos, Mass Effect 3 succeeds in showing just how thrilling, and occasionally devastating it might be to walk in the shoes of the most important person in existence.
Mass Effect 3's Horde mode derivative is pretty inelegant by comparison, but it succeeds in once more proving how fun it is to grab a few friends and shoot aliens in the face.
8. Mark of the Ninja
2012 has seen stealth mechanics make a comeback in a big way. Games like Dishonored, Hotline Miami, Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution, and Assassin's Creed III all deftly blend classic stealth gameplay with more action-oriented structures. But Mark of the Ninja doesn't even bother managing a balancing act. This is pure, unadulterated sneaking that pays homage to many of the genre's best while adding a dimension entirely of its own.
Actually, "taking away a dimension," is a much more fitting way of describing what makes Mark of the Ninja so distinctive despite it being an amalgamation of preexisting stealth game tropes. The only other 2D side-scrolling stealth game I can think of is the GameBoy Advance version of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, and though that game may have served as yet another one of Mark of the Ninja's influences, it certainly didn't pull off its central conceit with the same degree of self-assuredness. Seeing the stealth mechanics we're all familiar with - be it zipping from one vantage point to another a la Arkham City, or hiding in a cardboard box Solid Snake style - go off without a hitch in this atypical perspective is hugely impressive. One would think sneaking mechanics almost require a 3D or at least isometric space as the genre is entirely predicated on examining your environments and finding openings in cyclical patrols, but the game shows us otherwise in an extremely compelling fashion. How all these mechanics are able to function within this space would require some pretty thorough analysis, but that simply goes to show how impeccably designed Mark of the Ninja is.
Though the team at Klei Entertainment are clearly students of the genre, their entry into the once-again hip stealth game market outdoes many recent competitors. Every gameplay concept presented not only functions exceedingly well, but does so within a set of parameters that few other developers have even attempted. Mark of the Ninja is thus groundbreaking in a quiet - one could even say "sneaky" - way. Quite fitting, don't you think?
***
That's it for now. It's been taking me more time than usual to write up my top 10 picks this year since I have quite a bit more to say about most of them than I have with my selections in years past, so my next entry on the list might not get posted for a couple days or so.