Board 8 > Para's top 100 games of the decade, 2010-2019

(+) Yeah! (+)

oh man.

i want to play paper mario.

---

dr2 > drv3 > dr1

not particularly close on any of them imo.

aai2... probably my game of the decade?
---

replay Terraria when it gets the 1.4 update in a few months. Honestly you should also replay it now because 1.3 was huge and made the game much more complete
---

ooh, whats coming in 1.4??

---

... what was 1.3?

---

The only thing that I remember offhand was that NPCs actually do stuff now, like walk around and fight monsters, but I remember having as much fun as when I first started again.

---

Wow, it's been a while since I've looked at this topic, and now it looks like I have a decent bit to comment on:

Of course Smash Ultimate is here, yes. I think it'd be hard to disagree it's the apotheosis of the Smash series, though I know well enough that means it won't necessarily be everyone's favorite Smash game. The one thing that's really missing in my eyes is Smash Run, which I absolutely loved from 3DS, as a pitch-perfect adaptation of the great format of Kirby Air Ride's city trial mode.

Stardew Valley is my Animal Crossing (never mind that it's not an AC-like), though like you with New Leaf, I haven't played it in a while - nor, however, have I been particularly tempted to pick it back up.

I think I'm probably Board 8's biggest Civ fan, at least if my over 2,000 hours in Civ 5 and 6 combined (split about evenly between the two) are anything to go by! Oddly, I haven't really played nor felt like playing either game in a while, but Civ 5 in particular has acquired a second life for me via community-ran AI games. At least for me, they've become quite a fun spectator sport, but they also make the military inadequacies of even Deity-level Civ AIs with intelligence-enhancing mods clear.

Like Lopen, I really dislike that the main effect of difficulty levels in Civ is to give the AIs enhanced bonuses, which for me usually results in lots of restarting until I get a decent spawn, then a touch-and-go early game that turns into an assured win if I've kept my empire intact through turn 100. At the same time, Prince is simply too easy for me to have fun. Maybe (probably) that all has something to do with why I haven't been coming back to Civ of late, even though I still love the series.

I love the joint Jackbox placement - such a great party game series! Offhand, I think I'd agree that 3 is the best, especially since I've finally started enjoying Tee K.O. (even though I'm still terrible at it).

And yes, definitely replay Terraria once 1.4 comes out. If we could somehow set up a B8 multiplayer playthrough, that would be a blast, but Terraria's still just as fun when played singleplayer, at least IMO.

---

Huh I just glanced through the list again because I saw Stardew Valley mentioned and didn't recall a write-up for it.

I completely glossed over the write-up for Grim Dawn and I really want to play Grim Dawn now. I'm one of those weird people who think Diablo 3 (in its current state, which is a far cry from where it was at release, mind you) is superior to both Path of Exile and Torchlight 2 and wasn't big on either of those.

Grim Dawn looks really cool though.

---

I somehow skipped over Grim Dawn too, just scrolled back and it sounds awesome.

---

Peace___Frog posted...

... what was 1.3?

Celestial Events
---

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

ooh, whats coming in 1.4??

A fuckton of new items and balancing plus a new difficulty mode.
---

Oh yeah, I sort of did Grim Dawn dirty in my writeups because I just couldn't think of any really interesting thoughts to articulate at the time, but I ranked it at #36 on my list (and much higher than Torchlight II) for a reason! I directly prefer it over Diablo II, I think it has more interesting class and equipment options and I think it plays more interesting. I super highly recommend it and I'm really surprised that it feels like it has gone largely unnoticed by a large portion of the gaming population, it feels like it should be one of those cult indie hits that everyone talks about, because it's really well produced and captures the feeling of playing Diablo II for the first time again effectively, for me at least.

As for Stardew Valley, I did start playing it very recently (like, this december), and I wasn't instantly hooked on it so it didn't get a mention anywhere. I might go back to it at some point since I know people love it and it should be the sort of game I like, but it wasn't an instant must-play for me.

Enjoying the list

---

#18





Years of release: 2015 (Wii U), 2016 (3DS)
Beaten?: N/A

This could also be Super Mario Maker 2 in this slot, but I've only played a little bit of it, and I played a lot of SMM1. Super Mario Maker 2 by all accounts seems to be improved on most levels, although it has some slightly awkward UI and a couple of removed features I'm sad about, but the original has the novelty factor, so I'm ranking that one here. You can assume this is both games in one slot though.

Super Mario Maker is the highest Mario game on my list, and for good reason. Well, no, not for good reason, SMO should've been, SMG2 and SM3DW are both amazing also, etc etc whatever. But Super Mario Maker in so many ways feels like the truly ultimate Mario game. It is all Marios at once, both the good and the bad, and it is a truly wonderful thing to behold.

I have always loved games that allow you to customize your own levels. This goes back to when I was 2 years old - one of our most beloved home videos is of me as a wee tot, playing Wrecking Crew with my mom, telling her where to place objects on the screen, shouting "LADDER LADDER LADDER LADDER LADDER" and giggling with excitement as, there they go, the ladders going up the screen. This obsession continued with Excitebike, onto things like Rollercoaster Tycoon and RPG Maker in the 90's, Jumper and Stepmania in the 00's and of course, stuff like WarioWare D.I.Y. later. I've always wanted to get into romhacking games like Super Mario World and messing around with stuff and making levels in those, and although Lunar Magic is a pretty comprehensive and fairly intuitive SMW hacking tool, I just couldn't really get into it for some reason - wasn't quite intuitive enough. I wanted more instant gratification out of it, I guess.

I was a little skeptical of Super Mario Maker at first, for the same sorts of reasons I skeptical of WarioWare DIY. How well would the creation engine really work? Really well, as it turned out. Well, does it create levels that are perfectly faithful to the original games? Sort of. While it's lacking in some options and I was at first bothered by how a lot of the visuals effects don't look true to the original games, I soon got over that - Super Mario Maker really creates its own "language" so to speak of the different old and new parts that it has cobbled together. The result is its own new thing that lets you make old things.

I really like creating Mario levels in Mario Maker - I personally find a real joy in trying to create traditional levels, designing them to be how they would have developed them in older Mario games, trying to balance the difficulty and finding new ways to use the tools I'm given. The interface is really intuitive, the touchscreen makes putting stuff down a breeze, and I really like the almost Mario Paint-like qualities to the game's UI and sound design. But playing the levels is endlessly fascinating, too. I love doing 100 Mario challenges and just seeing everything - the good levels, the bad levels. There is something fascinating about seeing all of these infinite Mario worlds, even the garbage ones, and exploring them all.

I think what I get a kick out of the most though is just seeing other people play these levels. It is amazing to see the kind of crazy puzzles and awesome challenges that people create with these things and give to other people to try. The blind Super Mario Maker races they did at GDQ were some of the most entertaining things, seeing people speedrun on the fly and try to figure out these levels that other people created, and it's a joy to see the creativity at work. And I love to look up Youtube videos to see the various different tricks that people have figured out with different objects in the level editor to create new kinds of situations through clever application of the tools they have. There's just such an awesome and interesting community surrounding this game.

I only have a couple of minor complaints. First, Super Mario Maker 2 removed the ? mushrooms, which really sucks, because that was one of my favorite elements of the first Super Mario Maker. Also, it kind of makes me wish that we could create our own world maps and create entire games out of it, as long as that would take a person to do, it seems like something that would be really fun. And I just never feel like I have enough energy to really sit down and create a level - it's always too damn hard to put in the brainpower towards creating one. And Super Mario Maker 1 is, I guess, probably dead at this point? I don't remember if services are still online for it, but it's probably going to poof out of existence soon enough, and who knows if Super Mario Maker 2 will last the whole decade. I hope so, and hopefully I can enjoy it to the fullest while it's around, playing through an endless parade of absolute garbage some 10 year old kid in Florida made.

#17





Years of release: 2013 (3DS)
Beaten?: Three times!

Phew. I was worried for a second there that this wouldn't have enough Zelda games on it. Crisis averted, guys. I found all the Zelda games. I have proudly retained my status as a Nintendo shill. If this were my real top 100 games of all time list, you wouldn't be able to wade through it without tripping over a Zelda game every five games or so. It's probably my favorite series of video games, even if that's not a particularly exciting or unique opinion to hold - they have the status they do for a good reason.

One of the best days of my life was the day that I received my SNES, way back in 1994. I got Donkey Kong Country with it, and just having that game on its own, I was absolutely thrilled - but when I looked in the box a few days later, I realized that there was something else that I had completely missed - the SNES was packaged with a copy of A Link to the Past. Wow, cool! I had already played Link's Awakening for the GB, so I was really excited to play this new Zelda game I hadn't heard of. The great thing is that, at the time, I thought that Zelda cartridge was a demo. It made sense to me, right? There were demo CDs for PC games all the time to try to entice you to buy the full game, so I assume that the SNES just came with this neat demo for a game you could go out and buy later. I didn't realize that at this time, the consoles were usually bundled with a free game, so imagine my shock when it slowly dawned on me that this game was not a demo, but the full, real thing. It was like Christmas came early, twice. I couldn't believe my good fortune.

LTTP is a game that doesn't really quite hold up for me nowadays - I think the game is kind of ugly and plays a little slow and it doesn't hold the same magic for me that it once did. But that said, it was an incredibly formative experience of my childhood, and it's very near and dear to my heart. When I was a kid, the world just seemed so BIG, and I couldn't take any of the game's challenges for granted. Discovering any secret, any bombable wall or hidden item, seemed like a huge bit of progress, figuring out any of the game's puzzles like solving a grand mystery, and can you even imagine how awestruck I was that beating Agahnim wasn't the end of the game, but just the beginning? I seriously didn't know I was less than halfway through the game at that point, I thought it was about to be over! LTTP was such a great adventure for its time.

A Link Between Worlds is a perfectly crafted sequel and revisiting of LTTP. I love how well it effectively blends old elements with completely new ones. I love how it tries to get you with nostalgia, by having the world map be exactly the same, and all the dungeons and enemies are familiar, all the music arranged from the original game - but then it turns everything on its head, planting new secrets in the world, completely changing dungeons, adding new music. It has the appearance of something old, but the guts are totally new.

The biggest new mechanic is the ability to merge into the walls as a painting and walk along them, which is about as mindblown as I've been since... well probably since Portal gave me the portal gun. It doesn't seem like much, but suddenly the fact that the walls are an available movement space in rooms opens up the possibility for puzzles a lot and forces you to think about how to get around in ways that I've never considered in a video game before. This game, above all other Zelda games, has the best puzzles I've seen in any of them; the dungeons are really well designed to take full advantage of the painting mechanics, as well as creating puzzles of their own, eschewing the more standard Zelda layouts for dungeons that offer multiple paths and surprisingly open-ended, emergent puzzle designs that really ask for creativity, as well as using themes that the original LTTP didn't touch (such as the brilliant darkness mechanics in the palace of darkness, which is actually dark now).

I love the music in this game - the old tracks from LTTP are lovingly rearranged and remastered here and sound a lot better than the originals, and the new dungeon tracks added are really interesting and moody, bordering on experimental, creating interesting soundscapes. The artstyle's great here too - I love how they ported over like, all of the "weird looking faces on the walls" aesthetics of the original and recreated them completely faithfully here, giving the trees weird faces and all that stuff. And it's cool how they took the elements of LTTP but reimagined them into this brand new story, where the "dark world" is a completely different concept and the villain all new.

The only bad thing I could say about it is that, while I love Ravio, the item renting mechanic doesn't quite do the job for me here. I do love that it means this is one of the few Zelda games were acquiring a lot of money really does matter, since you have something to spend in on, and I like how powerful all the items are, but it did leave me longing for a more linear adventure where I get items and can use them in new places and stuff. It's not so bad being able to get almost everywhere and choosing which dungeon to go to, but there was something strangely unsatisfying about being able to buy nearly every item in the standard Zelda lineup at the start of the game (with a couple of exceptions that you don't open until later). It's a minor complaint though, it has its upsides, and I appreciate that they tried something new. It's otherwise a nearly perfect reimagining over a game close to my heart, and I daresay probably an improvement.

#16





Years of release: 2012 (3DS/Vita), 2017 (PC/PS4)
Beaten?: Yes

I don't think I could have telegraphed any harder that this game would be on the list, considering I was kicking myself for not including 999 on the list (still kicking myself honestly), and calling ZTD somewhat of a disappointment, although an incredibly fun disappointment. While I played 999 on Board 8's recommendation and enjoyed it since I knew the sequel was coming up soon, HOLY HELL was VLR a ride that I wasn't expecting. In my opinion, it's not just the best of the three games, but really the high mark that makes the entire trilogy worth it, at least for me.

I think it would be kind of an injustice for me to describe too much of the game or talk about any of the story for anyone who hasn't played it, but the general premise is - nine people wake up, trapped in a mysterious location by a mysterious figure named Zero, and they are forced to play a Prisoner's Dilemma style game with each other with potentially lethal consequences. It's a dark, philosophical, sometimes humorous, and fully batshit insane visual novel with branching paths and escape room-style puzzles, as well as some other tricks up its sleeve that I won't talk about here that really blew my mind when I realized them.

Some of the twists in the story - if you've played the game, you can probably imagine which ones - still get me thinking about this game sometimes, and there are things that happen that blew my mind and are so interesting that it makes it fun for me to see other people experience them vicariously. This story is confusing as shit and makes no sense half the time, but man oh man, it knows how to play intrigue, it knows how to make the player question everything they think they know, and even the game's stupider plot points are delivered with such flair and confidence that I can get over the fact that, again, this game's plot makes no sense and is mostly just a bunch of pseudo-philosophical babble.

I actually really love the cast, too. The funny thing is, despite the fact that they look like a bunch of absolute clowns, every character is actually way less weird than they look and wind up being relatable and likeable from top to bottom. Unlike Danganronpa, where the characters are just completely absurd, I actually feel like I can take the cast of VLR really seriously, and that gives the story a much greater sense of urgency than it would have otherwise. It's a long game, too, so getting to spend a good 40 hours with this cast helps you really get to know them and get invested in figuring out the mystery behind each one of them.

The game's puzzles aren't too great, really, and could have been better, but that's alright - the story's the meat on the bones here, and I think that having the escape room puzzles to do as a fun little break in between story sequences helps not just break up the action but also kind of tricks you brain into making you FEEL like you're doing work in solving the story, even though the game never really requires you to do anything except make a few difficult choices. I haven't really played many true visual novels, like the ones where all you do is advance the text and read, but I really like these games like Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, and Zero Escape, where it's mostly reading but then you have to do some stuff yourself as the player, and you feel like you're really the one advancing through all these scenarios instead of merely watching the characters do it.

It's one hell of a game, and I was super excited for ZTD afterwards, and it... didn't quite deliver, but honestly, this game alone feels self-contained enough, even with something of a slight cliffhanger of an ending, to have been a completely satisfying experience on its own. I'm looking forward to playing AI: The Somnium Files now, which I've heard is really good, and I trust that whatever Uchikoshi does, it's gonna be interesting at the very least.

Zero III >>>>>> Monokuma and I'm really sad that he just doesn't appear in the second half of the game for no apparent reason (aside from one small cutscene).

Random comment: Also I just want to briefly comment on how Virtue's Last Reward is probably the most clever game title I've ever seen; the original Japanese title translated literally to "Good People Die", but also contained within it a double meaning of something like "I have to be a good person" that's lost in the literal translation to English; instead they used the idiom "last reward" meaning death, to convey the double meaning that virtue is something that carries with it a reward, but also, that virtue will get you killed. It's a fucking masterstroke of translation and I just felt like giving commendation to this. (Also, I didn't mention this, but the localization and voice acting for the game in general seemed really top notch)

#15





Years of release: 2017 (Game Jam demo), 2019 (PC, Switch)
Beaten?: Yes, almost 100% but not quite

I don't remember exactly how I came upon Baba Is You, but at one point or another it became the flavor of the month sometime around the beginning of the year, and I decided I would play the less polished demo version of the game to get a feel for it. Despite the fact that the visuals and music were all hastily put-together things for a game jam, the game concept was completely riveting and immediately catapulted itself into being one of the most interesting puzzle games I've ever played. I knew I had to play the full thing right away, and I did.

Baba Is You is a block-pushing puzzle game, but with a twist, the best twist the Sokoban genre of games has ever seen - every rule that governs how objects in the world work are ALSO blocks that can be pushed, and by pushing them, you change how everything operates - walls no longer stop you, objects become pushable or not pushable, and you can potentially control any object on the screen, including the walls themselves. Soon, you realize that objects themselves have no intrinsic meaning, only the logic that the game grants to them, and the ability to change this logic allows you to manipulate them as you please.

Well, to an extent. Because, of course, this is a puzzle game, and if you could do anything you want, it wouldn't be much of a puzzle. This game's puzzles are so intelligently designed that the game always feels challenging, but never feels too fully frustrating, except for a few of the game's more arduous puzzles. The solutions always feel like they're just in your grasp - there are only ever so many ways that you can manipulate the level's logic, and trying new things results in different interactions, and experimenting with what things you are allowed to change reveals the path forward if you spend enough time with it and spend enough time thinking about how you can use the tools given to you to move forward and achieve your goal. It's a difficult game, but far from one of the most difficult puzzle games I've ever played - it's no Snakebird, or Stephen's Sausage Roll, or something truly miserably difficult along those lines. Baba Is You starts off nice and simple and gradually works its way to being difficult, before still gradually working its way up to being truly nasty, and then when you think you've understood all there is to understand, there is so much more yet to learn. It's really surprising and impressive just how far this game takes its own concept to the max. And yet, all the way, aside from a couple of puzzle solutions that I admit I did have to look up, I always felt like the puzzles were manageable, within my reach. Just as long as I kept trying new things, and never repeating old ideas that didn't work, and eliminating seemingly dead possibilities until only one remained, I could always figure out the answer - and the answers themselves always felt like rewards, these grand moments of realization in which I realize a way that I could have used the tools given to me. Playing around with the logic of the game makes the answer to each puzzle seem not like a solution, but a REVELATION. These, to me, are always the best sorts of puzzle games.

I really love the art style and music in this game, too. The soundtrack is really chill but surprisingly catchy, and I find myself humming its abstract and discordant little tunes surprisingly often - they're a really nice backdrop to this game when you're thinking for a long time. And Baba is just so damn cute. I don't know what he is. Is he a sheep, because he's called Baba? Some kind of rabbit? Some kind of... weird gremlin? I don't know. I love Baba. I am glad that he is me. (Not to be confused with Me, who is not Baba.)

But I really keep coming back for the puzzles. I'm even replaying the game right now, because it's been long enough that many of the solutions to the puzzles I've forgotten by now, and even having more expertise in understanding the game's puzzle 'language', so to speak, I still continually find the puzzles challenging. And there's quite a few that I still haven't cleared yet. I did look up a couple of answers just because I wanted to progress through the game and unlock stuff, but I'm satisfied with leaving some puzzles uncleared to gradually work my way through, because nothing's more satisfying than having spent several hours over weeks or months solving a puzzle to finally stumble upon the answer and have it seemed so simple all along.

Oh, one other completely random thing that I forgot to mention but I wanted to mention in my Super Mario Maker writeup: a shoutout to Mega Maker, a brilliant little fan project in the vein of Super Mario Maker that does for Mega Man games what Super Mario Maker did for Mario. I haven't really actually gotten as deep into it as I should have, and I don't really know why - I think, again, it's just hard for the creativity bug to bite, and random Mega Man levels are harder to just pick up and play than Mario levels for whatever reason. But I LOVE the concept and I really should check out and see how it's come along in the past year or two since I first found it. It was something I considered putting on my list but I just didn't have enough experience with it, but it's a great little thing.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Random comment: Also I just want to briefly comment on how Virtue's Last Reward is probably the most clever game title I've ever seen; the original Japanese title translated literally to "Good People Die", but also contained within it a double meaning of something like "I have to be a good person" that's lost in the literal translation to English; instead they used the idiom "last reward" meaning death, to convey the double meaning that virtue is something that carries with it a reward, but also, that virtue will get you killed. It's a fucking masterstroke of translation and I just felt like giving commendation to this. (Also, I didn't mention this, but the localization and voice acting for the game in general seemed really top notch)

This is pretty great

---

Link Between Worlds was my favorite Zelda game of the decade.

Yeah, I said it

---

really good list. thanks for taking the time to put effort into these writeups

Hideo Baba is You
---

Virtue's Last Reward is so good. It's easily my favorite of the trilogy. I can't even talk much about it here because of spoilers, but yeah, it's like a less absurd Danganronpa.

and heck yeah Zero Jr. was great

---

It's my least favorite of the trilogy but still really cool

---

VLR is the best in the series, yeah. I do wish its artstyle and tone hadn't been kneecapped by publisher mandate but the actual writing is a step above the other two games.

---

#14





Years of release: 2017-2019 (PC early access), 2019 (PC/PS4/XB1/Switch)
Beaten?: A20 act 4 on Silent/Defect but still working on Ironclad/Watcher

Clocking in at an unconscionable 1,144 hours, Slay the Spire easily ranks as my most-played game of the decade, and surely ranking near the top of my most-played games ever, although I believe Rock Band 2 is still the likely titleholder (although I'll never really know how much time I spent playing it and I don't really want to know). You might have thought a certain other game might have been the highest, but that other game is only in the 700 hour range! This is my most-played Steam game right now and it will take quite the effort for any game to top it.

Slay the Spire is a roguelike deckbuilder. If you've ever played Dominion or something of the sort, the concept will be familiar here. It's like a CCG, except you always start with the same, basic deck, and through the course of play, drawing cards, playing them, discarding and reshuffling, you use the cards in your deck to defeat monsters and advance through the Spire's many floors, adding cards to your deck as you go (and sometimes removing cards) and powering yourself up to take on the challenging boss fights at the end. Like any roguelike, the game's different every time you play, and if you die, you start a new run from the beginning.

Does this game really have 1,144 hours of content? Well, probably not quite that much. But I've had a lot of times in my life between late 2017 and now when the exact thing I needed was a Slay the Spire run. It's comfort food - something I can pick up for an hour or two to relax and put down whenever suits me. I never really get bored of this game. The possible strategy space is pretty vast, almost every card in the game is useful and be utilized as part of some effective and fun strategy, so every game feels a little different. Adding cards to my deck and collecting relics and watching myself get stronger over the course of the run just has an addictive quality to it, and there's enough variety here that no two runs ever feel quite the same.

The game's pretty challenging too. My first ever run, on Ironclad, was a victory, and my first Silent run was a death to the act 3 boss; but after that stroke of luck I found myself needing improve my skills and knowledge to keep that streak up. I did, but the game offers one of the most clever difficulty mode options I've seen; Ascension mode, which goes from levels 1 to 20 and adds incrementally harder challenges to each run, beefing up enemy hp and damage, giving you less gold and healing, adding junk to your deck and making events worse, just turning up the heat a little more each run until you hit ascension 20 and suddenly the game has gone from relatively simple to completely oppressive. Ascension 20 and act 4 didn't exist for about the first half of my career playing this game, but even still, I have only scored an act 4 victory on A20 three times ever. This level of challenge gives me a lot of motivation and a lot of room to really focus on playing my best, and that combined with the variety of different cards at my disposal keeps me coming back, trying to increase my mastery of the game little by little.

My only complaint about the game really is that it's pretty random what cards and relics you get, and some relics and cards are much better than others. I really like roguelikes that present you with different but equal options, focusing on having runs have variety, rather than a variable chance of success - sometimes hoping for great relics in Spire can be a bit of a frustration when you get dumped with the really bad ones. But it's a pretty minor complaint, as most of the possibilities in this game are viable.

Not much more to say than that. Dominion has long been one of my favorite board games, and the mechanics of adding and removing cards from your deck during play in order to create the most efficient deck has long been a game mechanic that has fascinated me. I haven't been able to play as much Dominion lately, but the single-player Slay the Spire has given me the opportunity to really think about those mechanics in a different setting. After all this time, I still haven't really mastered the new DLC character, so I've still got more of this game to play. A roguelike deckbuilder is right up my alley as far as games that can absorb all of my time go; I don't know what type of game it will take to break my current playtime in Spire but it'll have to be pretty damn good.

Oh god Stephens Sausage Roll

There was a puzzle hunt that had levels from that that you not only had to beat, but extract the optimal number of moves to solve each level. I couldnt even figure out how the game worked.

VLR is fantastic. So glad I decided to buy it after thinking 999 was just pretty good.

---

LordoftheMorons posted...

VLR is fantastic. So glad I decided to buy it after thinking 999 was just pretty good.

Same. I actually like 999 more now that I've played VLR, but at the time I was only kind of mildly interested in the sequel, I thought 999 was okay, had an interesting style and some really interesting plot twists, just enough to get me to want to see what the sequel was about since everyone said VLR was really good.

Paratroopa1 posted...

My first ever run, on Ironclad, was a victory, and my first Silent run was a death to the act 3 boss; but after that stroke of luck I found myself needing improve my skills and knowledge to keep that streak up.

I recently finally started playing this since it was added to Origin, and I'm pretty sure I did the same thing, and then spent the next 10 hours coming nowhere close, and trying to figure out if everyone just has an easy first run or something

---

It took me a couple tries to beat act 3 as Ironclad, but then I won with Silent and Defect in one attempt each right after.

Still haven't beaten the heart at over 100 hours played! I think I'm probably terrible at the game.

---

I got up to like +10 Ascensions with Silent before I had my fill. Fun game.

Clocking in at an unconscionable 1,144 hours

Slay the Spire has been playable for about 850 days. Assuming you started playing since that original early release, you must have played around 1.35 hours of Slay the Spire every single day since then to rack up those hours. Still not MOBA numbers (do not ask me how much I used to play LoL) but I'm still impressed.

---

I DID start in original early release (like, December 2017), but, yep. That's mostly active playtime too, not a lot of idling (although there's definitely some. Probably somewhere between 10-50 hours of idling, hard to say.) But, yeah, there were some days during 2018 where I didn't do much except play Spire, so even though I've had a few months where I didn't play it at all, yeah, I'm not surprised that I got the average way up there.

#13





Years of release: 2011 (Wii, Japan), 2012 (Wii, NA/EU/AU)
Beaten?: One time I did it blindfolded just for fun

I can't believe that this is actually a game of the decade. This game feels way too formative for that - like one of my core experiences as a human being. This feels like a game of my childhood - how is it only seven years old? I really don't know if I can convey to you how staggering this is to me. No game on this list feels more out of time than this one. I sincerely don't clearly recall the time before I had played this game, yet it's younger than the Russell Wilson era of Seahawks football. I guess that's how much of an impression it made on me.

I am, obviously, a big fan of rhythm games, just as a general rule. I haven't really immersed myself in any of the big, challenging ones lately, but I still love a game that lets me tap along to a nice beat, enjoying the almost tactile feel of pressing a button and seeing or hearing stuff happen. It feels kind of like a deconstruction of video games, in a way, completely removing all the abstraction between the idea of pressing a button and succeeding at a task, and in that way, Rhythm Heaven also feels like a deconstruction. The game is a series of minigames, each of which have a song and a pre-programmed, non-random routine that goes with it; in each game, you have some set of visual and audio cues that the game teaches you careful before you play, that you must follow along with. Delightful things ensue.

Rhythm Heaven Fever is my favorite of the series, partly because it's got the best music, the best games, and the best overall polish, but also I think because, even though it's the third game in the series, it's also the simplest, broken down to the barest essentials, and that somehow works. The GBA game has you pressing multiple buttons as well as the d-pad and occasionally engages in different rulesets or weird gimmicks; the DS game has you using the touchscreen to occasionally do some fancy things. Fever has you press A and sometimes B - and that's all. But it's amazing how much mileage it can get out of just telling you when to press A and when to press A+B at the same time; that's what's so interesting about the deconstruction aspect of this game. Every game, by virtue of the way it looks, sounds, and reacts when you hit buttons, as well as the precise way in which it expects you to hit the buttons and how you should know which buttons to hit, manages to feel like a very different experience.

This game is a sheer joy to play. It wouldn't work if any element of it was off, but the music is infectiously catchy, the characters cute as all hell, the gameplay as tight as it can be. Pretty much every game and every song is permanently imprinted in my brain at this point, and even the voices and sound cues themselves are good for a meme or a few; there's a lot of "wub-a-dub-a-dub is that true?"s and "Ba-BOM BOM BOM"s among me and my friends. Almost more than any other game on this list it feels like a very important shared experience, something that's always been there and that again I cannot stress this enough cannot be a fucking 2012 game, there is no way.

The remixes are the best part of this game, when the game gives you different music and mixes up a bunch of different games together into one longform game. I wish there was more of this, and this is probably my only complaint, because this is when the game is really at its best. I love seeing all of the custom remixes that people come up with online; a lot of them are really creative and involve custom art assets and there's a surprisingly big community for it for such a niche game - that's rhythm game fans for you I guess, the desire to create knows no bounds.

I once played this game blindfolded and it was awesome. Every game except one, bafflingly (Built to Scale) has sound cues that allow you to perfectly play the game without looking at it, so I casually played through it blind and it was a lot of fun and an interesting experience playing a game with my eyes literally closed for over two hours. Really speaks to how much I like what this game has to offer that I'm looking for new ways to play it like that, and it was totally worth it too. Needless to say I'm kinda in love with this game and I really wish they had added the Chorus Kids into Smash like was once rumored, but there's tragically no Rhythm Heaven representation at all, even as an assist trophy or something, and it really bothers me. This game is one of Nintendo's best first-party offerings and it should not go ignored.

Honorable Mention: Rhythm Heaven Megamix. Really like this game too, but while it does add some new games of its own and some new features as well, most of what makes this game good are old games ported over from previous Rhythm Heaven games, so I decided not to rank it. It probably would have ranked in the 70's or 80's or thereabouts - I don't like the remixes in this one as much as in Fever, nor do I even like the game selection as much as Fever, for various reasons which I don't feel like getting into here. And just the fact that it's lacking as much novelty as Fever has means it doesn't rank as high for me. It's still really good, though, and I feel really lucky that we had it localized here, because it felt for a while like we weren't going to get it. I'm wondering if Rhythm Heaven will have a future - I really hope they make a Rhythm Heaven for Switch.

#12





Years of release: 2017 (PC/PS4/XB1), 2018 (Switch)
Beaten?: Just the Bea path. Sorry Gregg, one day

It's a crisp autumn day, and somehow, I'm back at my old community college. I'm wearing my Seahawks hoodie and a pair of shorts unseasonable for the weather; my hair is slightly disheveled and my backpack strung along behind me by a single strap as I race up the stairs of the main building and into the library. At the counter, I impatiently ask the librarian if there's a book club meeting here today; she hesitantly replies yes, confused by the urgency of my question, but she doesn't know about the news I'm about to break to those unsuspecting literature snobs. I run past towering shelves of books too tall to reach their highest levels, bothering some people quietly studying for a science test, and I burst forth into the room where the book club is being held, the door dramatically swinging open and hitting the wall. A confused and frightened hush falls over the dozen people in the room, looking up from their copies of whatever dumb novel they were reading before I arrived and changed their lives forever.

"GUYS, THIS IS IMPORTANT," I shout excitedly in between labored breaths. "VIDEO GAMES ARE NOW ALSO ART."

And then I show them Night in the Woods, the whole thing. I show them its stunning art, its gorgeous music, its loveable characters, the way it uses an interactive medium to seamlessly blend all these features together, but most of all I show them its story. They see this story, a postmodern reflection on millennial depression and a requiem for the inevitable decay of lower and middle class America; they see its themes, and oh, how much they love their themes. They see all of these things and they fall to their knees, immediately and intuitively understanding that I am right. Their books are all bullshit, now. I have decisively won the war, and video games are, now and forever, officially Art.

Then I wake up, and I wonder why the hell I chose to frame the opening paragraphs of this writeup as a dream that I never had, and I wonder if I should start over. It's okay, I decide. I also frequently do not understand the ways in which Night in the Woods chooses to frame its story, I question the choices it makes, but I admire that it made those choices, and the best way I can honor it is to make some questionable choices myself.

There are narrative-driven video games that I like more than Night in the Woods, but I don't know if there are any that I would consider more important, more urgent, more relevant to the current time than this one. NitW is a game that probably hits something close to home for most people here; for me, it hit rather close indeed. Most games focus on gameplay challenges, but Night in the Woods is an emotional challenge. The game is at once easy to play and get wrapped up in, but also at times very difficult to continue, not for the events of the story itself but for the way they reflect back on my own life and the lives of people around me. At the time, I didn't know if it was hurting or healing to have a game dig this deeply into a wound, and looking back on it now I still don't know. Night in the Woods is a difficult game to grapple with.

But it's all okay, because NitW washes it all down with a heavy dose of warmth. At the same time as it's a cold bucket of water all over my head, it is also a warm, cozy blanket next to the fireplace with which I can nurse myself back to health from my hypothermia. This game ranks as high as it does because I realized that this game is going to stick with me for a long, long time, because its world feels so alive with the real, lived experiences of its writers, beautiful and moving in all the strangest ways, melancholy and thoughtful all while having a goofy smile on its face. I will want to return to this world someday to play through the story path that I did not see the first time, but I still need to give it some time to really recover. I hope that the game's final act will make more sense to me the second time I play the game.

Let's not forget the most important lesson here, however: aside from the cheapest frozen pizzas in the store that barely register as food, and some kind of freaky ass pizza that's topped with caviar and gold leaf or some shit, all pizza is Good As Hell.

#11





Years of release: 2010 (DS/iOS, Japan), 2011 (DS, WW), 2012 (iOS, WW)
Beaten?: Yes

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective was, once, described to me as being a lot like Ace Attorney, sort of. I understood that it was written and directed by Shu Takumi, the mastermind behind the Phoenix Wright trilogy, but I otherwise didn't really understand how it could be like Ace Attorney. There's no lawyers or courts of any of that stuff - the game isn't really even about solving murder mysteries, not in the standard sort of way, anyway. It's a narrative-driven game, and there's an overarcing mystery to be solved, but that's where the similarities end. But I played it with great skepticism about what sort of game this would be, and it turns out, it's exactly like Ace Attorney. Well, no, it's not actually like Ace Attorney at all, so forget that. But it's written with the same sort of sensibilities - and the same sort of flair - as Ace Attorney, so it ends up evoking a lot of its style. And it is a very good style. Ghost Trick is every bit Ace Attorney's equal in clever writing and storytelling, and for me it was a can't-stop-playing game from start to finish.

In Ghost Trick, you play as Sissel, who has just died. Although he cannot save himself, he discovers that he has just one night to at least solve the mystery of who killed him and why, before he disappears forever. As a ghost, he has the power to possess objects and perform "ghost tricks" to make the objects move and react in various ways, and you move Sissel from object to object, manipulating them to prevent other people from meeting the same fate you did. It's a puzzle game, where each new puzzle is lovingly crafted and exceedingly clever from start to finish, surrounded by lengthy narration that explains further developments in the mystery surrounding Sissel's death.

It's really damn good. Aside from the puzzles being great and the story being surprisingly gripping, the game just nails every element of its presentation so damn well. The animation is one of the rare DS games that still holds up perfectly today, smooth and stylish and incredibly fun to look at; every character moves with a brilliant sense of personality. The music is pretty much nonstop bangers and drives the action much like you'd expect from an Ace-Attorney-except-it's-ghosts-and-not-lawyers kind of game.

But goddamn, if you've read this list you can probably figure out that I'm a fucking sucker for a good plot twist - some story element that the game builds up to that knocks me flat on my ass when it's revealed. I'm not gonna talk about it here, of course, but this is where the game really reveals Shu Takumi's fingerprints all over it. Some of the shit that happens in this game still gets me fucking pumped up as hell thinking about it almost ten years later it's so awesome. There's a fair handful of moments in this game that were worth experiencing not just myself, but also vicariously through other people, and I think this game surprised me in a few ways that Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, etc could only dream of doing. I still think about this game a lot, and I might be due for a replay I think. This may well be my favorite game on the DS; if you haven't played it yet, don't miss it.

I feel like I'm not as high on Ghost Trick as most B8ers are but it's still quite good.

---

And one last honorable mention before I get to the top 10, one "game" that I had meant to mention somewhere, probably in the same post that I talked about randomizers, but I forgot, so I'll pay it tribute now:

Honorable Mention





Not really a game so much as an event; not really an event so much as a bizarre hallucination we all had for a couple of weeks back in 2014, but maybe one of the most important things to happen on the gaming part of the internet, ever. If you missed it, it's really one of those you-had-to-be-there things. Never seen anything like it, probably will never see anything like it again, but for the two weeks that this happened it was pretty much all I thought about. The idea of everyone controlling a game of Pokemon all at once is brilliant. Put into practice, it is beautiful, maddening chaos, so much that the rules had to be changed halfway through to allow for people to vote on which input to use to get through the more harrowing parts of the game. I got more suspense, more excitement out of watching this play out than I've ever gotten watching any TV show. And this did feel something like a TV show, waiting to find out what would happen in each new episode; would we beat the next gym, or would we get stuck on a narrow ledge for 12 hours? Would we catch a new Pokemon, or release all of the ones currently in our party? The constant thrill of not knowing what was going to happen next despite it in theory all being in our control was fascinating, and the fact that all you had to do was type inputs into a window to help participate made it all the more fascinating. I was there! I was there at sometime around Pewter City, all the way through the end. What a fascinating journey that gave us so many great stories and a wealth of memes so pervasive that even Jeopardy's twitter account invoked them when talking about its Pokemon category. You just had to be there. Some of the future TPP playthroughs were also great, but they've lost their edge since, since sadly the newer games are far too easy to control via the twitch plays method. But the original playthrough of TPP is legendary. It's not the best game released this decade, but it might be the most interesting game-related thing to happen.

TPP was a bizarre fever dream and we are blessed to have experienced it, whether you personally did so up close or from afar. Definitely a 2010s highlight.

---

Best moment of TPP for me was catching Zapdos

tpp was a goddamn adventure

---

Yay Night in the Woods

---

whoa, you go big guy

---

Ghost Trick is so good. I definitely recommend that everybody play it.

I also absolutely loved the final twist

---

Bane_Of_Despair posted...

Yay Night in the Woods

I'm not going to talk in-depth about it here, but NITW left real marks on me mentally and emotionally, something I thought would be impossible for a video game to do to me before playing it.

---

Playing NitW made me very unhappy and made me like life less, which is quite an accomplishment for a video game. Probably a bad thing for suicidal people to play, especially considering that the guy who made it committed suicide.
---

Mac Arrowny posted...

Playing NitW made me very unhappy and made me like life less, which is quite an accomplishment for a video game. Probably a bad thing for suicidal people to play, especially considering that the guy who made it committed suicide.

Whoa whoa whoa. I didn't really want to bring this up as a topic of discussion for a lot of reasons, but I think it should be clarified that there were three people who worked on this, and the other two, who did a lot of the writing and character design and such, are alive and seem to be doing fine.

That said I do think "NitW made me unhappy" is a perfectly valid feeling to have felt

When I was making my 'Favorite Stories in Fiction' topic, someone asked me if I'd played Night in the Woods. I said no, but that I'd heard good things, but was also hesitant to try it because of the effect it might have on my mental state. They then told me 'yeah don't play NitW'. I don't think I've ever seen a game where its most ardent supporters warn people not to play it.

---