Some Reflections on Gaming in 2015
4A lot of big games impressed me this year, but in the end none of the really hyped-up releases quite managed to live up to my (perhaps impossibly high) expectations or give me what I truly wanted out of a game in 2015. Metal Gear Solid V and The Witcher 3 presented fantastic open worlds to explore and sophisticated gameplay mechanics to master, but these games didn't necessarily push the open world genre forward as much as they pushed it inwards. Just as we saw with last year's Assassin's Creed Unity (post-patch), what can be achieved from a technical standpoint with a large enough development team is truly awe-inspiring; yet that in and of itself does not translate into true innovation in an increasingly formulaic triple-A environment.
To take an example of what we didn't get this year, 2015 could have been the year in which the popular procedural survival simulator was given a tasteful make-over by some big studio applying an intelligently streamlined design approach and some much-needed polish to the basic template established by games like Rust and Day-Z. Instead, we got yet another one of those adorable but messy Early Access phenomena in the Ark: Survival Evolved whereas most of the mainstream developers dutifully churned out respectable but unimaginative installments in their respective long-running series (Batman: Arkham Knight, Just Cause 3, Fallout 4, Assassin's Creed Syndicate etc.).
For me personally, what turned out to be remarkable about gaming in 2015 was just how often I was caught off guard by a conceptually risky but truly engaging adventure game. Her Story could have been a a tired and creepily voyeuristic whodunnit mystery but cleverly turned the tables on the player and explored some really thought-provoking themes. Until Dawn's misguided promotional material made it come off as a cynical splatterfest while the actual game combined an unexpectedly solid script with marvelous motion capture and genuinely interactive storytelling. Contradiction – Spot the Liar looked like a clumsy casual crime puzzler yet produced a playful spin on its genre trappings and enriched the FMV Hall of Fame with some delightfully scenery-chewing performances. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture seemed to offer little beyond non-interactive traversal through pretty landscapes but delivered a couple of superb emotional uppercuts scattered throughout an admittedly uneven story.
Last but certainly not least, DONTNOD Entertainment's episodic sleeper hit Life is Strange always threatened to collapse under the weight of its creaky mechanics and problematic script, yet somehow still managed to deliver almost all of my most poignant and memorable gaming moments of the year. During the first few hours I mostly cringed at the annoying teens and stilted dialogue. By the end of the series, Max and Chloe had become two of my favorite gaming heroines of all time and I really wanted their story to have a happy ending.
One of DONTNOD's accomplishments was world-building on a refreshingly minute scale; small-town life in Oregon is vividly recreated with vibrant pastel colors, a rich ambient soundscape and some of the most appropriate licensed music in a video game (you might not like Bright Eyes, but it makes total sense that Chloe and Max digs Conor Oberst). Yet the single most important aspect of the game's success might be the simple fact that it wears its heart unironically on its sleeve and delivers a daringly straight melodrama (its intermittently queer subject matter notwithstanding) while respecting the characters and their emotions – which I guess is also why LiS has garnered such an enthusiastic following among younger players. In a gaming ecology dominated by world-weary male anti-heroes such as Venom Snake or Geralt, the life-affirming eagerness and uncompromising idealism of Life is Strange's star-crossed female leads definitely make them stand out from the crowd. Or maybe it's just me who is getting old and sentimental?
On a side note, while it might sound more than a little bit stupid coming for someone who has been maintaining a YouTube channel of sorts for the past seven years, narrative-driven titles such as Life is Strange and Until Dawn finally made me realize just how fun it can be to watch other people play and react to video games. Both dedicated gaming sites like Giant Bomb, Gamespot and Polygon as well as semi-professional YouTubers like Geek Remix have produced some really entertaining playthroughs, and my own experiences of these games are now inextricably linked to those of various people on the Internet. Better late than never, I guess...