Ranking Archives

*A space to organize my pre-website annual rankings. 2021 on should have their own article.

Escape From Tarkov - the best multiplayer/co-op experience I’ve ever had. An FPS that verges on horror. Gun mechanics and handling that I wish were replicated in every realistic shooter I play.
Battle Brothers: Blazing Deserts - I’ve already said enough.
Hades - a fun, story-driven roguelike. The greek mythology is really well done with the gods all being memorable. Everything about the game is an 8/10.
Metro Exodus - this game has grown on me a lot, but maybe it’s just because I’m remembering the open world sections and not everything else. It also keeps good company in my thoughts, alongside the likes of Tarkov and Stalker.
Slay the Spire: The Watcher - Unfortunately the most boring character out of the bunch. Fortunately, Slay the Spire is spectacular, so their worst is others best.
Halo Master Chief Collection - a fantastic bundle of the scattered memories I have of the Halo franchise, ranging from multiplayer maps I binged to death with my brothers, campaigns I played through with old friends, and stuff I missed from odd entries long ago.
Monster Train banger soundtrack, fun gameplay, blegh visuals.
Spelunky 2 - Spelunky is hard.
Rimworld: Royalty - an okay expansion that I probably didn’t fully understand at the time because I was barely scraping the surface of the base content.
Fallout: New Vegas - a janky classic.

Summary: Covid-19? Never heard of it… because I spent the whole first wave of the pandemic playing Escape From Tarkov with my brother. Not many gaming experiences compare to EFT. It’s hard to put into words why the gameplay of EFT works so well, although I think it as a lot to do with what it doesn’t have. It has essientally no HUD, no map, no teammate indicators and friendly fire is on. I believe the collective effect is that players must pay attention, listen, look, and communicate. In EFT friendly fire isn’t a joke you pull to mess with friends, friendly fire is a complete mistake that puts your teammate into a shellshocked tirade. Friendly fire is a disorienting experience for both parties because both realities are shattered at once. Picture this, you’re in a forest and come under gunfire. You take cover seperating slightly from your teammate. Your teammate asks for you location, you say “behind a tree over here”. You spot the enemy and fire back, enemy returns fire once more, you switch trees and to your relief your teammate spots the enemy, “I see him!”. You give him the go ahead to fire and your teammate elatedly yells “I got him!” and right at that moment your headshot… dead. You react, “what the fuck!… he got me…” your teammate, disappointed but still excited about the kill, runs over to the body just as your match-over screen comes up aannnndddd goddammit…

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - This game sucked me in whole. The meta-progression is my jam. Unlocking new characters and items by taking on various challenges is addicting. I’m not usually one for top-down bullet hell games but this game clicked with me in 2019.
Rimworld - My pound for pound #1 comes in 2nd to The Binding of Isaac??? Similar to Battle Brothers, Rimworld has grown on me, signficantly. I think games with the much depth can be intimidating and hard to understand the first time around. I think I only played Rimworld 25ish hrs in 2019. That has since changed.
Battle Brothers - I have said enough.
Risk of Rain - awesome soundtrack, simple bought fun gameplay.
Return of the Obra Dinn - again an awesome and very unique soundtrack, along with an art style I haven’t seen before. Has it been long enough to where I have forgotten the solutions to this games’ many questions?
Prey - Have you ever wanted to explore a fully realized, alt-history space station? Well Prey accomplishes that by having visually and functionally distinct sectors of the station, having each human onboard be accounted for and discoverable in-game, and giving the player many tools and applications to interact with the station and its systems.
Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire - my gold standard for isometric CRPGs.
Risk of Rain 2 - a really cool and accurate transformation of Risk of Rain into 3D.
Stellaris - cool game, but 4X is not for me.
Noita - what happens when you mix a fully destructible world with insanely powerful wizardy and a roguelike format… you get a fiendishly chaotic and difficult game.

Summary: I 100%ed a The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth save file in 2019, if you know anything about Isaac that should explain my 2019 to you. If not, just understand that the variety of Isaac is immense… 10+ characters, 9 endings I think, multiple game modes, etc so imagine all the permutations. Rimworld and Battle Brothers are two of my favorite games that I just grazed the surface of in 2019. I think both I put down after 30ish hours feeling kind of exhausted by the experience of learning all aspects of the games. So maybe not the most beginner friendly games, but just check out my top 10 all-time to see if they’re worth coming back to.

Gwent - beta Gwent, the one and only time I’ve been invested in a competitive multiplayer game. I’m sad this version of the game no longer exists as nearly everything else on my 2018 list has aged beautifully and I play to this day.
Spelunky - the only time my wife has enjoyed playing a video game…
Faster Than Light - one of the best games I’ve ever played. Like a great movie, everytime I return to FTL I enjoy it more.
Hitman - The Paris level is one of the greatest levels in gaming history.
Slay the Spire - again, one of the best games I’ve ever played. Endlessly replayable, endlessly fun.
Into the Breach - the best roguelike/puzzle game out there. I love the art design and soundtrack, the feel is simple yet detailed, sci-fi but rooted on earth.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - sad :(
Dead Space - the iconic sci-fi horror video game. Shows its age a bit.
Superflight - the best $3 game.
Darkest Dungeon - holds the record for the game I’ve played the most but never beaten.

Summary: I spent an unreasonable amount of time playing Gwent. Looking back, I don’t understand how I both had a job and was working on my thesis while competing on Gwent’s pro ladder. It was so much fun to deckbuild and play until I ran into actually stiff competition. The game just became too stressful plus I was probably burnt out from only playing Gwent for 6 months. Outside of that, I somehow stumbled upon some of the best roguelikes ever not to mention my favorite games ever, those being FTL1, Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, and Spelunky. FTL I may have tried to play previously, but in 2018 it really stuck with me. The permadeath format was super-compelling as each run became unique and worth fighting for. I also remember Ben Prunty’s FTL soundtrack being what I played to really focus in on thesis writing. Slay the Spire really tickled the Gwent deckbuilding itch I had left over by putting the deckbuilding on the fly in a roguelike format. Playing Spelunky co-op with my wife was the most fun we’ve ever had playing a video game together. All the interactivity built into Spelunky makes for so many spontaneous and unexpected situations/outcomes to the point where you’re always learning new details.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - the best story-driven game I’ve ever played. The Witcher 3 was such an impactful game for me. I fell in love with standalone Gwent, I trudged through part of Witcher 1, kinda enjoyed Witcher 2, read part of a book (I never read), grimaced through 1.5 seasons of Netflix Witcher when Henry Cavill wasn’t on screen all trying to recapture that feeling of being immersed in the world of Witcher 3.
Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain - along with Hitman, MGSV has the best stealth gameplay. MGSV offers a vast array of tactical options in its sandbox while the story is complete batshit crazy.
Exanima - I’ve watched this game slowly grow for the past 5 years and while it is extremely slow in development the groundwork and concept here are truly original and exciting. The combat and movement starts by feeling completely jank and broken but slowly becomes graceful and deep with familiarity.
Resident Evil Remake - I went from “What the fuck are fixed camera angles?!?! This is unplayable” to “This is peak immersive gameplay”. The Spencer Mansion is one of my favorite video game environments.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl - this was my introduction to Stalker, I don’t know what compelled me to try it, but I’m glad I did.
Thief 2: The Metal Age - the stealth genre OG
Thief: Gold - the stealth genre OG prequel
Doom - very fun game
The Swapper - cool sci-fi puzzle game
Dishonored - Thief but with overpowered skills, ehh it’s okay.

Summary: 2017 was dominated by The Witcher 3 and MGSV. Both of these games had huge open worlds that were a joy to simply exist in, just for very different reasons. The Witcher 3 was the first time I played a video game where the open world felt incredibly lived in and realistic. The geography was beautiful and varied, the towns and people were grimy and down-to-earth. On the other hand, while MGSV’s geogrpahy was at times was beautiful it felt more like an eerie no-mans land, which maybe it was? But the joy was more in the slick traversal/stealth options and the expansive enemy encampments dotted across the map. Other than playing these two behemoths, I somehow got into Resident Evil and Stalker for the first time. And while, at least initially, they did not make a huge splash, the decision to play these games laid the ground work for two series that I now consider some of my favorites.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition - there’s been a few games over the course of my life that have changed my perspective on what video games are and can be. Rimworld is an example where the concept of indirectly controlling your colonists through prioirities simply broke my brain for the first couple hours. FTL opened my eyes to the roguelike genre, displaying how repeat playthroughs are part of the game design. Then there’s Dark Souls.
Alien Isolation - the best video game representation of the original Alien. They hit the nail on the head with the retro-futuristic design.
Dark Souls 3 - more Dark Souls, this time a little sleeker and more linear.
Soma - one of the best stories in video games. Soma asks really interesting questions about human conscience and technology while triggering my horrifying fears related to the depths of the ocean.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent - probably the scariest game I’ve ever played. The atmosphere of this game chills me to the core, just hearing the title screen music is enough to make me question my choice to continue playing.
Black Mesa - fantastic game, can’t say enough about how high quality this mod turned full-fledged remake is.
F.E.A.R. - what if I told you I played essientally the whole game without knowing about the bullet-time mechanic… I gotta replay this.
Spec Ops: The Line - traumatizing story, okay gameplay.
Metro: Last Light - good, linear shooter with a cool atmosphere.
Gunpoint - cool, 2D stealth/puzzle game.

Summary: In 2016 I started to branch from what I knew about in gaming. Dark Souls was the big one. I remember my brother telling about this ridiculously hard game, but it’s so much more than that. I remember we were both were playing through it around the same time and everytime we talked we’d go back and forth with stories about what we found or how we handled certain situations. I was always so surprised and intrigued about how his experiences were so different, some stuff he found so easy, some areas I completely missed, some zones we progressed through in opposite directions. To this day, I still love seeing how someone new approaches Dark Souls, it rekindles those feelings I had on my first playthrough. Other than that, I really got into horror games. Alien Isolation, Soma, and Amnesia all bridged the territory between my love of horror films and video games.

Half-Life 2 - the Ravenholm demo on Steam back in the late 2000s was how I found out about Half-Life and Steam. I ended getting The Orange Box for our Xbox 360 and fell in love with Valve games, so much so my first purchase on Steam on my own PC was the Valve Complete Pack. Out of all the fantastic games in that collection, Half-Life 2 is the best and my favorite.
Half-Life - After years of playing Half-Life 2, I had to play its predecessor and yeah it’s really, really good.
Portal 2 - a great follow-up, improving on every aspect of the original. The co-op mode is well done if not rage inducing.
Portal - one the greatest puzzle games ever. Short but sweet.
Star Wars: Battlefront 2 - my most nostalgic game by far. When this came out, me and my brothers somehow got our hands on a PC release of Battlefront and even more miraculously a random PC in our attic was able to run it. Running it might be a bit of an overstatement because we were probably barely scraping 30 FPS and the load times were unbearable. Nonetheless, Battlefront’s 3 modes: campaign, galatic conquest, and instant action and are engrained in my brain and all equally fun in their own rights. Each map I know like the back of my hand, well maybe not Dagobah, and the sound effects plus music are just iconic.
Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast - these Jedi Knight games are super underrated.
Half-Life 2: Episode 1 - more of Half-Life 2, this is a good thing.
Half-Life 2: Episode 2 - the unexpected end of the road :(
Half-Life: Blue Shift - nice, condense expansion that portrays Half-Life’s events from another perspective.
Half-Life: Opposing Force - a more beefy expansion. It’s solid.

Summary: This was the first year I really got into PC gaming. Most of it was spent replaying games I love like Half-Life 2, the Portals, and Battlefront 2. One thing that blew me away was the mods for Half-Life and Battlefront. With Half-Life there were fan-made levels and cut content. With Battlefront 2 there were huge content packs that added maps, classes, vehicles, etc… These modding communities definitely turned me onto one of the huge benefits of PC gaming, that’s modability.

My brother has now reminded me that he showed me FTL back in 2016-17 time range. He used to play it on his laptop on family trips down to Florida, what a badass. ↩