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The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

Whether gamers end up going for all of these titles, that there’s now more for everyone can only be a net positive for the future of this industry.

The 25 Best Video Games of 2015
Photo: Sony Computer Entertainment

What a difference four years can make. Our inaugural list of the 25 best video games of 2011 was stuffed full of big-budget sequels. In 2015, fewer than half of our picks are traditional AAA releases, two of which focus on putting creativity into the hands of the player. There are hardly any sequels here, and of those that made it, with one exception that proves the rule in Fallout 4, all have introduced bold and significant improvements on their predecessors, refusing to be pigeonholed in an annualized and formulaic fashion.

Maybe this year’s a fluke, with studios only momentarily adapting to reflect the dissatisfaction over last year’s bumper crop of buggy, repetitive games like Assassin’s Creed: Unity. But the larger trends suggest this is more than a trick of our subjective preferences. Adventure games, led largely by the efforts of Telltale Games, have become popular and profitable again, and while the lowering barrier of entry to game development explains the increase of deeply personal and eclectic indie titles, it doesn’t explain the mainstream interest in them, as with Square Enix’s choice to publish Life Is Strange.

The best example that studios and players are looking for the Next Big Thing, or at least a whiff of something new, is in the existence of The Talos Principle. How else to explain the success of a deep, philosophical puzzler from the testosterone-y studio once best known for Serious Sam? As developers continue to take risks, games grow more inventive and hard to define. Roger Ebert once famously dismissed the notion that games could be taken seriously as art, but his peers would be hard-pressed to do the same today, especially given the way in which advances in motion-capture technology have basically turned some games, like Until Dawn, into interactive films.

Our list this year pulls from all sorts of genres—the transcendental spaghetti-western homage, an intentionally bizarre bullet-hell shooter—and recognizes how fiercely creative games are becoming. Most of all, we’re proud to see a community that’s looking toward an inclusion of ever-broader perspectives, without having to sacrifice the pure entertainment afforded to us by some of the purer adrenaline rushes to make our list. Whether gamers end up going for all of these titles, the fact that there’s now more and more for everyone can only be a net positive for the future of this industry. Aaron Riccio


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

25. Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition

Through a family’s yearning for solidarity and economic security, Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition finds a spiritual connection between seemingly disparate generations. You make dialogue choices as twentysomething Kelly, whose disappointment about her lack of self-sufficiency could have made for a pandering tale of millennial angst. Developer Zach Sanford avoids this mistake by also emphasizing the vicissitudes of her family’s life, whether it’s her father being out of work due to injury, her younger autistic brother’s trouble at school, or her sometimes-overbearing mother trying to hold the whole unit together. This approach gives Three Fourths Home a mature social consciousness, allowing the characters to illustrate common American anxieties that transcend the party politics of our time. In the game’s epilogue (the “Extended” part), Sanford writes the best line in 2015 video games from the perspective of Norah: “A grade is a grade. A job’s a job. My wisdom isn’t exactly the most creative.” This statement captures the alienation, resolve, and humility of U.S. working people in universal terms. In the epilogue, you can only walk back and forth. This limited movement, like the single-button acceleration of a car in the primary chapter, represents a soul stuck in place. Jed Pressgrove

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

24. The Swindle

Most old-school games give you up to three lives to complete your objective. Contemporary story-based blockbusters, in their bid for inclusiveness, freely hand over as many as you require. The Swindle occupies a uniquely arbitrary position in the middle: it gives you one hundred. This number corresponds both to the amount of days left until Scotland Yard activates a Foucauldian surveillance machine, and to the number of chances you’re given to break into Victorian London homes guarded by colourful steampunk automata, grab what you can, and use the spoils to upgrade your equipment to, eventually, take on the authorities and sabotage that ungodly apparatus. The Swindle looks like a platformer, but, like its obvious inspiration, Spelunky, is more of a skill-based, real-time puzzle game. As such, it’s not the intentionally clumsy controls that’ll become the many deaths of you, but the little things you’ll neglect to factor into your carefully orchestrated burglaries: the remote guardbot spared a blackjack to the head under the assumption its patrol will never cross your own illicit trajectory, or a mine you couldn’t bother to deactivate in the expectation that sneaking out of a labyrinthine mansion, loot in bag, can ever be as controlled and uneventful a process as entering it. The Swindle’s brilliance lies in a kind of clockwork design that expands linear video-game laws of causality into complex webs of volatile interrelationships lying invisibly in wait for the unfortunate misstep that causes them to erupt, spectacularly dismantling your best-laid plans and moving you one step closer to doomsday. Alexander Chatziioannou


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

23. Beeswing

Developer Jack King-Spooner’s games have always shared a provocative, hand-crafted quality that counters the polygon- and pixel-obsessed default of pop video games. But even his best work (Will You Ever Return? 2, Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time in History) keeps the player at a distance for the purposes of philosophical and satirical contemplation. Beeswing bravely goes for the heart. King-Spooner reveals his rural Scottish origin through a journey in which memory and art express the real and the artificial as complementary forces, much like Federico Fellini’s Amarcord. The game concerns other people more than its creator, with King-Spooner’s mom establishing the moral core of being a sensitive neighbor who listens. The original soundtrack has an unusual willingness to acknowledge vulnerability from both a technical (you can hear deadened guitar notes that lack intentionality) and storytelling standpoint (pay attention to the scarily personal music that accompanies a surreal trip into the lonely mind of an elderly woman in a nursing home). If the gaming world doesn’t acknowledge and remember Beeswing, culture loses. Jed Pressgrove


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

22. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

After the failure of the broken, monotonous Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Ubisoft went back to the drawing board promising a return to form for their struggling series. The narratively and mechanically exceptional Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate proves to be the shot in the arm that the series needed, largely due to the introduction of its female protagonist, Evie Frye. Since Assassin Creed 2’s Ezio, each game’s protagonist has felt emotionally distant and passive. Evie is neither. She’s an active participant in the civil war that explodes across Victorian-era London at the close of the Industrial Revolution: She’s passionate, has relationships (including the rarest of rare, an interracial romantic interest), and fights believably for the side of the downtrodden and for her family. She’s skilled in battle, utilizing a cane sword with which to thrillingly cut through otherwise mundane combat, and appropriately accessorized with gadgets that make open-world traversal exciting again, most notably a steampunk grappling hook that allows one to bypass laborious running and climbing. Evie is the lens through which players view Syndicate’s unique take on London, and through which the series’s stale formula, largely unchanged over the last decade, is made fresh once again. Ryan Aston


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

21. Westerado: Double Barreled

“Open world” is a marketing term meant to trick people into thinking that if they play a game, they can be free. If there should be truth in advertising, Westerado: Double Barreled outclasses The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Batman: Arkham Knight, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and Fallout 4, the biggest open-world hits of 2015. A freer experience can be found in Westerado’s mercifully brief introduction, to-the-point dialogue, unlimited bullets (though the cocking/reloading system keeps you on your toes), and the absolute rejection of a cluttered inventory. Developer Ostrich Banditos combines this terseness with the anarchic (and comic) potential of Fallout and Fallout 2, as almost any man or woman in Westerado is ready to pull a gun on you if you’re messing around. The pixelated graphics aren’t just there for retro hipness, but call for your attention to detail, making a worthy mystery out of the villain who kills the protagonist’s family. Like most games set in the Wild West, Westerado could be criticized for a superficiality that never approaches the moral and psychological depth of the western genre in cinema and literature. Thankfully, it’s also true that this consequences-driven bonanza has far better pacing and a sharper understanding of fun than most of the year’s action-filled efforts. Pressgrove

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

20. Shutshimi: Seriously Sswole

This wacked-out shooter seems like a paradox: sharply constructed yet fundamentally at odds with fairness. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine Shutshimi: Seriously Swole as a hit during the arcade era, but the game’s rules are more than nostalgic. The alternating 10-second bursts of shooting and item selection would make for great e-sports drama. As in classics like Blazing Lazers, you develop a style through a combination of offensive and defensive power-ups. But because you’re always forced to choose a new item, some of which cause confusion and debilitation, Shutshimi is absolutely fine with steering you toward doom or—maybe even worse for those rushing to beat a high score—the safety of a harmless screen. The scramble to read the item descriptions for clues can lead to precarious mistakes, suggesting a parody of the Information Age and social media’s dangerous urging toward rapid-fire thinking. The comedy is welcome, but the truly impressive feat by developer Neon Deity Games lies in its shooter’s ability to stand its ground among masterpieces, such as TwinBee and Fantasy Zone, based on the criterion of distinct technical expression. Shutshimi separates itself from the many supposed returns to old-school glory that cash in on mimicry. Pressgrove


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

19. Life Is Strange

Equal parts My So-Called Life and Donnie Darko, mixed with a very special brand of nostalgia familiar to anyone who played DONTNOD’s prior Remember Me. That’s Life Is Strange in a nutshell, and it would be special just for being that. Where Life Is Strange transcends the sum of its parts is in its ability to tap into such a universal teenage need to be able to step back and take every decision, every word unsaid, every stupid argument with a loved one, every reckless act with a friend who’s a bad influence, everything about being a teenager that one regrets later, and rewind to take the unexamined path. Max Caulfield’s specific experience as a kid attending a fairly exclusive boarding school may not be universal, but the experience of being a teenager who still hasn’t figured out what kind of person she wants to be in the world yet is nigh-ubiquitous. Being able to look at one such teenager’s life and make decisions in her stead with hindsight as a very real gameplay mechanic is powerful, and entirely unique for this medium. Even despite the looming supernatural threat at the plot’s center, Life Is Strange gives its adolescent experience all the import and empathy it deserves. Justin Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

18. Rocket League

What a perfectly ridiculous game. If you haven’t heard, it’s arena soccer in bunny-hopping, turbo-boosting RC cars. But the teamwork and coordination that fuels Rocket League far outclass any digital facsimile of a real-world sport to date. There aren’t pass or shoot buttons here. To direct the ball (which, by the way, is about twice the size of your vehicle), you have only the thrust and angle of your car when smashing into it, much like a real foot bashing a ball down the pitch. When a pass or shot goes awry, there’s no one to blame but yourself. There is, however, a jump button. And with the addition of wall and ceiling driving with sloped transitions between the arena surfaces, the ball-bashing becomes balletic. It only takes one majestic move to become a believer. Try a lateral hop off an arena wall and then boost in-air to meet the ball mid-flight at just the right angle to set your teammate up for a goal. In the hanging descent before your eventual return to the field, rest in the eloquent expression the minimal mechanics allow because, if your mate biffs the shot, the marvelous chase is about to be on once more. Luke Chinworth


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

17. Destiny: The Taken King

There’s a reason the original Destiny, released in 2014, is now referred to as the “vanilla” version. The Taken King is anything but plain. We could focus on the additional features alone: the more engaging story (and villain, Oryx), and how the new Taken enemies require strategic shooting as opposed to the standard run-and-gun approach. But what makes The Taken King stand out is its element of mystery. Routine grinds are interrupted by impromptu and odd-ball scout missions, weekly quests suddenly feature secret areas with hidden exotic weapons as rewards, and once-standard encounters are increasingly randomized or remixed. There’s a depth to Destiny that wasn’t there before and, given the obscurity of some of the hidden secrets, much more of a sense of community. It’s not unusual to put a quest on hold in order to follow an urgently beckoning player down some previously unnoticed nook, and there’s almost always a party hanging about by the Court of Oryx for some complex, epic co-op boss encounters. All of this gives new life—new purpose—to the underlying adventure and exploration that Destiny promised with its gamified version of the galaxy. Riccio

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

16. SOMA

Perhaps no other game on this list is as flawed as SOMA: A redundant first act, a collection of laughably inept enemies, and an array of technical issues congeal into a rather unfavorable first impression. Still, as everyman Simon Jarrett descends into the depths of a seemingly empty underwater research base, forced unease is gradually replaced by silent awe at the haunting beauty of this new environment and the journey expands inwardly to reflect his own growing self-awareness. The whole process stands as a metaphor for something, that becomes clear soon enough. But just like our oblivious protagonist, we’re too busy disregarding the piling evidence, even while too fascinated to abandon a quest that will inevitably lead us to the truth that already resonates in the scale, the emptiness, the sheer unfathomable fortitude of an alien world utterly indifferent to our existence. There’s no god waiting at the end of Simon’s dark night of the soul, only a simple, unbearable realization on the nature of being. That, and the darkest, most shocking twist in recent memory on any medium. Be patient with its faults and grateful for its cruelty: SOMA will cleanse you. Chatziioannou


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

15. Tales from the Borderlands

The stark contrast between the Borderlands FPS titles and Telltale Games’s adventure-game magnum opus is encapsulated by the music in its opening credits. Where Borderlands uses down-and-dirty soul to remind you that you’re the bad guy and to go out and get as much swag as you can, Tales from the Borderlands’s opening needle drops evolve over its five episodes from money-making R&B to spacey, soulful laments to the loss of friends, and the need for us to become better people so as to get them back. It’s almost miraculous what Telltale does with Gearbox’s aggressively cynical cash cow. The greed and homicidal mirth at the series’s core shifts into unerring positivity and lightness across 10 hours, delivering just the right amount of biting sarcasm, madcap physical comedy, and high-speed treasure-hunting adventure along the way. It’s helped, more than anything, by Telltale doing what they do best: crafting characters worth caring about, and who actually grow even more endearing or compelling with time. The worst scumbag in Tales from the Borderlands gets an affecting moment of vulnerability. The sweetest, most unerringly wonderful character in the game finds themselves in the deepest peril of all. Having such total control over both situations is an absolute joy. It’s just about as perfect as a game narrative can get. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

14. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

Like the best science fiction, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture balances on the edge of the tangible human experience. At the outermost bounds of known reality, spacemen surely are prone to ponder the intermingling of physical and spiritual existence, but here, we’re just walking around English villages and countryside. Graphically, the game world is stunning (second only to the unbelievable fidelity of last year’s The Vanishing of Ethan Carter), but its mundanity is palpable compared to the fantastical, extra-dimensional worlds common in sci-fi. This game captivates, then, by collapsing the plainness of our world and the vastness of worlds beyond our space-time reality into one. Here, too, there’s no one around except ghosts and memories in the form of glowing spirals and orbs of floating and swooping (and sometimes talking) light; there’s very little to do other than contemplate the nature of their, and one’s own, existence. The overall lack of things to do other than walk, look, and listen is actually quite refreshing. After all, when the night sky looks as deep and starry as this, and the time-lapse into day entrances with its thousands of shifting shadows from nearby trees, and the convincing voices of spirits lead us on, there doesn’t need to be much more than looking and listening. Chinworth


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

13. Tearaway Unfolded

Early on in Tearaway Unfolded, players are tasked with using the in-game collaging tools to design a butterfly. It’s a small and simple action, but it speaks to the way in which Media Molecule urges users to engage in a more creative and immersive way than usual—to play, so to speak, with the way in which they play. In a nod to the so-called “butterfly effect,” this imaginative choice continues to have ramifications throughout the game, as any butterfly encountered down the road will look similar to the one players designed. Those who take the time to teach a mushroom how to dance will notice fellow festive fungi later on. The meta storytelling consistently emphasizes that this is as much the player’s journey as Atoi’s—the equivalent, then, of a bedtime story told to oneself. Given all these small and intimate touches, Tearaway Unfolded isn’t just a reinvention of its Vita version, it’s a constant celebration of invention itself, and one of the few games where players will be proud enough of their progress to actually want to show off what they’ve done using the in-game camera. Riccio

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

12. Super Mario Maker

Ever since Super Mario Bros. captured the hearts and minds of gamers worldwide, fans have wanted to devise their own Mario levels. And they have: From simple sketches on graph paper all the way through to complicated rom hacks, making Mario levels has been a popular but untapped market. Until now. The sublime Super Mario Maker’s major achievement isn’t just that it offers incredibly robust tools with which to creatively design fun and engaging levels across multiple generations of Mario games that can be played and shared across the world instantly, but that those tools are offered in such a fun, user-friendly package. The inaccessibility that encumbers LittleBigPlanet and similarly esoteric video games with a strong emphasis on user-generated content is gloriously absent here: Super Mario Maker is an uncomplicated tool that can be used to make both simple and infinitely complex creations without hours of tutorials. More than that, it’s a celebration of the fandom that Nintendo has cultivated from its popular series about an unlikely plumber who battles living mushrooms and oversized lizards to rescue Princess Peach. Aston


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

11. Off-Peak

What a joy to play video games in a time when a single mind can take hold of the game-creation tools becoming freely available to gamers and—dare I say—author the hour-long weirdness and beauty that is Off-Peak. Cosmo D’s first-person exploration might be called creepy, Lynchian, or surreal, but it’s spatial above all else. Everything runs together. We’re tasked with a simple collectathon at its outset, but soon the pure discovery of the game’s magnificent train station is driving our exploration. Something funny is going on though, and our unimpeded exploration gets us in a bit of trouble; we’re reprimanded not with a restart, but with an inventive use of perspective and teleportation. The transition back to the station’s main hall feels like a dream, and so does the massive whale model hanging under the colorful, powdery nebulae painted on the ceiling we find ourselves gazing up at. With space at the heart of the quest, exploration, and narrative, it’s only fitting that the best game soundtrack of the last five years is spatial as well. The thickly layered and rich synths, horns, and woodwinds hypnotize as they transition between tracks as we move between spaces. Chinworth


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

10. Sunless Sea

There are, arguably, two categories of games. On one side are games of competence, whose pleasures derive from mastering their required skills and achieving success, measured by completing a stage, knocking out an opponent, or earning a place on the high score table. On the other side are games concerned with exploration, of a fictional world, a story, a concept. It’s a sliding scale, but Sunless Sea, firmly anchored in its farthest end, makes a binary opposition out of it. To properly play Failbetter’s masterpiece one needs to dismiss any thoughts of efficiency; permadeath should be mandatory and gaps between playthroughs measured in weeks, not hours. The break may hurt your grasp on the intricacies of naval combat tactics and the workings of Fallen London’s obscure economies, but is necessary for dull reality to filter out thoughts of cetacean husk forests, conspiracies in simian royal courts, and glowing colossi fleetingly glimpsed beneath the surface, lest their strangeness be diminished by overfamiliarity. Its literary prowess is well documented, but less often remarked upon is how stunningly visualized the submerged archipelago is. Sunless Sea’s greatest achievement, however, lies in the way words, images, and sounds, even in the rare occasions when they do echo something of previous experience, coalesce to create a universe as unique and otherworldly as it is consistent and persuasive. To a hopeful explorer, there’s no greater gift than the darkness beckoning outside of Fallen London. Chatziioannou


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

9. Splatoon

Nintendo is about selling fun, first and foremost. The studio’s games are typically bright, and colorful, and full of imaginative protagonists who wouldn’t be out of place in children’s animation. No one could have predicted that 2015’s best multiplayer shooter would exchange the gruff masculine archetypes and bleak settings of the stagnating Call of Duty and Battlefield games for adorable half-squid, half-human children, armed with paint guns instead of the latest military weaponry. Splatoon is both a stylistic and mechanical delight, with its gorgeous glossy visuals complementing its clever objective-based gameplay. Two different-colored teams of Inklings battle across brightly colored cities, harbors, and skate parks for supremacy, spraying and rolling paint across the levels to so as to decorate the majority of the setting with their signature color. Beneath this simple and accessible veneer hides surprising depth, complexity, and strategy: customizable clothing and weapons are earned across matches, the former transforming characters’ abilities with bonuses and modifiers, and the latter opening up the gameplay with a range of paint-inspired artillery that build on standard shooter firearms with sprinklers, ink-filled waterbombs, and oversized paint rollers. These unique armaments work hand in hand with the Wii U’s touchpad, combining intuitive motion controls with a top-down map of the action where players can plan their next movements and quickly teleport to their teammates, never leaving the action. Aston

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

8. Her Story

It’s still a mystery how the industry got it into its head that 2015 was the year full-motion video needed to make a comeback, but regardless, this year’s Guitar Hero and Need for Speed reboots decided to make a go of it, with mixed results at best. Her Story, on the other hand, was the only game to show there’s still life in the format yet, and do so with a seemingly effortless sense of purpose and direction. You’re given a police database, the knowledge that a man has been murdered, and the fact that the enigmatic woman whose file you’re perusing is the prime suspect. Whether she did it or not fades into the background fast as player curiosity leads to one video snippet after another unearthing something new and bewildering about this woman’s life. The compelling search for truth has a multitude of twists and turns, leading to an understated but powerful fact at its end. Even then, questions and possibilities remain, and the truth is entirely in the hands of the player. Held aloft by an utterly fearless performance by Viva Siefert, Her Story ends up being one of the most compelling interactive character studies ever created. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

7. Fallout 4

Taken at face value, Fallout 4 is a somber meditation on family and the way in which that informs what exactly “the greater good” is. But the game transcends that, mainly because it doesn’t force players to take it at face value. From the horrifying disfigurements that can come out of the standard character creation, to the lifestyle choices made by creative players as they explore the post-apocalyptic Commonwealth, nothing demands that players ever follow up on the built-in revenge narrative. Instead, they may find themselves repairing the damaged robots in the General Atomics Galleria—or indulging that corruption by humoring their violent attempts to provide their services. There’s a quest chain involving the Silver Shroud costume found in Hubris Comics, but players can choose to be their own kind of vigilante instead—or director, fooling around with the film studio’s controls. The silly, experimental freedom afforded to players captures the insanity of living in a post-apocalyptic world far better than the linearity of Mad Max, especially once the ability to fashion one’s own ramshackle shelters is unlocked. That, far more than any rudimentary RPG-based stat-builds is what makes Fallout S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Riccio


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

6. The Talos Principle

In The Talos Principle, a kind of Garden of Eden story, writers Jonas Kyratzes and Tom Jubert articulate the conflict between skepticism and the order of God. This juxtaposition comes in the context of a series of puzzles, implying that human and deity have a natural interest in making sense out of chaos. The religious reference doesn’t moralize about sin or cater to secularist values, instead implying that inquisitiveness mechanically binds humanity to a common fate. This conflicted but life-affirming perspective trumps the adolescent nihilism that oversimplifies player choice as an illusion. Even if the philosophical angle in The Talos Principle didn’t exist, the game would still register as outstanding. The world design allows you to bounce between puzzles while also requiring a certain degree of completion to try higher challenges. Developer Croteam’s gradual integration of several puzzle types is as accessible as it is brain-twisting. If nothing else, The Talos Principle celebrates its genre with shrewdness. Pressgrove


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

5. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, you’re the villain. In fact, you’re every villain. You wage a war you believe in, against an enemy who stands for everything you despise, who’s wronged you in the past, and against whom vengeance must be wrought. You will become an evil brand, like Spectre or Weyland Yutani or the Umbrella Corporation, and build an enormous base of operations to be filled with soldiers fighting for your cause. Just how do villains amass armies of individuals with which to do their bidding, the kinds of individuals you kill by the dozen without a care in other games? By tranquilizing enemies on the battlefield and recruiting them instead of killing them, smartly subverting shooter-game convention as part of this game’s espionage action. For the first time in the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima’s complicated narrative takes a backseat to gameplay, which moves effortlessly between third-person stealth action in open-world theaters of war and a deep, addictive villain simulator. You control the expansion of your base and the role each soldier plays as the territory you conquer expands, and wage war on others who might attempt the same—while taking your soldiers on missions across the world, in settings that are gorgeously detailed and full of unique, varied, addictive, blood-pumping thrills. Aston

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

4. Bloodborne

Though always a shining example of artistry, level design, and tiny, beautiful, emergent moments of story waiting to be found out in the world, FromSoftware’s Souls series remains better known to most for its unforgiving difficulty than its accomplishments in world building. Bloodborne is an earnest, powerful attempt to change that. The essence of the series remains, with its deliberate (albeit slightly faster) approach to combat, brilliantly labyrinthine stages, and crowd-sourced help or hindrance composing the core of the experience. This time, however, the ruined, diseased world of Yharnam, the increasing psychotic delirium of its people, and the incredible fever-dream terrors around its every corner cannot be ignored. This is Lovecraft by way of old-school Cronenbergian body horror, a place that will consistently, effectively distress and disturb with just as equal measure as it will consistently and effectively kill you. Yharnam is a place where you can witness every friend and enemy desperately praying to God, and the game takes a vicious glee in pointing out that this deity is on the wrong side. The term “survival horror” will never be more accurate for another game than it is for Bloodborne. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

3. Batman: Arkham Knight

There have been plenty of stories showing what might happen the day the Batman reaches his expiration date, be it by hanging up his cape and cowl or by his own messy death. What few stories deep-dive into, save for Batman: Arkham Knight, is the character’s mortality. The fundamentals of playing as the Batman remain steadfast throughout the game, with winged flight and fluid, hard-hitting combat now joining actual detective work for once, but being the Batman has an unexpected, harrowing urgency here. Taking down all of Gotham’s worst enemies in one night is the last gift the Batman can give to his city before he fades into nothing; all the while, the taunting, unrelenting specter of the Joker takes him through all of his sins and failures. The bravery of being the Bat, as the commercials consistently urged, isn’t in saving the day from the rogue’s gallery for the thousandth time, but in moving forward and saving the day, knowing for an absolute fact that, one way or another, failure is certain. In Arkham Knight, the Batman truly becomes a legend, simply by the sheer force of will it takes to take a superhero’s worst hits and keep pushing forward. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

2. Until Dawn

I was devastated when, near the end of Until Dawn, I lost Sam. The refreshingly level-headed young woman provided a much-needed moral and emotional counterweight to the constant bickering and scheming by the rest of the gang blockaded in the game’s besieged mountain lodge. Yet, going back for another crack at saving her was never an option. For all of the trite, unsophisticated mechanics—a simplistic QTE here, a binary branching path there—forced by Supermassive upon their teen slasher in an obvious effort to keep fingers as busy as eyes and ears, their one crucial decision is both brave and brilliantly effective: refusing the player’s prerogative to a second attempt. Ever so often, it’s the cheapness of the reload that lowers the stakes and kills off immersion, especially in more narrative-driven games. Until Dawn works as effectively as a Scream marathon not because of its jump scares; these just punctuate the constantly rising tension produced by the awareness that a momentary lapse of concentration, a single mispress (your lapse, your mispress) can unceremoniously, and irreversibly, terminate a character you’ve grown fond of. It also serves as a reality check to horror fans blaming the body count on the mind-boggling stupidity of implausible characters. The blood on your thumbs means you’ll never be as haughty shouting advice to panicky teenagers at the screen again. Chatziioannou


The 25 Best Video Games of 2015

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The biggest issue with open-world games is that they so often end up feeling empty, or populated with repetitive filler quests in order to give a sense of depth. Part of the magic in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is that it doesn’t waste an inch of its territory. That keep in the distance that’s fallen into disrepair? Chances are it’s housing a terrible secret, or, at worst, a hidden cache of treasure. That’s no mistake either. Whereas some games put the emphasis on discovering new and ever-more-powerful loot, Wild Hunt is too focused to be distracted by shiny objects. Its best content is in the narrative, and there’s arguably a greater variety of monster-hunting quests than weapons to collect. Simply put, there’s a richness to the folklore- or fairy-tale-inspired monster hunts—a house undone by tragedy and betrayal, a vengeful wrath summoned up by injustice—that compels players to scout out every inch of the game’s territory (as if the poetry of a moonlit copse or the sunset from a mountainside vistas wasn’t already enough). The beauty of the game is tempered by the ugliness of the monsters (this sometimes refers to the acts of deplorable humans), just as the fantasy setting is given a solid foundation thanks to political machinations that would make Game of Thrones proud. Wild Hunt, then, feels far more real and important than its individual parts. Whereas other titles may captivate or spellbind an audience for a few hours, this game’s mature narrative manages the singular feat of keeping players invested for nearly 100 hours. Riccio

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