My Top 100 Video Games (6 – 10)
I hit a video game milestone recently: I have beaten 100 games! I thought it would be fun to rank all 100 of the games in a series of videos. Here’s the nineteenth video, ranking games 6 – 10.
This is episode 19 of 20 in my top 100 Videogame series. Check out the full Top 100 Video Games playlist for a bit more about the rest of the videos, specifically check out video #1 to learn about the qualifications for this top 100 list, the main qualification being that I must have beaten the game for it to make this list.
10. God of War was developed by Sony’s Santa Monica Studio and was released in 2018. I played a lot of the first God of War game on the Playstation 2. Well, better stated, I watched my roommate in college play a lot of the first God of War game. It wasn’t exactly my type of game. It felt unbalanced. Much of the game would allow button mashing, but at some points the combat turned quick into something that demanded precision. Then there’d be quicktime events that further pulled the game back into easy territory. Then the difficultly pendulum would swing wildly in the opposite direction again. I recognized this is a really great game, but I didn’t have the skill nor the patience for it. Subsequent God of War games didn’t even enter my radar. So when the 2018 reboot of the series was first announced, I was luke-warm on it.
But the marketing points for the game really sold me on it. The game would be more story-focused. The game would follow a much more emotionally nuanced Kratos, foregoing the hot-headed, vengeance-fueled Kratos of the previous games. Also, this new game would heavily feature Kratos’ son Atreus. Many of the series’ most dedicated fans were put off by this apparent full turn in direction. I, however, was very interested.
The game turned out to be absolutely amazing. The game looks fantastic. The story is, well, okay. More on that later. But the visual direction is quite amazing. Director Cory Barlog was finally, with this God of War game, able to realize his dream of creating an entire game without jump-cuts or loading screens. Load zones here are cleverly masked by narrow corridors that force the player to slow down as the forthcoming area loads. Stylish camera pans move seamlessly from the player-controlled action to the scripted story elements. And this technique actually works well with the game’s themes of heredity. The player is living the the hour-by-hour lives of these characters as the characters themselves are. Given how much this game focuses on Atreus’ growth during a snapshot of pre-adolescence, and in turn Kratos’ own growth as a father, the single shot technique makes us, the player, feel like we’re witnessing every one of Atreus’ boundary testing moments along with every one of the father-son arguments that certainly define this age and relationship for many fathers and sons.
But the story outside the father-son relationship, yeah, it’s not super great. This part of the story is based on Norse mythology, which I don’t know enough about to tell you how faithful God of War is to those stories, but what’s presented here seems to fall flat at times. Late in the game Mimir, a disembodied yet very alive, and very funny, head that you carry around your waist during much of the remaining game, says “magic is powerful, but its rules are slippery and elusive.” This is how I view the overall narrative of God of War. It’s held together by coincidence with cracks that are spackled by Mimir’s humor. A spoonful of sugary laughter helps the story go down, I suppose. Now, I admit, I might be ignorant to many of the Norse deep cuts that make the narrative whole, but if a story requires remembering minor details then it’s not a super accessible story and therefore could divide the audience. The story is interesting, sure. Fun, even. But not well-constructed. But ignore all that, because the game is absolutely fantastic! The emotion is real. The gameplay is amazing. The visual presentation is unmatched.
Question for the comments: Are previous God of War games worth going back to?
9. LIMBO was developed by Playdead and was originally released in July 2010.
At its heart, LIMBO is a simple, short, puzzle platformer. And all the elements that make a great puzzle platformer are here. Puzzles and platforming, of course, but also excellent control, a fair difficulty curve, perfect level design, and a protagonist that the player can connect with in some way. In this case, a human child, and I’m assuming most of you watching this were at one point a human child. So, you’re connected with this game.
Going into LIMBO, all we as players know is that we take on the role of a young boy who is rescuing his sister. Other than that, the story of LIMBO is vague, and has therefore generated a ton of player theories ranging from the main character having fallen from a treehouse to the main character having been killed in a car accident. Every theory involves death, by the way. The developer encourages the non-specific intent of the story by refusing to answer any questions about it.
First, a bit about the title. As the title is a single word, it removes any additional contextual help for determining an absolute theme–it’s not called “a child’s limbo.” It’s not called “Limbo Run.” It’s not giving us a small hint like calling it “The Limbo”–. Rather, the term itself introduces the player to the idea of being “in limbo.” Casually speaking, being in limbo indicates a state of directionlessness, or more appropriately in the case of the game, an inability to either progress or regress, or rather perhaps the inability to know if you are progressing or regressing. You’re stagnant. From a religious context, Catholicism specifically, Limbo refers to an afterlife state meant for unbaptized souls. The souls aren’t allowed into Heaven but also aren’t damned to Hell.
I think the game honors both the religious and the causal meaning of the term. Are you dead and trying to escape Limbo? Maybe. You play as a child protagonist, which is really the only protagonist that would have worked with LIMBO. The implied innocence of a child further conceals any concept of right and wrong, of black and white. Therefore, is the protagonist just as unsure about his progression as you, the player, are?
The most visually striking aspect of LIMBO is its monochromatic color use? Grey conveys a sense of emotional fluidity, happy to sad, angry to joyful. If white represents hope and black represents defeat, then the greys in between represent various states of indirection and confusion. And that’s what you are when playing LIMBO. Confused and left without direction.
Color’s effect on emotion seems like an inexact science. Earlier I stated that grey conveys a sense of emotional fluidity. But that hasn’t always been the case. Historically, grayscale was used in things like photography and television simply because it was the only thing available and later because it was cheaper to produce than color. Today, grayscale is an artistic decision, and like with any artistic decision the artist chooses a specific presentation based on an intended reaction. That reaction can be a marketing one, one driven by the need to highlight certain details of the art, but it can also be, as in LIMBO’s case, an emotional one.
Question for the comments: Any other great monochromatic games?
8. INSIDE was developed by Playdead and was originally released in June 2016. Inside begins immediately, without any narrative exposition to orient the player. So the player is primed to immediately start hunting the gameworld for contextual clues about the narrative. But quickly the game introduces a stealth element which eases the player into accepting the game’s mystery. Now we’re at the mercy of it, and perhaps not necessarily charged with solving it. And the game developers are smart storytellers because they put us in the body of a child, and as you learned in the previous entry on this list a child protagonist implies innocence, so the world by default is mysterious.
So we, as players, adopt that innocence and immediately begin asking questions. Why are we hiding? Who are those guys that are trying to kill us? Why are these chicks following me? What’s up with those weird vapid people? We’re kept invested not only by these questions but also by the game’s design. The stealth elements transition to swimming, then to puzzles, then new enemy types, then more swimming but upside down this time, and eventually you become a blob with a movement set that’s entirely different from your child character movement set.
As a player you are 100% on board with the mysterious narrative every step of the way. This is great, but at some point, the game becomes an allegory for insemination and the resulting pregnancy. At least that’s my interpretation. Stay with me here. Give me a chance to convince you. There’s one point, just before the final escape into freedom, where your character exits a room which seems to be sealed by a vaginal opening. I know you are thinking that I’m looking too deep into this, but just the fact that this soft, curved element stands out against the rest of the game world’s hard-edged metal services begs the player to look a bit deeper.
Don’t believe me? Grant me a moment to highlight some specific parts of the game that lead me to believe that the game is inspired by insemination and pregnancy:
- In multiple places throughout the game, there are herds, with a single individual leading a group of others in a common direction. To me, and my gross brain, this seems to be an allusion to groups of sperm all moving in the same direction. Baby chicks follow you. Fish follow you. People follow you. And in all of these situations, only one member of the group moves on to the next phase of life.
- At one point your character falls into a pool of fluid and is only able to breathe via the help of a very umbilical-cord looking device. It’s even attached to his midsection.
- There’s a few rooms where you swim through gravity-defying water, as though your entire world is upside down. At between 30-32 weeks of pregnancy, most human babies flip head down and bottom up, becoming upside down in the womb surrounded by amniotic fluid.
- And then there’s this monstrosity, called The Huddle, a mass of organic, body-shaped pieces that becomes the playable character for a short time.
- And just before The Huddle escapes, the player briefly occupies a room unlike any other in the game, a cylindrical shaped, soft, padded room with a crevice style opening.
- And if all that wasn’t enough, Playdead even teamed up with RealDoll to create a very, um, distinct collector’s edition, complete with a strange statue, with a strange hole for the stand. Who is RealDoll? They are a company that makes lifelike, um, companion dolls, for companioning.
Is INSIDE trying for a specific message, something about herd mentality and office work, as many of the prevailing themes discussed online would indicate? I don’t think so. I don’t believe the developers are hiding a deep message. I think they just wanted to make a cool puzzle platformer and they used the body, specifically its INSIDE, as a blueprint.
Question for the comments: What games take place inside a human body?
7. Super Metroid was developed by Nintendo and originally released in March 1994. So many exploration-focused platformer games that I and many other people love were perfected with Super Metroid. The metroidvania genre was less than a decade old at the time of Super Metroid’s release, but quite honestly I’m not sure that it’s ever delivered a game as great. There are a lot of close ones, for sure, but Super Metroid is still the clear leader.
Though the game was released in 1994, it holds up like a game that was released today. I replay it every few years with the most recent playthrough just last year, so I’m not operating with nostalgia colored glasses on. The music remains fantastic. The controls are almost perfect, with the glaring exceptions being the grappling hook and the wall jumping mechanics. Those could use some polish. And the game simply feels great.
Super Metroid exemplifies the concept of game feel. Think of game feel as virtual sensation, so when you feel something as you’re playing a game, but the game isn’t actually doing those things to you that’s called game feel. It’s a hard concept to define by any other way than example, so let me give you a few. In the original Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System, when you jump on a Goomba there’s a tiny thing that happens that a lot of players probably don’t consciously pick up on, but is undeniably an amazing example of game feel. When you stomp on a Goomba, the Goomba doesn’t immediately, instantly disappear nor does your character immediately just drop to the ground through the Goomba as though the enemy was invisible. The Goomba instead flattens to a few pixels tall, just enough to allow the defeated enemy to maintain a visual sense of mass. Additionally, the player character reacts to the mass by bouncing slightly off of it. Little things like this go a long way to immerse the player in the game world, and Super Metroid is packed full of them. When the charge beam fires, there’s a bass to the sound that helps convey the sense of kickback while trying to control a giant weapon. When the ice beam fires, the targeted enemy crystallizes to the sound of… I can only describe it as a crystalizing-type sound. That’s how perfect the sound is. When the player character moves through a wet environment, moisture from the ground latches onto Samus’ feet to convey the sense that you’re stomping through a puddle.
I love that intricate 2d platformers are still such a popular genre. With games like Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, the SteamWorld Dig games, and so many more, metroidvania lovers like myself are living in a wonderful time. If you haven’t played Super Metroid yet, you owe it to yourself to do so.
Question for the comments: Have you read my Essay about Metroid? You should. Check out “Shoot, Jump, Run: Born into Metroid and Cocaine.”
6. Marvel’s Spider-Man was developed by Insomniac Games and was released in September 2018. You know what, I made a video about this game already that I really, really like and only 100 people have seen it (or me and my cat, 50 times each). It’s really good, so I’m just going to link that below.
Question for the comments: Who’s ready to rap battle?
