2017 | The Bonus World

Video games, lets talk about em. The year has come to end and it’s about time for me to share my thoughts on the ones I played. 2017 has been a hell of a year, so lets dive right in.

Personally, the game that has endured through 2017 and has been a calming respite remains to be Cities: Skylines. There’s something nice and relaxing about building a new city from the ground up and swearing that this time, there will be no traffic jams. With the addition of some great mods and add-ons that allow me to get more granular than before, I’m continuing to find joy in watching my little hamlet transform into the next Times Square, even if I never play it right.

Alongside of Cities: Skylines, I’ve also been able to return to Astroneer from time to time and see it progressing quite nicely. There’s been noticeable performance enhancements and new feature drops that have made it a delight to return to. As well as that, my favorite game of last year, Hitman, continues to be as fun as ever especially since giving me the ability to attempt the Elusive Targets I’d missed, once more.

Swing and a Miss

It’s probably obvious, but one of the biggest flops of the year in my eyes had to be Mass Effect Andromeda. Right from when EA and Bioware pitched the premise of the game I recall feeling the slightest tinge of skepticism. A story that ran parallel to the events of the original trilogy but also made sure to remove the possibility of ever seeing any familiar characters was enough of a bummer until the game came out. It was so boring and uneventful. Every aspect of Andromeda seemed to be an artists interpenetration of what made Mass Effect great without ever understanding the reasons behind its success. “We gave them aliens to bone, put that shitty car back in, and let them explore the planets that have nothing interesting on them. What more could they want?!” Mass Effect Andromeda was such a damn bummer.

I Think Something is Wrong With Me

I feel so strange. Even now if you were to tell me that I could fight robot-dinosaurs in a post apocalyptic setting with a bunch of science-fictiony intrigue sprinkled on there for good measure, I’d justifiably lose my mind. So then why didn’t Horizon Zero Dawn do anything for me? Everything about that game was wonderful. It looked amazing, it was fun to play and also there were freaking robot-dinosaurs to kill. Many would attribute bouncing off of Horizon due to The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of The Wild releasing 3 days later. But even before that, from the moment they let me loose in the open world, I just had no desire to explore or learn about these characters. I think I wanted to learn more about the fall of modern civilization and where the robots came from a lot sooner than the game wanted to tell me about it. I still don’t know how that game wraps up. Maybe I’ll give it a go in 2018, but who knows.

Along those lines, the game people kept telling me about was NieR: Automata. I was so intrigued by what I had heard about this game that I was desperate to try it. I was told that I needed to beat it a third time to really some crazy shit. But after the first time around I had no interest in forcing my way through it several more times. Another game that I really wanted to like was Absolver. I wrote a piece about my feelings about the difficulty and how it failed to resonate with me, but the quick and dirty version is that I never felt like I was getting better, I only felt like I got lucky.

Bring Your Friends

Some people are an army of one, others like myself are very much not. That’s why the only way I’ve played PLAYERUNKNOWN’s Battlegrounds has been with my friends. We’ve even streamed a whole bunch of it because we play it that much. From defeating another squad who thought they were alone, to flipping just about every vehicle we ever touched, and of course getting that chicken dinner together, PUBG is packed with reasons why it’s the best game I’ve played with friends all year.

But where PUBG is very tactical and requires a ton of coordination, sometimes you just need pure chaos to have fun. Stick Fight and Gang Beasts are two games that released this year that exemplify that mentality. They’re both janky and glitchy enough to where the physics themselves become a new character you’ll have to contend with. But it’s all fun and lighthearted which makes them a blast to play when you’ve got a couple of friends around.

Game of the Year

This year, before most of the biggest titles came out, a little game called Night in the Woods released on the PC and PS4. Night in the Woods is a game that resonated with me on a fundamental level and mirrored a lot of my experiences in life. It told a story that struck me on an emotional level while also having an awesome sense of humor and painfully charming aesthetic. I still have trouble expressing every reason why Night in the Woods was so wonderful in my eyes. Sometimes a game just hits you the right way, and that’s what happened here. It’s the game I’ve thought about most this year and have replayed twice already. Night in the Woods is easily one of my favorite games. Click here for a more complete version of my thoughts.

A close second this year, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is perhaps the most unsurprising entry in this list. I won’t beat a dead horse here, we all know why Breath of the Wild is on so many GOTY lists. It’s an achievement in a systems-driven, open world game. It’s the epitome of “you see that? You can go there.” But the best part about that, is there’s always something to do when you get “there.” It’s truly a phenomenal game and what’s even more impressive is that it made me love a Zelda game the way no other entry in the franchise has.

Where Night in the Woods and Zelda were locked in for a long time, this third entry took me a lot of time to decide on. While I have plenty of great things to say about PUBG and why it’s one of my favorite games this year, I have to give the edge to Super Mario Odyssey. Mario Odyssey isn’t a perfect game, but it’s just so damn charming. In a year where you could look around and have found plenty of reasons to be scared upset or angry, Odyssey was just this beacon of color and positivity that I needed.

Lastly, I’d like to just add one more thing.

2017 has, for lack of a better term, been an interesting year. The games were (mostly) good while a lot of things outside of the industry maybe weren’t as great. With that in mind I’d like to thank everyone for watching our videos and reading the occasional features we put up. You have no idea how much your support means to us.

I hope that 2018 is a better year… like, in general. So Happy New Year everyone. Be good to each other.

Note from the editor: Our friend Sam from As I Play Dying was kind enough to write a piece about his favorite game of the year. So a big thanks to him.

Greetings, Bonus Worlders; it’s Sam from Bonus World subsidiary “As I Play Dying.” I’m overwhelmingly pleased to see our channel absorbed into the all-consuming singularity of Bonus World Industries, LLC, TMI, TLC, OMG.

Our dear, bearded friend, Ari, asked us to write a bit about the great games we’ve been playing in 2017 (and a bit about the shitty ones too). I was delighted to participate. As I sat down to bang out some insightful criticism of this year’s roster, however, I ran into a complication.

I have played exactly four games released in 2017. Four. Like, one hand’s worth, thumb notwithstanding.

So, unfortunately for you and for Ari, instead of adhering to the appropriate format, I’m instead going to give you the lowdown on what I played this year–all of which has been interesting and fun in different ways.

#1: PYRE
Originally, this article was supposed to start with a Game of the Year selection: and, if I were still enough of a gamer to populate the article, Pyre would be my choice, hands down. The third release from San Francisco-based developer Supergiant Games, Pyre is somewhere between “a party-based RPG in which you lead a band of exiles to freedom through an ancient competition spread across a vast, mystical purgatory,” and a “fantasy basketball simulator.”

If I had heard “fantasy basketball simulator” (or FBS, as the genre has become known) before I purchased the game, I might have skipped it entirely; I don’t like sports in life or in video games, no matter how fantastical their setting. However, in addition to being the most groundbreaking FBS of 2017, Pyre is also an engaging narrative, set in an engrossing fantasy world and full of enchanting characters.

I’ll point this out up front: you’re gonna notice a theme in the games I’ve chosen to play this year. They’re all very focused on their stories and characters more than any sort of revolutionary gameplay features, graphics, or other such things. I’m more into fluff than crunch. Bearing that in mind, from its opening screen, Pyre progresses like a novel that you can’t put down. The game opens on the discovery of the player character, known only as the Reader, by three wandering, robed companions. All of you have been cast out of your native society to an inescapable wasteland known as The Downside: or, at least, inescapable by any means but one. The victor in a series of sacred challenges known as the Rites may be able to restore their freedom and return in glory to their homeland, their sins absolved.

As Pyre progresses, you begin to uncover deeper and deeper layers and discoveries about the world you’ve left, the world you inhabit, and the people with whom you share it. The game’s story unfolds at a wonderful pace, balancing the ongoing preparation for and travel to and from the Rites with the mounting tension of an imminent challenge against a new Triumvirate–another team of exiles equally bent on earning their freedom. And, by the time you reach its final moments, the game’s story will take you and your friends in the Downside in directions you couldn’t possibly have predicted, and will face you with choices that feel heavy. I reloaded previous saves on more than one occasion to undo a decision that I couldn’t bear to live with.

Pyre doesn’t punish you for your choices, though; indeed, by the developers’ own admission, the game’s first inspiration was to explore the consequences of defeat and the process of rallying after misfortune. Pyre’s story is actually built to progress regardless of your performance. Whether you are the most amazing Reader to ever walk the Downside, or you can’t tell your opponent’s pyre from your own sphincter, life will go on and the story will continue. For this reason, Pyre is one of the most engrossing stories I’ve ever played, even outside 2017.

Besides its exemplary narrative quality, the care and passion of Supergiant comes through in every other aspect of the game experience: Darren Korb has devised another stylish soundtrack full of unique charm and fascinating sounds; Logan Cunningham delivers another amazing performance as the disembodied voice guiding you, sometimes forcefully, across the Downside; and Jen Zee’s vibrant artwork brings the whole world to life. The gameplay is, honestly, very challenging at times, but even in its most infuriating moments did not feel cheap or broken, and overcoming a challenger with a flawless play is deeply satisfying. Matches can become edge-of-your-seat slugfests as you weave around your opponents to set up the field to score. And aside from the core gameplay, Supergiant throws in tons of secondary content to make their world feel alive and fun to experience, including an in-world soundtrack in the form of a traveling minstrel and a practice arena that can raise your characters’ abilities. The player is guided through the considerable world lore via an intuitive hyperlink system embedded in dialogue; and, as a personal aside, Supergiant gets major bonus points for the best method of dealing with player-character gender that I’ve encountered.

Every element of Pyre works so well as part of the whole. The game is exceptional. I cornered Greg Kasavin, Supergiant’s writer and designer, at PAX 2017 to thank him for giving me such a great experience, and I’m terrified of speaking to people. I can’t recommend the game highly enough to anyone who wants to experience an amazing story in a beautiful world.

The Bonus World

Tag Archives: 2017

Ari’s Game of the Year List [2017]

Sam’s Game of the Year [2017]