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RPS Time Capsule: the games worth saving from 2015We list our favourite games from 2015, and why they deserve to be preserved above everything else
We list our favourite games from 2015, and why they deserve to be preserved above everything else
PC Game Music Quiz | Can You Guess PC Classics From The Music?Watch on YouTube
PC Game Music Quiz | Can You Guess PC Classics From The Music?
Rocket League
Ollie:Rocket Leagueis still the finest competitive game ever made. From a spectator’s point of view, it’s perfect. There are no huge on-boarding videos, you don’t need someone at your shoulder explaining everything that’s happening on-screen. All you need is four words - “it’s football with cars” - and you’re ready to sit back and enjoy some spectacular acrobatic plays.
Grand Theft Auto V
Hayden:Sometimes I think I don’t likeGTA V, but I’d probably feel the same way about anything after playing it on and off again for almost 10 years. That’s a long time, but the memory of my initial playthrough hasn’t faded. I still remember waking up early to complete the Jewellery Store Heist before school, like a goblin craving some chaos before being thrown into the pits of Catholic education. Sublime.
Of course, GTA V is a two-part package, and GTA Online has everything you could ask for. It’s a playground filled with things to do, and me and my pals had a great time getting lost in its many myths. Between hunting for the ghost of Mount Gordo, documenting alien murals around Mt Chiliad and more, GTA Online renewed that buzz we had while hunting for the mythical Ratman in GTA IV, and it made for some very fond memories.
80 Days
Image credit:Inkle
It’s not just its tale of mischief and mayhem that makes 80 Days worth saving, though. Along the way, it also plots a course that elegantly traverses multiple genres, giving players an expertly guided tour of the visual novel, management-lite and point and click adventure game. Its 750,000 word script is an absolute marvel, evoking the kinds of impossible cities, bustling machines and wistful chance encounters that even some of the flashiestopen world gamesstill struggle to match. Sure you’ve got that 80 day deadline ticking away in the background, but hot damn if it still doesn’t make you choose between efficiency and the allure of just ‘one more day’. And that’s before we even get into the inventory Tetris of managing Fogg’s suitcase, and making sure he’s got his morning cuppa ready and waiting at the start of each day. In short, it continues to be one of, if not the best piece of interactive fiction around today, and that’s definitely worth saving over some dancing totem poles and a wispy forest sprite (sorry again, Ori and Kalimba, I love you really!).
Little Party
Alice0:Little Partyis one of my favourite short days. Your artsy daughter is holding an artsy sleepover with her artsy pals at your cute little home in the woods, and you’re there mumming about while they paint and compose and make games and such. It’s a lovely and gentle experience, pottering about, chatting with people and seeing what everyone’s up to, with a little tension running through the gaps in the story.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Image credit:CD Projekt Red
SOMA
Alice Bee:Soma– or, I suppose, SOMA – isn’t just my best game of 2015. I list it quite happily among my best games of all time. Frictional Games also brought you the series Amnesia, but I will always think of Soma as the real dark jewel of theirhorror gamescrown. It’s scarier, weirder, smarter in almost every way. Most games that call themselves “psychological horror” these days just mean “oooh, you’re having hallucinations” or “someone who used to live in this haunted house had a bad time and wrote a journal, which you will now gradually collect the pages of, detailing it all in increasingly poor handwriting.” Yawn-o-rama.
Undertale
Alice0:I like the skeleton.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
James:Let’s be honest, much ofMetal Gear Solid Vis a joke, and not the ha-ha kind. It’s actually missing those, abandoning the series’ endearing oddness in favour of a dour attempt at a conventional thriller tone, and the final hours – comprised mainly of recycled missions on higher difficulty settings – collectively form the worst example of bodge-jobbing I’ve ever seen in a creative work.
Alice0:It’s amazing how good this game is despite so much being so bad.
Dying Light
Image credit:Techland
CJ:I always feel slightly embarrassed for likingDead Islandso much. Techland’s first zombie thwack ‘em up really grabbed me back in 2011 and 2012, despite my desperate, flailing attempts to bat its legions of undead tourists away. WhenDying Lightshowed its half-chewed mush a few years later, the cycle of zombie apocalypses dragged me right back in again.
There’s a few differences between Dying Light and Dead Island, mind, and I wasn’t immediately chuffed about all of them. Dead Island’s bizarre, unwieldy, hand-waving melee attacks were one of my favourite parts of that game, because they’re so frantic when you’re fending off the zombs. While Dying Light dropped that particular electrified crowbar, Techland made the possibly genius decision to chuck parkour in there instead. And it just sings. Techland kept throwing more stuff on the Dying Light pile for years after the game was released, too, with expansion pack The Following’s dune buggies being a notable boon. I’m not sure anything else can top the thrill of leaping between post-apocalyptic Harran’s buildings in the dark while freaky superhuman night-time infected are roaring for your flesh, though.
Life Is Strange
Image credit:Square Enix
Rebecca:Not long after I first playedLife Is Strange, I was walking across campus when I heard a lad behind me shout “Max!” and I instinctively turned around to respond. I think that was the point where I realised quite how much I’d come to identify with this game and its characters.
Cities: Skylines
Image credit:Paradox Interactive
That is, until Colossal Order releasedCities: Skylinesin 2015. It was unbelievable! Here was the next-generation SimCity we’d all been waiting for, complete with all the features and quality of life improvements fans expected from a project like this. The vanilla version of Skylines felt complete straight out of the gate, providing a deep and satisfying simulation that appealed to hardcore fans of the genre and casual players alike. Did you want to micro-manage traffic flow? Build an aesthetically pleasing metropolis? Create custom buildings - and custom features! - before sharing them via the steam workshop? Cities: Skylines catered for it all. I think it says a lot that the game is still receiving expansion packs as recently as this month. Cities: Skylines is the best citybuilding gameever made. An absolute triumph.
