The PS4K (NEO): Some Notes

Here are some really quick notes based on the new technical data on a supposed PS4K mid-gen refresh that reworks the SoC (and possibly the RAM but I kinda guess that even the same mainboard design and chips they're currently using can probably clock that fast once the SoC's memory controller is poked a bit). I may come back and rewrite this properly but for some off-the-cuff notes, I'll share what I'd already noted on Twitter.

Ye, the free RAM upgrade (seriously, try to find chips that can't do 7GHz out of the box and AMD must have gotten their controller down by now even if that's something they usually go wide on vs nVidia's narrow bus with high frequency) - 224GB/s is the normal figure for 7GHz so maybe they're still not quite up there with the controller but I think that's more likely than making a wider bus. That makes my list as "most current PS4 are possibly one small tweak from being able to be overclocked like that anyway". Same with 911MHz vs 800: ye, most of the chips probably already get made that can hit that. Even the Jaguar cores moving from 1.6GHz to 2.1: not out of the question and certainly what a chip 3 years more mature could probably get away with under the same Voltage lines (ie power constraints: see GTX 950s that released as 90W parts but now are sold as 75W so no PCI-E power connectors required).

So the actual big news is double the GCN blocks than the current PS4. That makes sense for making it so that games can look visibly better on the new hardware and so bother to make this a second unit with software set to work on it slightly differently than the PS4. If you're building a 4K media box (and Sony have to, they make movies and even kinda have that TV division that's been 15 years without making a profit, right?) then that's not a terrible idea. If they're shrinking to 14nm then that's basically totally fine and easy to budget into a reasonably priced SoC at this stage. Hell, if you didn't double the GCN allocation then it'd look a lot like a CPU-underpowered version of next year's AMD APU (because that is getting AMD's next gen CPU cores: Zen rather than the mobile-focussed Jaguar tiny cores and has a modest amount of new GCN blocks).

As I said on that there Twitter: this isn't even that soon for a mid-generation upgrade. It's just last gen was a long one. UK window between xbox & 360 release was 1359 days. Today is the 872th day of PS4. A year from now: 1237 days into the PS4's EU lifespan. If you're going to release a mid-gen upgrade this is when you need to be getting it ready for release otherwise you might as well wait for a PS5 and a full generation with no forcing devs to keep making a lower-end settings config to make sure it still runs on a PS4.

I played GTA V on the PS3 Slim. If that had been a totally solid fps rather than the sub-20 creaking mess that R* managed (because that was all those consoles could hope to deal with for that scope of game)? That sounds like it would be worth that PS3 Slim being $50 more expensive than it was to me. And that's speaking as someone who had to buy the Slim because my OG PS3 died (optical drive) outside of Sony's warranty. My 'new' 3DS doesn't get a lot of use but I'm really glad I've got a much stronger SoC in it than the device launched with, even if only a few games actually make good use of that. The 'new' bit of the price tag was small, the potential benefit from a much faster and slightly more expensive SoC being inside is large.

Will the PS4K mean some games are released that are fine on it and run like junk on the PS4? Definitely. Is that the fault of the PS4K: nope. Play Just Cause 3 or grab this week's release for £45 on PSN of Alekhine's Gun: we're already at the point where PS4 games can run horribly because that's not a cert fail and some devs just don't get to finish their games. Don't like it, don't buy them; but a higher tier just means some people will get to pay to avoid that bad experience, just as you can buy your way into 1080p60 for most games today if you're prepared to pay for a gaming PC.

The current PS4 is a 1080p console, call it the baseline (shader perf per pixel required). The GPU is 1.8TFLOPS to give a very rough "how big is the GPU" metric (as much of gaming is shader perf limited).
You can get a GTX 970 for not that much: 3.5TF (so 2x1080p).
Current premium PC is a 980Ti: 5.6TF (3x).
The new big Pascal is coming (we know what it can do): 10.6TF (6x1080p - beyond 4K with PS4 level image quality on a per-pixel basis)!
It can also do half-precision mode: up to 21.2TF (12x1080p) and that's going so far beyond 4K as to almost hit 8K!

The new PS4K specs would make it a 4.1TF GPU. So that's not only significantly more than the current design but also putting it between PC VR spec (970) and PC hardcore spec (980Ti) - a good place to be in today for a device that'll be running VR in some months and has a new generation of PC GPUs coming with those numbers that are horrifically large now they've finally gotten to die-shrink to 14/16nm after years stuck waiting for a process that could make commercial 300-600 mm^2 chips that large GPUs demand.

You could maybe get some 4K games out of it, in the same way that a few games on PS3 even got to 1080p via lower per-pixel quality. I think many games would prefer to render at 1440p or something and then scale for output and so give you better anti-aliasing. You can also up the level of detail stuff so that PS4K games were on par with a PC release. When my GTX 760 [2.3TF but dealing with 2GB of RAM that really puts pressure on the new engines] is rendering the Division with far less issues of draw in and shadow detail than the console version then the PS4K can definitely benefit from more perf and being able to really push out the LoD issues. Even when hooking it up to a 1080p TV and using a game with some really good anti-aliasing tech already.

As long as Sony force devs to have a decent config file that allows the games to run on the original PS4, I can only see this as a great step for games on consoles. Make it so we have a base game and a config file for each system. Now let future systems patch in their new config file and, assuming compat that I expect them to maintain between x86 and GCN-derived GPUs (or even just the Metal-like not-GL API that perf games code to), we get to a point where it's actually almost zero effort to release a PS5 where you just put in a PS4K disk or load the PSN download up and it renders in 4K native with greater LoD distances and so on. Because of course you can do that: PC gaming has been all about making games that allow the sliders to go to 11 and one day even budget systems can run them like that.

When I play PS2 games, I do it on a PC because almost all of them can be hacked to roughly run to 1080p or beyond with anti-aliasing etc. And those games aren't even aware of this. Much better than using the PS4 to play the exact same game. Consoles need to get better at that because we're already well into the territory where last gen games look ok when "ported" to next gen via nothing much more than LoD tweaks and resolution increases (if you're lucky, they rewrite the lighting code). Let's call it a living archive and give console games an even longer sales tail rather than allowing 1% of games to get a "HD remake" and everything else is left to die.

The Photography of Virtual Worlds

I'm assuming most people reading this are already aware of the various virtual photography communities. Dead End Thrills is probably the biggest.

This is something we've done forever on PC and now even consoles have dedicated space on the controller for a capture button (on top of the few games, often driving titles, that have put in an offline-render photo mode to really show off the art assets without the real-time rendering constraints). Hell, Firewatch even ties their virtual camera into a printing service, letting far more people realise they can print out their virtual photography because some of this stuff really does look good.

With VR about to arrive, people are about to really feel like they're present in the virtual environments we've been rendering for decades. The desire to take snapshots of places you're stood is only going to get stronger. Games built around photography are likely to bloom in the next decade, especially if they link the captures to a decent offline render pass so the files exported are the best quality the assets can be shown in. And not just games that add a camera as a proxy for a gun (for kids), adding jumps (for the more adult, horror games) or time constraints: those can also be fun games but I'm talking about photography as the act of having all the time you want to get the shot just right. The process of getting everything to be just how you want it at the instant of capture, moving to find the location that lines every elements just where you want it in the frame. I can even see a healthy market for big publishers reusing their AAA assets (every open world so far) in photography games.

An interesting things I noted while in the beta for The Division: even on tweaked medium settings picked to get to 60fps (because PvP promotes reaction times over nicer looking 30fps), even with a GPU I'm getting tired of waiting to replace (which is literally on the list as a minimum requirement for running the game), games with a decent anti-aliasing and lighting techniques can look pretty amazing. With only a few hours, a limited section of the map unlocked, and the constraint of primarily being there to shoot a gun (or be shot at), I still managed to get a few nice shots and can't wait to go back and take more. I just wish there was a button to hide my UI (and maybe even the protagonist) to do it.

Super. HOT. Super. HOT.

In medias res, the brilliantly white level starts with two bright-red, crystalline dudes in front of me, guns being brought to point at my face.

The guy on the right easily gets there first and a black bullet comes straight at me with a flowing red trail emerging behind it. Time creeps forward with the bullet slowed as if through treacle.

I lean to the left, trying to also look around slightly, causing time to speed up, and I feel the bullet brush past my ear. But I've now formulated a plan.

I reach forward for the black ashtray on the table in front of me and manage to throw it at the dude on the left before he manages to get a round off. It smashes into his face, stunning him and, far more importantly for my plan, causes him to let go of the shotgun's handle. Shards of black glass that used to be an ashtray will keep him busy for the moment and that moment is all I need.

The gun's forward momentum from being brought to bear on my head keeps it coming closer to me, close enough that I can reach out and grab it out of the air. Already with a slug in the chamber, the guy on the right can only wait for his next round to arrive in the barrel.

Aim, shoot. This time it is me creating red trails in the air.

The guy on the right tries to dodge but it's not enough. His head explodes into a thousand reflective fragments as the buckshot impacts.

Now I've got a choice to make as I wait for the next shell to load, hopefully to take out the guy on the left: how do I spend that fraction of a second? For a start, now the super-imminent danger is over, I need to look around and see what else is coming for me right now. Work out where I am, what happened before these gentlemen decided I needed to not be here, and make sure there aren't any more bullets already heading in my direction...

Super. HOT.

If You Don't Think You're Biased, You're Doomed

So I wrote a thing recently that's somewhat outside of the bounds of stuff I cover here but also thematically linked to a lot of how I apply my education in statistics, science, and engineering to wider issues and sanity-checking stuff that's more political, legal, and social than my day job typically involves.

If the worst thing that can happen to you is being called out, your unexamined biases mean you're pretty much the opposite of the Rationalist or "man of science" you perceive yourself to be. This will lead you down blind alleys, being highly selective in pruning your sources to fit a narrative you like but is fictitious. Then you'll have a very public meltdown defending the factually incorrect dribble you thought was a masterpiece of factual reporting. If you think you're white but totally not racist, cis but not transphobic, etc. you're setting yourself up for failure the moment it turns out you are partially the product of your environment. Read about exactly that happening.

The Fall and Rise of Tomb Raider

I've enjoyed the Tomb Raider series(s). I mean, I've enjoyed all four (five?) of the different series of games that are called that or offshoot from that original 1996 title.

The grid-based frustration of the early games, back when exploring Croft Manor on PC was part of the post-Quake explosion of 3D that eventually resulted in me saving for a (3Dfx Voodoo powered) Orchid Righteous 3D. That amazing moment where buying new hardware suddenly made a load of games I already had into completely new games, jumping forward a generation. After the 3rd game in as many years, I started to lose track and the reviews started to indicate the series was coasting into the drain. That grid-based movement system could only survive so long and when analogue sticks were the norm, it made very little sense (especially by 2003 for the 6th game in the series). Hell, I even went back to that first game when it came out on mobile the same year as Angel of Darkness (where the grid was a better match for the nGage's digital buttons than the PS2 evolution of the series).

Then the series was rebooted in 2006 with a trilogy of games that completely redefined how the input system worked. Rather than being forced to perfectly input what the level demanded, the system looked at what the user was pressing and then did the most sensible thing. Pointing in the vague direction of something catchable and pressing the jump button probably means the player wants to jump there. The reboot, Legend, was a great romp; the remake of the first game, Anniversary, reminded me of those hours spent in 1996 while feeling completely contemporary in 2007; but I started to feel fatigue at the greater focus on combat (rather than exploration, traversal, and working out puzzles), the slightly rough edges on intuiting what input was demanded, and the increasingly fantastical plot in Underworld. But this was also the time when Naughty Dog was starting to make an exploration/puzzle-light, combat-heavy (and unfortunately bullet-spongey), very cinematic push into the sub-genre with Uncharted. Underworld was the first Tomb Raider that had to compete with Nathan Drake and I preferred the WWII zombies to the Norse zombies.

So the AAA Tomb Raider games went dormant again in 2008. Nathan Drake was left to take control of that sub-genre and move it even further away from puzzles and towards combat. But Lara Croft emerged as a budget series that courted mobile. 2010 saw Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light emerge on consoles, PC, and mobile. A co-operative puzzle game with more of a challenge arena design than a linear progression, it managed to get a console sequel and spin off to a pure puzzle game on mobile, last year's rather enjoyable Lara Croft GO.

While that was happening, AAA Lara Croft came back for another reboot. A new origin story this time, rather than repeating the story first laid out in 1996. 2013's Tomb Raider would have made my list, if not for the fact I didn't get round to playing it until the start of 2014. It polished those controls (including removing suicide from most of the traversal controls, leaving it for the QTE moments), expanded the combat so periods of action actually felt good, and completely reimagined progression into a semi-open world. This was a series of areas in which you could really explore, with collectibles to encourage full discovery of every surface. The story was a lot more grounded, despite still engaging with fantastical elements (as Uncharted does), and everything was just the right side of the reboot scale to feel both fresh and familiar. A 1996 relic had been completely transformed into the new series. The only thing I really missed: it lost the tomb raiding. There were hardly any puzzles left, leaving the traversal to feed into the open area designs and upgrade paths that unlocked new paths as you came back to areas. It all worked to make a great game but I remarked at the time that this was the best Uncharted game ever made. Better combat, more open areas and backtracking to justify the traversal as more than busy-work in linear levels, and a great story: this was the natural evolution of Uncharted. But it had shed the puzzles and lack of combat focus that made Tomb Raider games distinct from what Naughty Dog makes.

Which brings us to Rise of the Tomb Raider, released on Xbox last year but just this week arriving on PC (and coming to PS4 at the end of the year due to Microsoft paying to give Uncharted 4 some breathing room - something I'm sure Sony are none too unhappy about).

The 7 optional tombs of the last game have been bulked out, both each being larger puzzles and including 9 of them; the combat feels a bit better but I couldn't narrow down why; and the traversal skills have been slightly refined on top of the already-great power curve. It's all rather minor tweaks rather than any radical departures but as the sequel to the reboot of both mechanics and story, this game was always going to feel incremental. It's not a knock against the game, which feels every bit as great to slowly unwrap as the last game.

The engine has been completely rebuilt, although a 360 port does exist to enforce some consideration for 2005-era silicon on the general design. Within those constraints, the game (and 2013's title was never bad looking on PC and did reasonably well as a 1080p port on the current console generation without much tweaking to that PC template) can occasionally look stunning and rarely less than competent under a range of lighting conditions.

The 2013 reboot managed a diversity of locations and conditions hard to believe could exist on a single small island (because they couldn't, welcome to suspension of disbelief), giving it a great visual range. Rise fails to quite live up to that standard and, while it is by no means just a game about the same looking ice and snow, this is disappointing. There is a brief intro chapter in the desert to remind you of the old jet-setting level design ethos the series once had and some short cinematics in a room of Croft Manor and a small apartment but this is another exploration of a single contiguous space. Just like in 2013, that means a few very large and non-linear levels, many more linear sections you pass through a few times to hoover up optional tasks or travelling back for story reasons, and some corridor sections that literally exist to allow narrative to play or provide a break from the action as you move between areas - single use traversal or combat puzzles. As you spend most of your time in the large areas with fast-travel available throughout, this may contribute to the lack of variety felt. The large areas are not all the same but not as different as in the last game.

Rise is mechanically solid. The combat is still good enough to feel like you're getting a change of pace when it arrives, and you can upgrade out both skills and weapons to tailor that experience. Range with a rifle or bow or focussing on throwable makeshift gear, all the way into a melee-focussed character - the options are there and you can expertly switch it up as your upgrade tree fills out. Stealth and using the traversal tools during combat is not the deepest experience but is enough to facilitate competent stealth play. While the last game was contemporary to the Last of Us, this one feels like it maybe references back to that range of combat experiences - although that could be more down to how similar they both played in 2013 so a 2016 sequel that refines either one would maybe look like it was moving towards the peak of the two. If you can't see 6 different objects (mainly bottles) to throw and distract an enemy near you, you're in an area where combat is impossible.

Traversal is still an almost Metroidvania-lite experience of slowly collecting all the tools needed to travel anywhere and travel quickly. This isn't a game focussed on combat everywhere (small patrols that repopulate areas after first cleared are trivialised by the mid-game combat upgrade curve so just become resource dispensers) and lots of the more open areas rely on traversal being diverse with the more linear stuff needing each tool to be fun to use. Rise stands up to this task just like the last game, although there is now even less focus on QTEs, almost completing the transition away from their heavy use in the 2006-era trilogy. But those few times when the controls don't read my desired input correctly and result in a needless death feel all the more frustrating today (especially when it is one jump that consistently misreads my intent until I realise what input combo is actually required or direction to request the jump in). This is not to say Rise is worse that earlier games; it is not, and the checkpointing means you will never lose a collectible and usually only go back seconds. But my standards are always rising and it feels like Tomb Raider is standing still on this. It's not yet to the point where I never look at the death screen and think "that's not what that input is requesting happens!"

So incredibly solid, a worthy successor to the last game, and something everyone should play if they got any enjoyment out of the 2013 reboot. But why don't I feel the same passion for this as the last game? On the one hand, this is more of the same and not a heady combination of familiar and fresh - this isn't the series realising something Enslaved or a Naughty Dog game hadn't: going more open with the levels can be really good.

On the other hand, it's also the story and, crucially, the characters. The last game wasn't perfect, but when you got on that boat at the end there was a reason to care about the ensemble cast of secondary characters who made it with you and the ones who didn't. That cast is largely not returning and, strangely, not being replaced either. This is not the solo logs of Lara Croft raiding tombs, but the characters that do appear feel little more than vessels of ideology (which is better explored in the collectible texts) and functional story progression. Lara Croft is possibly the only vaguely human person in Rise. And that really hurts the story's urgency in a game filled with side-missions and collectibles. I hate to use the tired phrase, "this story is really video-game-y" but I'll say that this story presentation wouldn't have been out of place in a game released next to Underworld, where I last felt the narrative was losing me. World-weary, depressed Jesus fights the evil papal army sounds like an Assassin's Creed parody. Better characters and dialogue could have made a mechanically identical game to this stand a lot taller.

Finally, I need to address a potential disaster for PC gaming. In 2013's Tomb Raider, I played at max settings and 4K to remove aliasing (SSAA). This one I could only get near high settings at 1080p30 (with FXAA) and changing most settings or even resolutions lower than my picks did not make the game much better. Short of completely turning off the real-time shadows entirely, not much moved the needle and nVidia's numbers indicate this isn't just my mid-range machine (awaiting FinFET GPUs, and hopefully HBM2 if that gets into the affordable enthusiast tiers). "Newer game requires faster machine" isn't news and I accept that this is a better looking game and I do like the higher settings I struggle to run the game with. However, I have gotten to a place where the game is consistently around 30fps in all areas with my current settings. Except for when it isn't.

Sometimes the game will, when rendering something that I've seen it do before at 30fps, crunch down to a stuttering mess. We're talking ~10fps averages. Unplayable. It can also drop down in-between this and normal performance. At one point the performance woes got so bad (8fps average, indoor area) the map menu, which stops rendering the game (check your GPU logs, the load is <10%), couldn't get past 15fps - something was bogging down the CPU so badly it couldn't dispatch enough calls to render a 2D menu. The only thing I consistently found was that restating the game fixed it; going down to 720p or turning all the settings down (to minimum) didn't and the GPU logs didn't indicate something on my end like a heating issue or even something as visibly broken as Just Cause 3 had (logs showed the GPU stalled and then flushed the VRAM (or just stopped using it for a tick?) the same moment that game degraded into low perf mode). Reviewers have mentioned this issue. And I've heard this being reported on nVidia and AMD GPUs so it's not a specific driver bug.

I also want to bring in a 3rd PC port from the last 12 months and talk frankly about potentially ruining the experience of paying customers. Batman: Arkham Knight. The Denuvo (seemingly memory-resident rather than on-start one-time-check) anti-piracy technology is used in all three of these games that have unpredictable and somewhat setting-agnostic performance issues that (at least in my experience of Rise and JC3) seem to be a degraded perf mode that the game drops into. The game is capable of doing the job required, but sometimes it stops and you have to restart it to get back to the normal perf mode. And this happened more than once or twice. Both those games I've put in tens of hours and have encountered at least that many times when I've needed to quickly restart after the game massively chugged (as a persistent state, whatever location I moved to) for no good reason and with no alleviation coming from turning the settings all the way down. It's random as I've had it happen within a minute of booting the game up and had no issues for several hours solid gaming.

Rise is better than JC3 on my machine: I was annoyed but once I realising this wasn't my settings/machine but a bug causing a degraded perf mode, I could quickly react to seeing perf had stalled and restart to get back into the game. Frequent checkpoints find another use and SSDs show why they're mandatory for the PC experience when that loses you less than a minute. JC3 hit that degraded perf mode so regularly that I had to stop playing it for a few weeks. Some patches and my machine getting an OS wipe (moving from Win7 to Win10) later and it was still there but with about the frequency I find in Rise, so I could complete the game. I really hope this is just a coincidence or some bug in some shared code between Rise and JC3 (both Squidix published) because if this new anti-piracy software is getting in the way of the game code talking to the GPU drivers and stalling into a low perf mode, we are going to get a lot more bad PC ports that should really sing on a mid-range PC. I include Batman on this list because, despite having somewhat different perf issues, it was something the devs said simply wasn't fixable and if the anti-piracy layer was broken then those devs could not fix that if the publisher would not accept simply disabling it.

Games of the Year 2015

So a fourth year of picking out notable games released (approximately) within a calendar year. I guess that makes it a tradition for this blog.

Life is Strange

I've already written about why this game is emotionally resonant, necessarily pondering, and mechanically important for several genres. To quote myself this is "one of the most exciting things to come from a publisher in years". A slow and considered story about young adult (queer) women coming to terms with the world and growing into who they are. It's also the shot in the arm that graphic adventure games needed since coasting on the success of Telltale's first Walking Dead season and it's hugely informative for anyone working on the narrative systems for modern RPGs.

Visually the decision not to chase photorealism pays dividends with the brushwork even extending to things like rain splash effects and wet shaders - the cohesion tied together with a thoroughly modern engine to render it in detail without distracting defects. The one area which could really have done with more investment is animation - the audio performances are mainly incredible and are leaned heavily upon as the face animation is very basic. Max and Chloe('s voice actors) sell the game throughout with plenty of strong performances from others. When you're telling a love story, you need those two main performances to chime and they do. The fandom that grew out of this game have clearly found fertile ground to grow from.

Everything in Life is Strange is painted broad and universal but also small and specific. Everyone is a caricature but also given depth and time to show their quirks beyond the exaggerated surface. Most people can identify with the themes of the story and the main characters but this isn't a story about straight men. It works because the glut of stories about straight white cis men distorts what stories we commonly see told in major, "all audiences" media. It is an everywoman story in a medium where the notion of an everywoman is barely explored above a very low budget ceiling. Hopefully it is the start of a new wave of published-funded projects. [photo source]

Pillars of Eternity

As I mentioned earlier in the year, this is a classic CRPG right down to the painted backdrops and limited use of 3D acceleration to make it pop. Of course, coming 15 years after the height of that genre, this use of 3D now extends to fully 3D characters and monsters with very detailed artwork for the backdrops but this is more of a "what a classic CRPG could look like today" than even the modest fully-3D top-down competitors like Wasteland 2 or Divinity: Original Sin. This is a 2015 take on the Infinity Engine, not the Aurora Engine.

What PoE does add to the table is a much-improved interface and some systems changes away from GURPS/SPECIAL/(A)D&D that allow more playing of the game and less working through the rule system to find how to progress. The combat is deep enough that dungeons are a great time exploring your party's classes but it doesn't ever dominate the game (and things like a 15-level mega-dungeon are offered as completely optional content for those who want more time to enjoy that incredibly refined tactical real-time with pause system); it's a CRPG so most people will come for the story. You can feel the experienced writing team in every inch of the game's narrative - a story that manages to vault the bar of even a rose-tinted view of those classic CRPGs.

Cities: Skylines

Another game I talked about at the same time, this is what SimCity (2013) should have been. Offline (no always-on DRM), mod-friendly, simulational, and built to allow fans of the classic SimCity games to enjoy a similar experience with a new layer of infographics and citizen simulation to run on top of it. For this game, that means importing a lot of the transit simulation from the developer's previous Cities in Motion series into a core city-builder template.

Not every citizen is simulated in detail (something EA planned for SimCity 2013 but only managed to reach simulating 10% of the Sims as agents and those acted too stupidly to generate meaningful outcomes) but there are certainly enough of them milling around and travelling to make traffic quickly become a constant system you need to master to enable your city to grow. The initially small plot of land grows as your city does and you can pick where it expands to rather than just getting a centred square of land. But most of the rest of this game is the classic (low & high density) R,C,I city-builder you expect from the genre and which has only slowly evolved since SimCity 2000 solidified the template.

This is exactly what you want after EA's Maxis completely dropped the ball in every way and left the somewhat archaic SimCity 4 from 2003 as the latest proper entry in the series. A thoroughly modern, infinitely moddable, 3D city-builder that reacts exactly how you expect and with a deeper-than-expected traffic simulation that shows the developer's previous focus. Anyone who enjoys this genre should be satisfied by this budget release (even if the headline feature from the expansion actually turned out to be part of ongoing support and so robbed that additional purchase of much value).

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

So I grew up in very rural England. This game was to me what many games have been to people who grew up in locations like New York, LA, San Francisco, or London. This even goes back to around when I was born for the period setting. All rendered with incredible fidelity and underlaid by another exceptional Jessica Curry soundtrack. Just as in Dear Esther, the soundtrack really sells the piece and makes wandering around uncovering the places and narrative never feel plodding.

This is definitely far larger in scope to that previous game and you can see every inch of Sony's involvement in the assets, rendering these villages and fields in detail you expect from AAA, not indie. There are a couple of slightly unclean edges to remind you this hasn't had the funding and army of artists you get for Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, or Battlefront; but otherwise it's amazing to wander round something that looks like where my life started.

The actual narrative, told via audio plays, helps to build a living, breathing space in which you are walking (after a cataclysm that has left every leaf untouched but no person remaining). It speaks to smart allocation of resources on the project and completely held me throughout the game. A game about isolation, searching, and small village toxicity that eventually falls to self-sacrifice and the tail end of the nuclear scare that fits the period.

The Beginner's Guide

As I touched on around release, this game has some meat to dig into both considering the text and the metatext that it has created. Advertised as 90 minutes of narrated game design, this follow up to The Stanley Parable shares a lot of the build process but uses it for a completely different exploration into game design.

Here the question is not about the illusion of choice in constructing levels but how a game developer can cope with the stress of the indie game process. How does an artist hold it together to complete a project? How do they deal with other people (or other facets of themself) during development and sharing their creations? How does feedback or just the act of letting a work grow without you pull on a fragile nerve?

It's a game that benefits from going into blind but being prepared to work for your fulfilment. You will spend 90 minutes with a narrator and look at a series of levels but this is like describing an audio-book as 4 hours of listening to someone speak: technically accurate but saying nothing about the actual experience of listening. If you have any interest in small-scale game development or discussions of mental health then this is an outstanding game to play.

Until Dawn

Do what the writers of Agents of SHIELD refuse to and construct a scenario where we can all enjoy watching Ward die, permanently. Then watch it a few more times, you deserve the catharsis if you've been putting up with that TV show. Also contains plenty of Peter Stormare emoting, again, and that's almost worth the entry fee alone.

While this had a tough development cycle (originally a PS3 Move-controller game), the final product shows none of that uncertainty. This is a confident horror story with state of the art performance capture the likes of which Sony normally only get to roll out for their David Cage projects (Heavy Rain, Beyond). It's also structurally very similar to those games, with emphasis on decision making and branching narratives driving a cinematic experience.

The advantage that Until Dawn has is competent writing and editing staff that bring together a post-Cabin in the Woods horror story that nods at the genre tropes while offering a game where, depending how you play it, everyone (individually) can live or die. American teens painted to been just unlikeable enough that their gruesome deaths aren't too much of a downer for the plot but don't destroy your investment in at least some surviving. As is necessary in the modern era of horror, tropes are either played with or inverted left and right so you're never quite sure what will be played straight and the different paths allow for some genuine unexpected moments as you know that theoretically everyone can survive whatever situation they're in.

DiRT Rally

Proper rally games that you can play on a standard joypad are back.

There's always a bit of give and take developing a game about driving (and with rally it's always about driving; racing is for people who are fighting the other cars, not the cliff face that will squash them if they don't take this corner [caution jump into right 4 tightens] just right): how demanding should the game be vs how much money can be spent on something that only appeals to a few driving game fans. In recent years it seemed like all rally games moved further and further from the sim side of the scales and towards arcade handling and difficulty.

This is where a small skunkworks team at Codies came in and decided to fix that. Get their old engine, throw out the handling model, and try and build a semi-sim game that is the equivalent of Forza or GT in providing a soft sim focus that can appeal to people who want to take things seriously but maybe don't want to spend £300 on a wheel and pedals. People who want a challenge and for track condition to matter, to need the co-driver to guide them. DiRT Rally is an incredibly solid attempt at that which just made final release after a period on Early Access. If you fondly remember games like RalliSport Challenge or the Colin McRae Rally games, this is for you.

Notable Runners-up

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - Just good clean cooperative multiplayer design that points to hopefully an explosion in asymmetrical knowledge co-op games coming soon (may get talked about more next year due to VR support).

Her Story - Fun, revered, almost made my list. I think the impressiveness of the design of the search system wears away with distance. While you're playing it, hunting the keywords to unlock the new videos you crave to make sense of the narrative, it seems really clever. Given distance, you start to wonder exactly how carefully constructed it all was and how it was somewhat inherent to the nature of language. It's a fun short ride through a bad search engine that is absolutely worth playing.

Just Cause 3 - From that very first moment, this game is totally upfront about how nothing is serious and everything is on fire. A sequel that refines the movement tools and builds a new sandbox. What little narrative there is shows sparks of self-awareness that raises it above the tired skeleton it is attached to. But it's the fluid traversal tools that make this game stand out; an itch that, last year, was satiated by inFamous. Just like that game, JC3 is rather copy-pasted in structure but it's all about using the varied tools to keep yourself engaged - hour 50 of Forza is only different to hour 5 because of how you make your own progression and a basic unlock chain you walk down with some freedom of selection. But it can't go on the main list because the performance (on console or many PC configurations) simply isn't there, the bugs are too many, and some of it is unquestionably stuff considered "known shippable" and that's not ok.

Lara Croft GO - Not just a reskin of Hitman GO. A really nice, cheap puzzle game with style showing how much can be done with mobile GPUs without chasing photorealism.

Sorry Undertale, I think Caro does a great job of explaining why you're not on my list. Just as with Brothers, this gets a mention for how far my views diverge from the consensus of reviewers in general and specifically critics who generally share my tastes (and politics).

Not Enough Hours in the Day

Kerbal Space Program - I just didn't have time to do more than watch others play it while working - finally out of Early Access and looking great. Space physics and rocket science, or at least an approximation of them in a construction game.

Rise of the Tomb Raider - Sorry Xbox, I'm calling this a 2016 release as I played the last game at 4K on PC and loved it, not going to sub-1080p (variable res) and buying an XBOne just to play this a couple of months earlier. When Steam put up their presale page saying this will release in January, I wondered how many people started eyeing the 30-day refund period on their 2nd console purchase.

Cibele - I didn't have time to grab this but I'll mention it as I did play Freshman Year this year. Both released in 2015 by the same dev as last year's how do you Do It? and about topics larger games fail to engage with so well worth checking out. FY is another really short vignette piece like hdyDI.

The Witcher 3 - This would take a lot of hours and I was playing quite a few top-down RPGs this year (as the last few years have been thick with new takes on the classic perspective/game systems). It helps that there is almost certainly going to be a 2.0 patch and the end-of-DLC edition, if previous games are any indication.