Eurogamer’s Games of 2011

Things have been pretty quiet around the web during the holidays, but that hasn’t stopped Eurogamer from putting together a series of “Games of 2011” articles that go into surprising detail on many of the titles released over the past year. Dark Souls, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Bastion, and Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (on PC) are all represented at the moment, with more likely to come. A snip on Dark Souls and Deus Ex:

Dark Souls is a game that calls to screen horrifying terrors, crocodile-skinned leviathans, fire-breathing drakes and obese executioners that pound toward you with single-minded urgency. But the most frightening demons are perhaps those it summons from within us. The petulant child gamer, who throws her controller at the wall in frustration; the irascible teenager who stops playing the moment he stops winning, all red-faced sulk. These are ghosts from the past we have supposedly matured away from, and yet in Lodran’s stony network of brutality, they are called to the surface. Dark Souls has no words of indulgence for the bruised ego. Rather, those demons must be exorcised if you wish to progress, or embraced if you wish to submit.

And how many submitted? Few who start a video game finish it, just as so many books remain opened but unread. Games require perseverance, commitment. But in Dark Souls’ case, they require skill too. Not the kind of skill that has become fashionable in games over the past two years: fetch quest persistence, hunger to gulp down drip feed experience points that offer rewards for merely turning the cogs. This is the systemic cancer that is deforming gaming’s DNA, a lowering of the barrier to entry that widens the pool of players, but at the cost of a diminished sense of accomplishment.

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Nominally, Human Revolution is the story of beardy, growly cyborg security guard Adam “I didn’t ask for this” Jensen, but screw that guy, frankly. Screw him and screw his lost love and screw his double-dealing employers. This is about me – because DXHR, with its impressive freedom of action, is a soft, yielding material I wrap around my own brain so that it reflects me. Its reality is the reality I choose to give it – and I choose that Faridah lives, that she’s rescued by me and that I do so without my ever breaking my own rules of engagement.

What my savegame abuse also achieved was to show off the game’s combat flexibility and quite how spectacular a DXHR skirmish can be in the hands of a (cough) skilled player. This Jensen I’d built really could take out everyone in an open space filled with snipers and body-armoured shotgunners and rocket-spewing robots; leaping from cover to cover, a silent throttle here, a tranquiliser dart in that guy up there’s face, a gas grenade at that clutch of thugs as they rush through the door, an EMP mine under that robot and then a stungun blast right to the belly of the last guard. Unconscious bodies and flaming robo-wreckage everywhere, and in the middle of it all lies one still-intact helicopter. I didn’t ask for this, but goddamn if I’m not going to make the best of it.