Cover art for Persona 5, to go with TimeOut review. NZH 20Apr17 -
Cover art for Persona 5, to go with TimeOut review. NZH 20Apr17 -
Little Nightmares
Chris Schulz: I've played all the big games this year. I've gotten super lost during excellent space race Prey. I've been super disappointed by the dead-on-arrival Mass Effect: Andromeda. And I've been super confused by the racially troubling Ghost Recon: Wildlands. I've even donned Playstation's VR helmet and had giant spiders try to tear my insides apart during the super scary Farpoint. But my favourite game of 2017 is a super simple, super humble platformer. Created by Swedish indie developers Tarsier Studios, Little Nightmares follows a little girl just looking for a feed. But she's stuck in a world that's best described as a mangled mix of Fraggle Rock and Resident Evil, with creaking doors and sloping staircases that will chill you to your core. Little Nightmares? That's the understatement of the year.
Siobhan Keogh-Dwyer: A lot of JRPGs make concessions to the Western way of doing things, and as a result we get games that are some amalgamation of East and West, but don't really fit into either category. Persona 5 is unapologetically Japanese. You travel all over Tokyo, visiting places that exist in the real world. The red light district of Kabukicho, in Shinjuku, the art museum in Ueno, the statue of Hachiko the dog outside Shibuya train station - these are all real places you can visit. The characters complain when they have to read English, and questions in the classroom often refer to Japanese history. It's also a very well-crafted and entertaining RPG, centred around your characters' supernatural abilities. Sure, it gets frustrating at times - occasionally you get bouts of bad luck during battles that seem very unfair - but it's easily my favourite game of 2017 so far.
Nier Automata
Francis Cook: This Action-RPG from Yoko Taro showed the potential of video games as a narrative art form. To reveal all the layers of Nier Automata, the player is required to finish the game four times, but each time a new game starts, everything is changed. It's a masterstroke of design which flips the book on how a story can be told. The gameplay, from esteemed developer Platinum, is fast paced and enjoyable throughout. While the existentialism can be a bit ham-fisted, there are some genuinely amazing moments which completely screw with your head.
The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild
Karl Puschmann: My enjoyment of Nintendo's lasted Zelda game is inexorably tied to their latest console, the Switch. Being able to explore Hyrule on the train each day has been a total game changer. Opening up extra gaming time that was previously unavailable for me to dive into an epic length game such as this. The other game changer is from Nintendo themselves, having taken the traditional straight-forward Zelda experience and thrust it into the realm of open world gameplay and all the possibilities that promises. While I was not originally enthused to hear that promise also included busy work such as crafting and cooking, I've slowly gotten into it. It's the freedom, I think, that makes it all work. When I'm at home I settle in for quest fulfilling adventuring, but on the commute where most of my game time has been spent, I'm mainly just mucking about it in the gloriously realised open world. I know the end of the world is nigh, but I've been busy creating my own little adventures in Nintendo's brilliantly fun sandbox. Sorry, Hyrule. One day I'll get round to saving the world. Promise.
