Life On The Grid

It’s easy to become jaded with games with the speed they’re being pumped out lately and how samey they can all seem sometimes. People who have been playing games for years or decades can almost know what to expect before it happens in games. While many games are brilliant to play and extremely enjoyable, at the same time, most of them can become forgettable simply because there’s nothing different or outstanding about them.

It’s comforting to know that some games are still being made that stand out. That will stay with you. Games whose sights and sounds will be burned into your brain. Games that you’ll never forget.

So I present to you an ongoing feature of a list of games that are special or unique. These are games that will stay with you, and you will see bits of them everywhere you go. Some of them are truly unique games, so there are just no similar games to compare with. Some are more common types that have other games in the same genre that may be empirically “better”, but these examples stand out because the design, music, atmosphere, visuals, characters, story, and everything else all come together to make something much greater and more memorable than the sum of its parts. Games that stir the blood and make your pulse race any time you see them in motion or hear a song from their soundtrack.

Keen readers will note that this list has a bias towards more modern games, with many being relatively new. This is not intentional snubbing of the retro catalogue but more acknowledging that the hardware limitations of older machines made it difficult to craft titles that had truly stand-out audio and visual qualities that could create fully immersive, believable 3D worlds. It wasn’t really until that sixth console generation of PS2, Gamecube, XBox and Dreamcast that this was possible.  Also, in the early days of video game development, it was still finding its feet and didn’t take the medium seriously or as the potential to be an art form.

So I guess another way to classify these games would be as masterpieces of their art.

But these are just my opinions and not hard facts. Call it some suggested playing. If you feel like it, maybe give a couple of these games a try, and you might find some of them mean something special to you, too.

Journey 2012 (PS3)

Rare indeed will it be for you to see so much beauty and emotion expressed in a video game that has absolutely no dialogue and is so elegantly simple at the same time.

You play as a nameless character wandering the desert trying to reach a mountain in the distance.  That is Journey in a sentence.  But when you play it, it is so much more.  The stunning beauty of the deserts around you.  The effortless elegance with which you can move around it.  The captivating soundtrack complements every moment of sorrow and triumph perfectly.  It’s so very short, barely taking two hours even on a first attempt.  But there isn’t a second of filler or wasted time in those two hours.  Every moment is filled with life and amazing events.

It also has one of the best cooperative systems ever seen in a game.  Two people can journey through the game together, aiding each other, but it is anonymous.  People will seamlessly join your game, and you won’t know who they are or be able to communicate with them besides jumps and squeaks, but this also works amazingly somehow.  It will be extremely rare for you to find a Journey player who joins your game who is unpleasant or unhelpful.  Everyone I have ever played with also seems to be so happy to be playing this game that they cannot help but aid you and jump and frolic with you as you move through areas.

All this and much more are just some of the reasons that Journey is an unforgettable experience.  The team behind it have done so much with so little that it is astonishing.