Jake's five favorite games of 2013

Honorable mention: I would include Sid Meier's Civilization V: Brave New World on this list, but it's an expansion pack, not a full standalone game. I certainly played it enough this year to warrant a mention. My review of the game is here.

5. Metro: Last Light

A sequel to the cult favorite Metro 2033, Ukrainian studio 4A Games made Metro: Last Light in terrible working conditions imposed by soon-to-fold publisher THQ. The game's entire budget was less than some other first-person shooters get for cutscenes. It represents a dying breed in this industry: the AA game. Indie games are blooming and multimillion-dollar blockbusters will always sell, but this middle ground is something that may not exist in a decade's time.

Metro: Last Light depicts post-apocalyptic Moscow with a grim melancholy that could only come from an Eastern European developer. But there's a twisted sense of hope: walking through the subterranean Metro stations which have become Muscovites' home, you overhear all sorts of quirky conversations between characters... and a full 15-minute variety show at the underground Bolshoi that you can walk right past or sit down and watch. Read my full review of the game here.

4. The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable would be higher on this list, but I already fawned about it enough in 2012. This game was originally a mod for Half-Life 2, and this year finally got a standalone HD remake. If you played the original, you know what to expect, but it's bigger and better. If you're new to Stanley, do yourself a favor and go buy it now. It's a game that's best not to know anything about before playing--it's entirely about deconstructing the nature of narrative in video games and the concept of player choice. Hint: you'll want to play through the short game more than once if you want to see everything there is to see. The Stanley Parable is $15 on Steam, although if you can catch the end of the Steam Winter Sale you can get it for a bit cheaper.

3. Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Nintendo's 3DS had by far the best 2013 of any console, handheld or otherwise. Fire Emblem: Awakening, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Pokémon X/Y, the list goes on and on. But honestly, the game I enjoyed the most was Animal Crossing. No challenge, no fighting, no winning or losing, just fun times as the mayor of a cute village populated by animals. There's a zen garden-like quality to playing this game, planting flowers and fishing for squid. The game isn't made for playing in hours-long binges, instead playing best in short 30-minute sessions every day. Animal Crossing has a clever sense of humor, and its family friendly appeal makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

2. Gone Home

I've written about Gone Home before. It's a game that will appeal to people who don't even like video games. You play as a girl coming home from a semester studying abroad to find her family is gone, and her Oregon home is deserted. You spend the entire game simply exploring the empty home trying to piece together what happened. There's a creepy haunted house vibe to it all, but without the actual horror part. Gone Home is a poignant commentary on family relationships, homosexuality, and '90s culture. It's $20 on Steam and on the game's own website, although if you can catch the end of the winter sale on either website, you can get it for $10.

1. Papers, Please

I've written about Papers, Please: A Dystopian Document Thriller before. As you can see from the screenshot above, it doesn't quite have the graphical fidelity of any of the other games on this list. Papers, Please looks and plays like an early '90s point-and-click game, and it works beautifully. You work as an immigration officer for a fictional Soviet Bloc country, processing people across the border, approving and denying visas. It's all about paperwork. Incredibly boring. But the rules and regulations change, and people will try to tell you why you should let them through without correct documentation.

Papers, Please is a look into the banality of evil, the moral shades of gray that come from a bloated bureaucracy. You want to let the old woman without a visa who's lost her daughter across the border, but you also want to put food on the table for your own family at home. Papers, Please is about a fake Soviet country, but it's more relevant than ever for Americans today. It's $10 through its own website as well as all the major digital retailers, although if you buy it in the next couple days you can get it cheaper on winter sales.

Metro: Last Light review

A while back I reviewed Ukrainian developer 4A Games' cult hit Metro 2033. Based on a series of bestselling Russian novels, Metro was one of my favorite games of 2010. It was flawed, but it was beautiful.

Now the Kiev-based studio is back with a sequel, Metro: Last Light. Despite its publisher THQ giving the studio a tiny budget, imposing terrible working conditions, and folding a few months later, 4A persevered. The game was picked up by German publisher Deep Silver and released earlier this month.

Metro: Last Light serves as a natural progression of Metro 2033. It's set in post-apocalyptic Moscow, where the surface is irradiated and survivors live underground in the tunnels city's Metro system... hence the title. You play as Artyom, a man dealing with the guilt of his murderous past. Guilt is one of the driving themes of the entire story, something carried through until the end credits.

I've had a lifelong love of both post-apocalyptic stories and public transit systems--subways in particular. So Metro is right up my alley; Fallout 3 is perhaps my all-time favorite game largely because of its post-apocalyptic version of my hometown Washington, D.C. Metro system. Last Light's Metro is based on the real-life Moscow Metro with its distinctive circular routes, and it'd be really interesting to take a trip there and see how closely the in-game locations match their real-life counterparts.

If you haven't played the original game, you won't understand much of the plot line, and that's a good thing. Instead of spending the opening hours of the game on exposition introducing you to the characters and setting, Last Light is able to jump right into the meat of the story.

Last Light is also a natural progression from 2033 in terms of gameplay and mechanics. It definitely feels tweaked and upgraded all around, but the core gameplay loop of Metro remains intact.

The game has been described as "Fallout meets Silent Hill." It mixes survival-horror with FPS and stealth mechanics, and the combat is serviceable enough. You've got a wide range of ways to approach obstacles, from ninja-like creeping to Rambo blazin'.

The most interesting gameplay mechanic is the gas mask, carried over from 2033. Anytime you venture to the surface of Moscow, you need to wear a gas mask. You need to make sure you have enough air filters, and you have to manually switch filters when one runs low. Combat has its effects on the mask, cracking the glass and making it harder to see. You can take filters and gas masks from corpses you find around the city if your current one is banged up.

I love to play games slowly and savor the experience, and at first I thought this gas mask stuff would be an unnecessary time-limiting annoyance when I'm trying to survive in an already-hostile world. But in practice, it enriches the experience and made me feel more immersed in the dystopian gameworld. It added the "survival" aspect to "survival-horror." You can survive on the surface for a minute or so without a mask, and some of the most intense experiences I had with Last Light were when I was frantically rushing around the surface sifting through rubble to find a new air filter for my mask.

Luckily, Metro is a series made for slow gamers like me. Where the game truly shines is in the downtime at the various Metro stations around Moscow. It's not an RPG, but you're free to explore the heavily-populated stations at your leisure. Unlike many games in which NPCs have fake conversations for a few seconds, in Metro, you can sit and listen to random underground citizens talk to each other for minutes on end. You don't need to listen to any of them, but if you do, it enriches the game's fiction and makes you feel like part of a larger world.

Ten games I'm looking forward to in 2013

a.k.a. A Few First-Person Walking Games

We're into the dead period of the year when it comes to game releases. But fret not! There's a ton of the horizon. I struggled to limit this list to just ten, so I won't include the upcoming standalone remakes of great titles like The Stanley Parable and DayZ. And of course, there's the upcoming Director's Cut of one of my favorite games of all time, Deadly Premonition. But when it comes to actual new games in 2013, here you go:

SimCity - Maxis

This one's less than a month away! The reboot of Will Wright's seminal city-builder looks more epic than ever, with a decade-long wait after SimCity 4 in 2003. While most of the rest of the games on this list are pretentious arty independent games, I'll always have a soft spot for well-designed strategy games. Heck, I've poured more hours into Civilization V than anything else I've written about on this blog. SimCity hopes to spark the next generation of strategy titles, with an increased focus on co-op and having your city interact with other players' cities online.

I've got mixed feelings on the "reboot" concept where a company gives a game the same name as the first game in the series, whether it's SimCity or Tomb Raider or Bionic Commando. You inevitably end up calling it "SimCity 2013" to distinguish it from the original, which seems to defeat the purpose of the name in the first place.