GAMES OF THE DECADE
We’re not going to lie – compiling this list almost saw our team come to blows more than once. We have many decades of gaming between us, and many decades of strong opinions to match...
Happily, over the years we’ve also come to appreciate the role that a firm set of guidelines can have in ensuring participants don’t start duking it out next to the office water-cooler. Only one game per series was allowed, and only one per developer or publisher; these rules helped stave off the Dark Souls vs Bloodborne argument, and averted a battle for supremacy between Breath Of The Wild and Skyward Sword.
The key is always the adjective: we decided that, rather than seek to name the best games of the 2010s – something every outlet under the sun will be doing over the next month or two – we would instead choose to celebrate the titles that defined the decade. The games that tell a story about the trajectory the medium we love has taken over the past ten years. That’s a long old time in the fastest-moving form of entertainment on the planet, after all.
Many of the games featured in the following pages will not surprise you with their inclusion. But we hope a few of them will. Combined, we hope they help you put in context what we have come to think might have been gaming’s greatest decade to date.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Developer/publisher Frictional Games
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Release 2010
Felix Kjellberg is out of Tinder. He is visibly nervous, combing the bookshelves of Brennenburg Castle for something, anything, with which to strike a light. The screen has started to pulse and the sound of grinding teeth can be heard as protagonist Daniel begins to lose his mind. Kjellberg, broadcasting under the alias PewDiePie, finds what he’s looking for, sighs with relief – and turns around to see a gaping horror stumbling towards him. The resultant stream of Swedish profanity will become legendary, part of a reaction compilation viewed millions of times on YouTube. It is 2010, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent has just scared the Let’s Play into existence.
WELL, NOTORIETY, PERHAPS
It turned out that watching people in their bedrooms freak out over horror games scratched multiple itches for YouTube’s nascent userbase: it attracted game fans curious to see someone else’s playthrough, sure, but also a mainstream audience who were enjoying the ‘prank’ and ‘fail’ videos popular on the Internet at the time (later, it’d spawn yet another genre, the ‘react’ video). Quite simply, it was fun to watch a generally quiet Swedish boy lose his shit. And he’d chosen the perfect enema in Frictional Games’ virtual psychological torture device.
The Dark Descent was not a typical horror game for its time: it didn’t really do the kind of bloody-face-and-scream jump-scares that defined the early days of viral media online. What it did do was build an atmosphere of dread so thick you could cut it with a knife, or indeed a piercing Scandinavian shriek. And this was in spite of it being technically rather basic: its monsters patrol set routes that are (theoretically) easily sussed, and aren’t particularly shocking close up. But The Dark Descent’s ‘sanity’ system was Frictional’s newest, nastiest twist. Staying too long in the dark drains Daniel’s sanity, and so you must find tinder to light candles and oil to keep your lantern burning. However, huddling near a light source to dispel the hallucinatory effects of his decreasing sanity puts him in danger of being spotted by an enemy – and hiding is your only weapon in the fight against your foes.
The result is a feedback loop of tension, created partially by the game and partially by the player’s own mind. The paranoia becomes such that you’re convinced there’s a monster around every corner – the enemy count is actually fairly low – as you fumble with objects, puzzle
