December 15, 2009

Gamasutra’s Best Of 2009: Top 10 Overlooked Games

[Continuing Gamasutra’s 2009 retrospective, Brandon Sheffield examines our top 10 Overlooked Games of 2009. Previously: Top 5 Biz Trends, Top 5 iPhone Games, Top 5 Controversies, Top 5 PC Games, Top 5 Handheld Games Of 2009, and Top 5 Major Industry Events.]

This was a tough one. Usually I’d come up with a list like this with a snap of my fingers, but the changing face of journalism, coupled with better PR and more avenues of release meant that most games that deserved recognition got it.

Who would imagine that I’d be living in a world where Demon’s Souls was one of the most talked-about games of the year, at least in games journalism? With sales to boot?

But not everything decent made it through the cracks. Here, we present 10 titles that deserved more recognition than they got (I avoided indies, as choosing just a few to add to a list of 10 would’ve been completely unfair to all the rest).

These include some titles from larger publishers that should’ve known better – and niche publishers that should’ve known better to boot. Special thanks to Chris Remo, Kris Graft, and Leigh Alexander for suggestions:

The Silent Hill series has taken some serious knocks, after the third. Most recently development shifted to the West, and for better or for worse, it seems here to stay. Double Helix dropped the ball on Homecoming, and Climax’s Origins didn’t fare much better – but the latter developer got a second chance with Shattered Memories, a reimagining of the original, and it works quite well. Though it doesn’t have the scares of the PSX game, it does have thoughtful puzzling and a very well developed UI.

I’ve argued about this with the developers in person, but the blue iced environments just don’t have the scare factor of the original rust-colored chainlinked worlds of Silent Hill for PlayStation – but the newest entry is the best Silent Hill in years, and it seems most have written off the series entirely at this point.

Shattered Memories is worth a shot for fans of the adventure genre more than the survival horror genre. Fans and critics alike will discount the game based on the downturn in the legacy – but if you can get past the arguable lack of horror, you’ll have a nice game experience on your hands.