The most innovative games of the decade (Patreon)

Hello! 

So as you should know by now, every December I dedicate my last video to the most innovative game of that year. I've been doing this since 2015, and just released the video for 2019, celebrating Baba Is You.

But with the decade now over, I thought it might be fun to think back to the games that came out before I started GMTK, and retroactively add some games to my "most innovative" awards list. 

So, just for giggles, these are the games that I reckon would have won the award for each year since 2010. Complete with the thumbnails that would have been on the videos, had they existed!

2010 - Amnesia: Dark Descent

Okay, starting with a game that I have to admit I've barely played. I'm a scaredy cat when it comes to horror games, and Frictional's Amnesia: The Dark Descent is one of the spookiest games around. But there are some great ideas in here - if you can stick it out long enough to see them. 

So Amnesia has a sanity meter, where staying too long in the darkness causes you to go slightly mad - and start dreaming up monsters and other nightmarish hazards. But while the game implies that topping out the sanity meter will lead to game over, this actually isn't a fail state. 

Nonetheless, the player's assumption that going insane would kill them was enough to scare them silly and keep them immersed - but without the problems of game over in horror games (they rip you out of the experience, and trial-and-error gameplay can lessen the fear).

Amnesia would also prove to be staggeringly influential. First-person horror games like Alien: Isolation, Outlast, and Resident Evil 7 all owe this game a debt of gratitude.

2011 - Spacechem

Zachtronics had been making problem-solving puzzlers for a while. But in 2011, he hit the mainstream with the incredible Spacechem.

This is a game about turning raw atoms into handy products by designing a factory that will automatically do the chemistry for you. That means laying out little tracks, and plopping down commands (like "grab", "bond" and "drop") so that the atoms get picked up, move around the level, attach to each other, and get dropped off at the end point.

Anyone who has done some programming will feel some familiarity with how the game works. You're building something that will run through commands (and won't break if you need to repeat the process 50 times). There's debugging, logic gates, and syncing up. 

And most importantly, you're not trying to find the one solution that the designer dreamt up: you're just trying to find anything that will work. You'll be graded on your efficiency and elegancy.

Zach would go on to perfect and twist this formula over a bunch of great games: most notably the 3D Infinifactory and the hex-based Opus Magnum. All of which are worth your time.

Honourable mentions: The world-changing Minecraft, the brain-busting 3DS puzzler Pullblox (Pushmo in the US), sound-only spook 'em up Papa Sangre.

2012 - Waking Mars

Waking Mars remains one of the best games I discovered when working at Pocket Gamer. 

You play as an astronaut who descends deep into the belly of the red planet. Inside, you'll find a rich ecosystem of plants and alien animals, who all coexist in funky relationships. Like, one plant will shoot out seeds, another will shoot out water that grows those seeds into food, which then feeds an animal. Stuff like that.

The game is all about manipulating these relationships to your advantage. To get through each area you need to boost the biodiversity of each area, so must carefully sow seeds to create the conditions for life to flourish.

Where most sci-fi games are about killing aliens and blasting anything not from Earth, this game throws the idea on its head and is all about creating life, not snuffing it out. Good stuff.

Honourable mentions: Paint splat puzzler The Unfinished Swan, anonymous co-op game Journey, choice-driven story The Walking Dead, deconstructive shooter Spec Ops: The Line.

2013 - Gone Home

It's infamously controversial, but Gone Home is - if you ask me - a wonderful game and an important touchstone for game design going forward.

If you've somehow never heard of it, the game casts you as a college student who comes home to find her new family's home completely deserted. The only way to figure out what happened to your parents and sister is to read notes, diary entries, Birthday cards, and other scraps of info to piece together the story.

This creates a wonderful archaeological dig of a game, where the story isn't told in a linear fashion (though, developer Fullbright does lock off certain bits of narrative until later), leaving you to put the tale together yourself. You become an active participant in the tale.

And while Sam's story (that's your sister) is made quite explicit, the stories of the other family members (including your uncle Oscar) are left for you to uncover. Some players might completely miss these bits, but those who do find all the letters will have a memorable experience.

Gone Home influenced a whole genre of narrative-driven "walking simulators", but I have to admit I find most of them pretty dull. Games like Virgina, Everyone's Gone to the Rapture, and even Fullbright's open follow-up Tacoma don't get what made Gone Home so good: the way the player puzzles out the story in their head by snapping together all the information they find littered around the house.

Honourable mentions: Item-free Metroidvania Toki Tori 2; passport stamping corruption adventure Papers, Please; mind-melting puzzler Antichamber; sibling sim Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and more. 2013 was a big year!

2014 - Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

I've typically tried to focus on games that don't have combat. There's more than enough games about killing dudes, so why not celebrate the games that focus on more gentle pursuits?

But I can't ignore one of my favourite games of the past few years. Shadow of Mordor is a bonkers experimental game (with a massive great budget, no less) that uses artificial intelligence, procedural generation, and clever design to create stories on the fly. 

Basically, the game generates a cast of special orc captains, each with a name, face, and set of traits. Getting into a scrap with them will cause them to remember you and how you acted, and then bring it up when you next see them. 

This leads to all sorts of mad stuff like chopping off an orc's head, and then seeing him again five hours later with stitches around his neck and a bit of an attitude. Or a captain gloating because they killed you two hours ago. 

It's a system that really deserved some more exploration. But sadly, the sequel was too stuffed with microtransactions and other fluffs. And no other dev has really tried it (Assassin's Creed had a very lightweight take on the idea, and a Batman game was supposed to have it but I reckon that's been cancelled now).

Still, I live in hope! Mordor created characters who worked unlike any video game character before. They had personalities and memories that were drawn in by the developer, but arose naturally through your interactions and existence. Great stuff. 

Honourable mentions: One-on-one swordfighting sim Nidhogg, AI showcase Alien: Isolation, goofy squid sim Octodad: Dadliest Catch, Escher-esque puzzler Monument Valley, awesome interactive fiction 80 Days.

2015 - Her Story 

Okay, so this is when I actually started making videos so I won't go into too much detail on these.

Her Story is a detective game about digging up clips of a woman's police interview from a dusty old 90s PC. This game used its interface to really make you feel like a detective, and like Gone Home, you got to piece together a wildly non-linear narrative on your own. Top stuff.

Honourable mentions: Goop-based platformer Mushroom 11, tree growing mobile gem Prune, paint-swapping shooter Splatoon, game-breaking puzzler The Magic Circle, genre-busting RPG Undertale.

2016 - Event[0] 

Cleverbot meets Gone Home meets Zork. It's a game about chatting to a super smart chatbot, who helps you solve puzzles aboard a space station. The first time I played this my mind was completely and utterly blown. 

Honourable mentions: Procedurally-generated planet hopper No Man's Sky, Fumita Ueda's Tamagotchi game The Last Guardian, augmented reality fad Pokemon GO, kitchen co-op madhouse Overcooked, time-halting shooter SUPERHOT.

2017 - Snake Pass 

A platformer where you can't jump. Which turned into a snakey serpent sim that's all about climbing, grabbing, and fighting gravity. Absolutely maddening, but also unlike anything I've played before.

Honourable mentions: Incomprehensible Metroidvania Rain World, clockwork murder mystery The Sexy Brutale, artful puzzler Gorogoa, genre mash-up Battlechef Brigade, zero-gravity VR gem Lone Echo.

2018 - Return of the Obra Dinn 

I didn't think Her Story could be beat for detective game design, until Lucas Pope launched Return of the Obra Dinn. As you hop back in time to see how the crew of a cargo ship died, you'll use logic, deduction, and a notebook to cross reference clues to this amazing mystery.

Honourable mentions: Perfect information tactics game Into the Breach, meet-cute mobile favourite Florence, make-your-own-hardware Nintendo Labo, VR masterpiece Astro Bot.

2019 - Baba Is You 

A brain-busting puzzle game where you rewrite the rules of the game to create a universe where the puzzle at hand is actually solvable. Become a rock! Make the walls disappear! Turn the key into a flag! And so, so much more.

Honourable mentions: Clockwork archeology game Outer Wilds, translation saga Heaven's Vault, detective RPG Disco Elysium, Hideo Kojima's FedEx sim Death Stranding, honk 'em up Untitled Goose Game. 

Looking forward to seeing what the new decade will give us!

Mark