From blockbusters like ‘Rise of the Tomb Raider’ to mysteries like ‘The Return of the Obra Dinn,’ this year was full of great games.
Whatever else you may say about 2018, the year proved that plenty of developers still take the Mac seriously as a gaming platform. I’m fond of saying that we as Mac gamers enjoy quality at the expensive of quantity, and standout titles like Subnautica and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire —both of which released at the same time as their PC counterparts—serve as proof of that. Nor did I have to struggle for this list: There are plenty of new enjoyable games like The Banner Saga 3 and The Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset that deliver hours of entertainment but fall a tad short of the greatness of the following entries.
Whether you’re looking for blockbuster action or retro-styled platformers, this year’s crop of games has many wonders to choose from.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is easily the most graphically impressive of this year’s Mac releases, to the point that I now frequently use its built-in benchmarking tool to judge the performance of MacBooks and eGPUs.
Fortunately, it’s a fantastic game as well. This sequel whisks Lara Croft off to the snowy wastes of Siberia, where she hunts down the legendary city of Kitezh while finding time to rummage in plenty of tombs and solve a plethora of puzzles. And of course, Lara being Lara, the number of bullets that fly here almost certainly outnumber the words in our favorite tomb raider’s doctoral thesis. It’s full of literal cliffhangers, and it’s more fun than a summer blockbuster.
I never wanted to be an insurance adjuster until I played The Return of the Obra Dinn, and frankly, I have a feeling that it overstates the appeal. It’s 1807 and a ship has wandered in with a dead crew after years of being lost at sea, and it’s your job to figure out what happened.
You do this, though, by whipping out a stopwatch that shows the exact second of someone’s death along with a few snippets of dialogue surrounding the moment. And, to put it lightly, that’s just the beginning of the weirdness in this masterpiece of deductive sleuthing. As a special bonus for Mac users, you can change the retro interface to look as though it’s running on an early 1980s Macintosh.
Training to climb a mountain can take years, so I’m not surprised that this marvelous platformer about climbing a snowy peak is about as hard as climbing Everest. You’re a little girl named Madeline— Celeste is the mountain—and you’ll subject the poor thing to a thousand deaths while guiding her through retro-styled dead cities and menacing ridges.
