This year, a lot of things sucked. But a lot of things were also unexpectedly good! Let’s celebrate those latter things with a big list.
This year, a lot of things sucked. But a lot of things were also unexpectedly good! Let’s celebrate those latter things with a big list.
As we do every year at Kotaku, it’s time to take a look back on the highs and lows of the last 12 months. (See: the biggest surprises of 2012,2013,2014,2015 and 2016 .) We’ll post the biggest disappointments of 2017 later this week, but for now, it’s time for happiness! Unexpected joy! Lots of Nintendo stuff! With input from the rest of Kotaku ’s staff, here are the best video game surprises of 2017.
The more we learned about the Nintendo Switch, the more we got our hopes up. Of course, Nintendo is expert at dashing raised hopes, so most of us struggled mightily to keep those hopes in check. When it was announced, the gimmick of a portable home console sounded good but there could still have been some hidden catch or downside. When it came out, the Switch seemed like a good console in general, but no one was sure if there’d be enough games. And then, somewhere around the release of Mario + Rabbids in August, it became clear: The Nintendo Switch in the midst of the best console launch year ever. From Zelda and Splatoon to Mario, Golf Story, Steamworld Dig 2 and Doom, there are already too many terrific games on the system to keep up with. The Switch’s first year went better than almost anyone dared hope. May its 2018 be just as strong.
One hundred players start. The last one (or the last team) standing wins. Many people probably remember Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds as the new early access game with the terrible name that was consistently at or near the top of the Steam charts in March. Terrible name or no, PUBG went on to conquer the world of PC gaming in 2017 with a simple premise and good-enough execution to become a beloved game and a streaming sensation. It seems likely that other games (like Fortnite Battle Royale) will cut into PUBG ’s audience significantly, and one may ultimately overthrow it. PUBG will still be remembered as the game that brought Battle Royale gaming to the mainstream.
When cover art from Ubisoft’s Mario + Rabbids crossover leaked in May, the response was nearly unanimous: this is going to suck so bad. Then Ubisoft showed the game at their E3 press conference, and… wait, what? It’s an XCOM -like turn-based tactics game? It actually looks kind of silly and maybe even… fun? Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto came out on stage to show off the game. The guy heading development cried during the press conference. Online sentiment began to soften. And then the game itself turned out to be pretty great, a smartly streamlined take on the XCOM formula with an emphasis on mobility and a few distinct, character-specific abilities. It wasn’t all that surprising that a Ubisoft studio could crank out a well-made tactics game, but it was surprising that Ubisoft’s Minions-esque Rabbids would wind up mixing so well with Mario, Peach, and Luigi.
“Oh yeah,” we joked, “I’m totally sure Nintendo will announce Metroid Prime 4 at E3 this year.” We make those sorts of jokes to inure ourselves to the constant disappointment of wanting a thing to happen, then watching it not happen. Yet… there’s always reason for hope, isn’t there? Nintendo was on a roll with the Switch, and seemed to be consciously targeting the sorts of hardcore Nintendo fans they arguably left behind with the Wii and the Wii U. Maybe, just maybe, a new Metroid Prime really could be in the works? Turns out, it was. Not only that, but Nintendo buried a second, more immediately exciting announcement in their subsequent livestream: Metroid: Samus Returns, a 3DS remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, would be out in just a few months.
There was a point right around March where the PS4 was just on fire. In just a couple of months it’d gotten a few big exclusives, including the beautiful-if-niche Gravity Rush 2 and the fantastic open-worlder Horizon Zero Dawn. But it was the Japanese games that put it over the top, and more pressingly, over Microsoft’s competing Xbox One. Nier: Automata, Yakuza 0, Persona 5, and Nioh all hit the PS4 at about the same time, a collection of wildly different games that had something for just about anyone. It was, and remains, a very good time to own a PlayStation 4.
There was always a good game hiding in No Man’s Sky, but you used to have to work to find it. After several major free updates, Hello Games has made it a lot easier to love their big, weird galactic exploration game. There’s so much more to do and so many more reasons to do it that the No Man’s Sky of 2017 feels almost like a different game. If you bought it back when it came out, try starting a new game and see what happens. As nifty as Hello Games’ updates have been, the No Man’s Sky community deserves just as much credit for keeping the game alive and interesting, creating and rebuilding a galactic hub and, most recently, working out how to wage a massive war in a game with no built-in PvP combat.
Bloodborne is a game built on mysteries, literally—the city of Yarnham is built on a bunch of catacombs that players in a group called the Tomb Prospectors are still exploring, looking for rare monsters that few have ever seen. In November, they found an elusive Flaming Undead Giant, a beast no one had seen before, in one of the game’s Chalice Dungeons. What other secrets might Bloodborne be hiding?
Along with a bunch of Switch and 3DS games, Nintendo released a new Super Nintendo game in 2017. Two decades after it was cancelled, Star Fox 2 finally came out as a bundle-in with the SNES Classic. It’s a weird game, and while it might not be enough to pull you away from the rest of the classic games Nintendo included on their retro console, it’s certainly a time capsule that’s worth opening at least once.
It may have seemed like Team Ninja’s “samurai Bloodborne ” action game Nioh dropped with little fanfare, but it was actually a loooong time coming. Originally announced in the mid-2000s, it apparently went through several substantial overhauls until Team Ninja took over development in 2010. Most games to go through such a process are released in sorry shape, if they’re released at all. Nioh is the welcome exception, a deep, finely tuned, extremely satisfying action game that stands toe-to-toe with the best in the “Soulsborne” subgenre.
When Capcom first revealed Resident Evil 7, there was some question as to whether this new game, with its first-person perspective and focus on a modern found footage horror aesthetic, would be “ Resident Evil ” enough. Turns out that yep, it is indeed possible to inject new ideas into the Resident Evil formula without losing the series’s identity. The first few hours are nearly unrecognizable, as your terrified protagonist creeps his way through a decrepit southern mansion overflowing with horrors. Then the game gradually settles down and you begin the Resident Evil -y work of upgrading your gear, uncovering secrets, and finding animal keys to unlock corresponding animal doors. Other venerated game series could take a few lessons from RE7 for how to shake up their own formulas.
At this point, Half-Life 3 is a tired punchline. Ditto Half-Life 2 Episode 3. We know that neither one is ever coming out, or at the very least, whatever version of them may have been in development over the last 10 years just ain’t gonna happen. So it was a bittersweet surprise when ex-Valve developer Marc Laidlaw, one of the chief writers of the Half-Life series, published a blog post titled “Epistle 3.” It told a lightly disguised, gender-swapped story of Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance’s trip to the frozen north in the wake of the shattering cliffhanger the concluded Episode 2. It wasn’t Episode 3, but it offered unexpected closure and even inspired a bunch of indie game developers to come up with their own rough versions of what the game might have looked like.
In the world of speedrunning, a single discovery can reverberate through the entire scene and change everything. That was the case with the “Barrier Skip” in Wind Waker, which two players cracked in 2016 but was only successfully replicated this year.
