DEVOTION
RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New44
46
MONSTER
HUNTER WORLD
RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION 35Rich: A triumphant reimagining of
Capcom’s excellent series that looks
gorgeous and delivers some of the best
co-op you’ll ever see. Incredible combat
with huge depth, spectacular monsters
and environments, and there’s so much of
it. You never want this game to end.
Wes: The 2020 expansion Iceborne adds
an endgame zone you can spend months
in and a vastly streamlined gathering hub
for multiplayer. It’s everything I didn’t know
I needed in the base game.45
HALF-LIFE:
ALYX
RELEASED 2020 | LAST POSITION 20Chris: One of the few blockbuster games
built from the ground up for VR, and
certainly the best and most beautiful.
Whatever Valve did under the hood with
the game’s locomotion, it’s easily the most
comfortable VR game, one that I could
play for hours at a time without feeling the
nausea or headaches VR usually gives me
after about 40 minutes. Plus, it cleverly
rewrote some Half-Life lore that’s been on
the books for a decade, priming us for
whatever comes next.47
THE JACKBOX
PART Y PACK 7RELEASED 2020 | LAST POSITION New
Robin: I don’t think there
exists a better digital
icebreaker than a good
round of Jackbox. It’s
brilliantly accessible
- anyone who can work a
smartphone can join in - and adapts wonderfully
to the sense of humour of
whatever group you’ve
assembled. Family
gatherings, drunken
parties, or lunchtime in
the office – it does it all.
48
SPELUNKY 2RELEASED 2020 | LAST POSITION New
Evan: Depth, literally and
figuratively. Creator Derek
Yu calls it “spiky”, a label
that describes many of the
things you can impale
yourself upon as well as the
emotional highs and lows
its teeming, subterranean
universe produces. A great
spectator game,
Spelunky 2 ’s streaming
and YouTube community is
full of experimentation and
unbelievable feats.
49
KERBAL SPACE
PROGRAMRELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 40
Phil: Build rockets and
send them into space. Or,
just as likely, fail because of
a disastrous flaw with your
design. Kerbal Space
Program takes all the
complicated maths needed
to successfully hurl
functional machines out of
a planet’s atmosphere and
presents them in a way
that celebrates creativity,
expression and fun. There’s
still nothing quite like it.
The Top 100
FE ATURE
Rachel: First released back in February
2019, Devotion was available on Steam for
only six days before it was hit with an
infamous review-bombing. Determined to
re-release the game, Red Candle put it
back up for sale this year.
Sharing many similarities to Konami’s
claustrophobic house in P.T, Devotion is a
story about a family living in a small 1980s
apartment in Taiwan, each member having
their own personal demons dragged out
into the house’s stark fluorescent lighting.
Everything kicks off after the daughter
contracts a mysterious illness, which
causes the desperate father to tumble
into a spiral of paranoia and misplacedspiritualism. What’s great about
Devotion is that there are no literal
monsters, the game is more
interested in how the troubled
headspaces of a family can seep into
the physical space of a home. It’s not
often we get to see the exploration of a
person’s religious faith, and seeing how
Red Candle has used that to create an
insidious story of family tragedy is like no
other horror game I’ve played. It’s a horror
tale that actually cares about its
characters, and together with artful
sequences and spine-chilling moments,
it’s truly one of the best horror stories of all
time. A game that was well worth the wait.