What Do You Think is the Most Underrated Game of 2018?
COMMUNITY QUESTION | What game do you think deserved more attention than it got?
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Wow! December is almost over. Or at least, for us it is. After next week, we'll be peacing out for the holidays, enjoying some hot toddies and binge eating all our advent calendar chocolate because we forgot to eat it the whole month. We hope that you too will enjoy the holidays!
But it's not the end yet, as close as it may be. Earlier this week, Caty cooked up a list of the 20 Best Games You Probably Missed in 2018, spotlighting everything from indies to bigger budget titles that evaded most acclaim. Of course, it's impossible to catch all of them in one go, so we'd like to turn the question over to you now: What is your favorite underrated game of the year, and why?
Nadia Oxford, Staff Writer
I want to give a shout-out to Forgotton Anne, a weird but heartfelt puzzle-action game about the things we forget under the bed (except for the monsters; the monsters never let us forget them). Though its controls and mechanics are a touch clumsy at times, Forgotton Anne showed me a great weekend with its great voice acting, solid storytelling, and darkly beautiful visuals. As much as I enjoy it, Forgotton Anne is easy to, well, forget in a market full of 100-hour triple-A releases. If you're looking for a whimsical and odd puzzle game to keep you occupied for a few days, I give it an easy recommendation.
Matt Kim, News Editor
I think the most underrated game of the year for 2018 is Frostpunk, 11-bit Studios' apocalyptic city-builder sim. Set in a world not to dissimilar from Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer players are tasked with keeping their citizens alive in the nuclear winter by building a fortified community around an ancient heater. It's stressful, and there will be hard choices to be made, but survive the winter and every sacrifice will have been worth it.
Caty McCarthy, Features Editor
As you may have seen, I made a whole list of underrated games this year! I definitely forgot a bunch—as one harsh person on Twitter reminded us of the absence of CrossCode (I'm sorry)—but I think I highlighted a solid array of games from 2018. Chief among them though is One Hour One Life, which my non-work-related podcast co-host was raving about earlier this year. It's a multiplayer game in which everyone lives through a life. At the start, everyone is basically cave-people, but as a collective multiplayer community, society and technology has advanced. When you're born in the game, you are a baby who can't do much, and an adult must take care of you.
The catch is: that adult is another player, and eventually, you will probably cycle into the same fate of parenting. It's a very unique concept, though the game itself is pretty obtuse (and it requires pretty much an hour of your time every time you pick it up, unless you get murdered—which totally happens unfortunately). But it's like nothing else I've touched this year, and with its developer adding new things to the game every week, I can't wait to see how One Hour One Life evolves over time.