2) South Park: The Stick of Truth
Some look at South Park and see it as a crudely animated excuse for teaching kids to swear, but those who regularly watch the Trey Parker and Matt Stone-helmed phenomenon know differently. While, to the uninformed, the series looks to be crass and unintelligent, the truth is that it’s full of smart satire. The naysayers will never see that, though, because their ignorance prevents them from actually understanding what they’re seeing in the five-minute snippets they complain about.
Since the late 1990s, South Park has attempted to bridge into gaming with varying levels of success. This year was different, though, because the men and women at Obsidian Entertainment did their homework, put in many gallons of blood, sweat and tears, and presented the industry with an unexpectedly great gift: South Park: The Stick of Truth. At the time, we were unsure of what to expect, but now that it’s the end of 2014, we can’t stop thinking about the game as being one of the year’s best and deserving of a spot on our Game of the Year list.
The Stick of Truth has resonated within us, and succeeded in general, because it expertly translated the show to interactive space. Playing through its RPG-inspired gameplay and exploring its detail-filled representation of the titular town made us feel as if we were participating in a lengthy episode. Not only that, but there was a seemingly endless supply of homages to popular events from the show itself, many of which appeared as collectible inventory items that could be sold to help fund weapon and armor purchases.
Of course, it helped that the core gameplay, with its turn-based combat and accessible exploration mechanics, was very well designed. If that hadn’t of been the case, then we wouldn’t be talking about it in this light, but we are.
Thank you, Obsidian, for giving us the South Park game that we’d only dreamed about before.
