The 10 best video games of 2015

By Verge Staff
on December 19, 2015 11:30 am

You can tell 2015 was a great year for new video games by the titles that didn’t make this list. It was a year that saw inventive new mobile games like Prune and Alto’s Adventure, and much-anticipated blockbusters like Star Wars Battlefront andMetal Gear Solid V. There were even plenty of wonderful surprises like Until Dawn,Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, andCibele. Those games aren’t on this list — which was voted on by various members ofThe Verge's staff — but the titles we did choose show the breadth of what games can be. Whether its massive open worlds, playful multiplayer experiences, or small, personal stories, the medium can cover a lot of ground. These are the 10 best games from the past 12 months.

Batman: Arkham Knight

PC, PS4, Xbox One

The power fantasy at the heart of Batman: Arkham Knight remains one of the most seductive in all of gaming: spend enough time brawling, blasting, and winching, and you can liberate an entire metropolis with a single tool belt and tank. (Seriously, you’re going to be doing a lot of winching.) You can spend hours soaring above Gotham’s skyline, tuning into radio dispatches from friends and foes alike. No one can touch you. If you hear a bunch of thugs wailing on a captive or daring to insult the Caped Crusader, you can swoop in and show them the cost of tempting fate. The city is your oyster.

The combo-heavy combat system that birthed a dozen action-adventure knock-offs remains fluid and physical, and the deep bench full of various Batman villains helps to liven up what would otherwise be boilerplate beat ‘em up side quests. Like its predecessors in Rocksteady’s Arkham series, Arkham Knight understands that Batman’s toughest battles are mental; there’s no villain more dangerous than the darkness looming in Bruce Wayne’s mind. Arkham Knight’s treatment of that truth is heavy-handed, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.

Bloodborne

PS4

Bloodborne isn’t like most modern games. It doesn’t ease you into the experience, slowly teaching you the rules and giving you time to understand its complex systems. It doesn’t put you in the role of a super-powered hero capable of taking down dangerous beasts with ease. Instead, it casts you as a regular person and throws you into a gothic world of violence and despair. And then it kills you, over and over.

Bloodborne’s unforgiving nature is a large part of its appeal. The spiritual successor to theDark Souls series, it’s a game where every victory feels hard won. The bosses are huge, grotesque monstrosities that will take every ounce of your skill to defeat, but even the standard enemies — the plague-inflicted inhabitants of Yharnam — can kill you.Bloodborne forces you to learn how it works, and then tests your knowledge in the most brutal ways possible. It’s a game where you will die a lot — but that only makes your eventual victory all the more satisfying.

Destiny: The Taken King

PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One

Telling people you liked to play Destiny used to feel a little like confessing you smoked cigarettes: it was an addictive habit, one you couldn’t really justify and were always trying to quit. That finally changed with the release of Destiny: The Taken King, an expansion that built on vanilla Destiny’s solid gameplay skeleton and fulfilled the promise of Bungie’s ambitious, galactic FPS-MMORPG.

When you list all of the ways in which The Taken King improved the Destiny experience, it sounds like you’re just finding another way to make fun of the game. There are real characters and non-terrible dialogue, bosses that are more than just bullet sponges, levels that ask you to do more than kill stuff while you scan doors and platforms, a leveling and gear system that rewards normal play instead of encouraging grinding, a robot companion with real personality. Add up all of those potentially humorous additions and toss in dashes of space lightning and flaming hammers, and the product is a game that’s better than ever and continuously evolving.

Downwell

iOS, PC

The best action game of the year is about falling down a well. The aptly named Downwellis thrilling in its apparent simplicity: your only real goals are to make it to the bottom and not die in the process. The fact that it looks like a game from 20 years ago only makes it appear even simpler. But once you start playing, Downwell slowly opens itself up and becomes something much more complex. At the beginning it feels like a twitchy game, one where fast reflexes are what will keep you alive, and where the best route to the bottom is the fastest one.

The more you play, though, the more you realize Downwell is about strategy and planning. Knowing how different enemies react and can be killed, and upgrading your character in just the right way, are just as important as pure speed. Every item and skill is more than what it seems. Your main weapon is a pair of boots that shoot bullets when you jump, for instance, but they also double as a way to control your downward descent. Downwelleventually turns into a never-ending loop, one where you’re constantly searching for the best possible way to make it to the end of the terrible, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired well.

Fallout 4

PC, PS4, Xbox One

Fallout 4 is a sprawling, complicated game, one whose greatest pleasures are simple and plentiful. You stumble on a new, mysterious location, and you’re gifted with a ping and a little experience bump. You target a foolhardy raider’s

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