(My trigger, oddly enough, was the song “Only You” as sung by The Platters and I’ll give the game’s composer credit for incorporating the melody into the incidental music in clever, unconventional ways.)
You can read what I had to say about it in the link at the beginning of this paragraph, but what finally demolished my enthusiasm for the game (and has left it lingering in my Steam cloud, unplayed since probably May) was its insistence on yanking me out of its open world and sending me off on hallucinatory missions triggered by post-hypnotic suggestion. Yes, it had almost all the elements that I enjoy in Ubisoft’s carefully crafted formula, but more than a few that I don’t. I wrote about this game far too enthusiastically back in April. Everybody loves a listicle, so I’ll just list them here with commentary. I don’t want 2018 to slip any further behind me before I say at least a little about the most interesting, if not necessarily the best, games among them. Still, I played quite a few games in 2018 and even enjoyed some of them, though most of the ones I’d expected to love were, to one degree or another, disappointments. Frankly, the year was all downhill from there (or before there, but you get what I mean). One game in 2018 stood out so prominently from the crowd that I wrote an entire post nominating it as the Game of the Year and possibly of the decade.