F.E.A.R.

In recent years, it strikes me that the larger video game devs have become a bit too arrogant for their own good. The strategy is to throw enough money at a franchise until it becomes the golden standard for the genre (think Call of Duty, Resident Evil) and then you don’t even need to bother with innovation. Just put a shitload more work into the trailer than into the game itself, tweak one or two things from the last game so that you can justify a full retail price, and slap the franchise name on it in as big a font as you can manage and sit back while the profits roll in.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise then that for the most part, the best games of the past decade have been new intellectual properties from a fledgling developer who can only get their foot in th...