2015 hid its best ideas in sequels

2015 is easy to remember as a year of rereleases. Under that, five games each bet the session on a single rule. Bloodborne, from FromSoftware, turns the heal into a dare: you get the health back by attacking. Metal Gear Solid V, from Kojima Productions, pays you for letting a soldier live. Splatoon, from Nintendo, makes the ground you shoot the ground you swim through.

Ori and the Blind Forest, and Life is Strange from Dontnod, are the other two, and they are not the same kind of idea. Ori makes the save point a place you choose, so safety is a resource. Life is Strange lets you rewind a conversation you already regret. None of these needed a new genre. Each one took a familiar verb and gave it a second job. That is the part worth stealing, not the release calendar.

2015 leaned hard on the back catalog. Remakes, remasters and rereleases carried the calendar. Saints Row IV, Resident Evil, Majora's Mask, the Borderlands games, Devil May Cry 4, DmC, Rare's archive, Journey. God of War 3, Dark Souls 2, Final Fantasy Type-0, Final Fantasy X and X-2. The Uncharted trilogy, Darksiders 2, Tearaway, Dishonored, Gears of War and Xenoblade Chronicles.

None of those needed to be cancelled to make room for something else. Still, when that many studios spend a year facing backwards, it is reasonable to ask who is left pointing forwards.

The answer turned out to be plenty of people. Some of what shipped was a headline system. Some was a single small verb. Some was just a decision that made a well-worn genre move differently under the hands.

Five of those ideas are worth pulling apart.

Bloodborne answers the question of how to make a defensive action RPG aggressive, and its answer is the regain system. Take a hit, and for a short window you can claw that health back by landing attacks.

The design goal came first. This was another dark, punishing action RPG from a studio with a reputation for combat, and it wanted to feel less cautious than Dark Souls. So the shield went away, and the recovery window went in.

What changes is the reflex. The trained instinct after a hit is to retreat, raise a guard, or burn one of a limited stock of healing items. Regain makes stepping forward the tempting option instead.

The danger in that is the point. Rash play is exactly what kills you in these games, so every hit sets up a small emotional trap: panic pushing one way, the chance of winning the fight back pulling the other.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain makes sparing a guard pay, and the Fulton Recovery System is how. The device predates this game, but this is the one where a lot of players felt how good it was.

Any guard who is asleep, stunned, or surrendering can be clipped to a balloon, yanked into the sky, and shipped to Mother Base. Animals and vehicles go up too, though it is the guards that make the system interesting.

Non-lethal play has always been a hard sell mechanically. Tranquilised and knocked-out guards wake up again, so unless you are hunting a particular achievement, a quiet kill is usually the tidier option.

The Phantom Pain fixes that with an incentive rather than a rule. A soldier with good stats is worth something to you back at base, which is a reason to sedate him, drag him somewhere his colleagues will not look, and send him up. A daft balloon ends up applying real pressure to the whole stealth loop.

Splatoon's central idea is not ink and it is not the squid. It is the circuit between them: firing and moving are the same system seen from two ends.

Shoot ink and you lay down a path. Swim that path as a squid and you travel fast while the tank refills. A full tank is more ink to shoot, which is more path to swim.

Plenty of games hand you several mechanics. Far fewer make two different ways of touching the world feed each other this directly. You are never shooting for a stretch and then moving for a stretch; each one is the fuel for the other.

The result is that a firefight, a route, a puzzle, and a boss all ask the same juggling act at once: territory, ammo, speed, and position. That is why it is not a shooter with paint standing in for bullets. The paint changes what moving means.

Ori and the Blind Forest hands the checkpoint decision to the player, and that turns saving into a tactic. Space checkpoints far apart and a lost fight costs a long stretch of progress. Pack them close and the stakes evaporate.

The compromise is soul links. The game keeps some automatic save spots, but you can also spend energy to drop a checkpoint of your own, wherever you decide it belongs.

So the amount of safety you carry is yours to set. Save at every calm ledge if you want to. Or hold on and enter a nasty platforming stretch knowing what a mistake will cost.

That is not quick save with extra steps. Energy is finite and it also powers your strongest attacks, so a checkpoint is bought at the expense of something else. Saving stops being background housekeeping and joins the list of real decisions.

Life is Strange builds rest into the pacing, and it does it with one small verb: Max can sit down. In a story about murder, bullying, suicide attempts, and abuse, that is not a throwaway interaction.

Sitting gives her room to turn events over. The soundtrack comes up, the camera drifts between quiet shots, and nothing moves until you decide she stands and walks back into it.

The scene is doing more than pausing the action. It is telling the player it is fine to stop for a moment.

Nothing about that is specific to story-led adventure games. Unbroken intensity wears players out. Strong games tend to build in slack somewhere: quiet rooms, slow routes, stretches where you can settle without having to quit to get a break.

What links these five is not scale or genre. It is that each one is a designer taking a practical problem and answering it with a single focused mechanic.

Bloodborne pays you for aggression by letting you take health back. Metal Gear Solid V makes mercy worth something by wiring it to base growth. Splatoon folds shooting and movement into one loop. Ori prices checkpoints against your other options. Life is Strange treats quiet as part of the emotional pacing, not a gap in it.

None of them earns its place by being elaborate. Each earns it by moving player behavior in the direction the rest of the game needs.

That is usually where the good stuff sits: not in a long feature list, but in one system that leans the player toward the feeling, rhythm, or decision the game is built around. You cannot tell from the design document whether the lean is working. You find that out by getting a build running and playing it.

Steal one rule, not five. In the Flockbay app, name the rule in a sentence: healing only works if you strike back, or a shot paints a path you can then travel. Ask for a single encounter that is boring if you play it the ordinary way. Play that encounter and see whether you reach for the new rule without being told.

A character-action template fits the Bloodborne dare. The AI soulslike maker is a reasonable place to ask for it.