Sampled a lot of bad games this year, couldn't finish most of them. Won't stop me from voting though!
The Quest (Valiant effort at an old-school dungeon crawler, but the UI is still
way too clunky; even Frayed Knights let you assign hotkeys to active abilities instead of forcing you to page through the menus and manually select a spell/portion/wand every single time you want to use them. Feels like the early 1990s again, and not in a good way. The weirdest thing is that you can only interact with containers that are positioned on the left side of your viewscreen; if you click on a barrel that's on the right side of the screen, you always swing your weapon at thin air instead. Probably a legacy of the phone UI, but terribly odd. In-combat options are also pretty limited; I want to do more than just spam the attack button 20 times or cast the same spell 10 times in a row. Most monsters just drop gold coins on death, and every gold drop takes three clicks to pick up. Just wastes my time. Meanwhile, the setting is quite boring, and the writing is pretty terrible as well. One of the game's biggest positive points is that many quests offer multiple solutions, usually along the good/evil binary. Dungeon design is also pretty good compared to the snoozefests we get from mainstream games nowadays.)
WL2: DC (Now with more bugs, horrible VO, weird undocumented changes, and mod tools that nobody seems to be using. Might become better than the standard edition by 2017.)
Dead State Reanimated (They had one job - fix the way-too-late trigger date for the end game - and they failed.)
Hard West (Unbalanced as hell and quite easy, but with a great atmosphere and good mission variety. Handcrafted missions are the way to go for tactics games. Surprisingly good flavour text too. Unfortunately, the basic combat gameplay is a bit too shallow; it became repetitive about halfway through, and this is not a long game.)
Legends of Scheissenwald (Actually quite good, with an interesting tactical movement system. The main problem is the combination of a long campaign, a limited sense of progression [including a few hard resets over the course of the campaign] and low unit variety, which makes combat feel repetitive far too quickly. The legends are cool though, and the writing is "unique" but entertaining.)
Renowned Explorers (off-putting aesthetics and repetitive gameplay, but offers 2-3 hours of fun)
BG2 (No.)
InvInc (repetitive and boring, sorry Codex fanclub)
Mordheim (A tactical squad game with no ability hotkeys, a silly "cycle through abilities and targets with the Q and E keys" UI, and no option for click-to-move. Poster child for consolitis. I don't see the point of the 3rd person camera here either -- did they think it would sell better? Staring at the laborious attack animations got tiresome after five minutes. Isometric would have fit the gameplay much better.)
AoD (Innovative and fun. Impressive post-release support.)
Voidspire Tactics (Slightly less innovative, slightly more fun. Good exploration, good character system, good combat, fun environmental interactions [games with lightning+water puddle combos are always worth playing], and a strong sense of atmosphere. Biggest weakness is the rather too old school "put items in bags, put the bags in bigger bags, and put the bigger bags in giant bags" inventory system. Dialogue is sparse, but the game doesn't hinge on its writing anyway.)
WiWiH (High water mark for mainstream writing in a video game. Full of entertaining quests with multiple choices, although the consequences are a bit too light for my taste. Lousy combat. Terrible itemization. Still getting new features and UI improvements through patches.)
Underrail (Good exploration and above-average combat, but a host of annoying and time-wasting design elements drags the game down; too many loading screens when travelling, eye cancer-inducing UI, terminally slow walking speed, respawning trash mobs, a stealth mode that offers massive benefits in exchange for walking reaaaaaally sloooowly, RNG-based quest rewards and loot, broken economy, wildly overpowered crafting systems, and a cooldown-based combat system that encourages repetitive gameplay. I would've greatly preferred Voidspire's approach here, where actions have execution times and need to be chosen according to the current situation - e.g. if an enemy unit gets its turn in 6 time units, then you don't use a grenade that takes 7 time units to explode. Or maybe you do use a grenade, but against an otherwise lower-priority enemy that will only be able to act in 8 turns. But maybe the unit that acts in 6 turns has an ability to push live grenades away... But maybe making him use that ability is better than giving him a chance to attack you... That kind of system is a much better fit for turn based combat imho.)
PilloE: (I actually liked the combat, but everything else was deeply meh. Grade only applicable to the pre-2.0 version. So many elements of the gameplay are being changed in patches that the game still feels like a work in progress, and I can't be arsed to replay it anytime soon. I'll assign the final grade to White March next year.)
SHoKo (If you want to cram this much dialogue into your game, you better make sure it's worth reading.)
Undertale (Three problems. One: I think metafiction should open up new avenues of insight into the relationship between people and art. Unfortunately, yakking about ludonarrative dissonance is not a new avenue anymore; I get bored just thinking about it. Thus, the game's "WOW I'M PULLING THE RUG OUT FROM UNDER YOU, GAME CHANGED MOTHERFUCKER" gimmick just annoys me. Two: the writing is clever enough, but it plays with infantile affectations in a way that I found violently annoying; "aw momma givez a hug" "lol the flowa is evil!" "uhhm mr sadghost seems real socially awkward-like", and so on. The game's "deeper" meta-elements hinge on the idea that you find this type of writing charming and emotionally resonant - otherwise, it all falls apart. Three: Bloody hell, that gameplay. Walk around, find encounter, navigate nested menus with Z, X, and arrow keys, select "Hug", get cute response, do bullet hell, navigate menus again, select "Hug" again, get slightly different cute response, do bullet hell again, and again, and again, and again. No thank you.)
SitS (Good aspects: the setting is pretty unique, and the puzzles are better than the rest of the gameplay. Bad aspects: the rest of the gameplay. Worst combat system I've played since... no, I cannot remember a worse combat system. Game is too large in scope for what the designers could deliver, leading to oversized areas clogged with respawning trash mobs. Simple, yet badly unbalanced rule system that looks more complex than it is, featuring descriptions like "1d1 + 1 damage" and mechanics like "lower Speed is faster". Inexplicably long loading screens. Still has bugs out the wazoo 9 months after launch. Quests feel weirdly unpolished. One example: a street urchin steals your ID papers at an inn. Later, you find the guy who looks after these urchins. You cannot talk to him about the theft, and you cannot pickpocket your papers back even with maxed out skill. The only way to get them is to kill the guy, based on the hunch that he might have the papers, and then loot them off his corpse. Who designs a quest like that? Why not even offer the option to ask the guy? Mind boggling.)
Victor Vran (Mediocre hack 'n slash. If I have to grade it in the same category as AoD and Voidspire, this is the grade it gets. Hearing Witcher Geralt's voice actor on other characters feels weird.)
Bloodlust: Shadowhunter (Super-low-budget hack 'n slash with vampires.)
THEA: The Awakening (Zzzzzzzz)
Despite the flood of trash this year, AoD, Voidspire, and Witcher 3 are really quite good compared to the usual mediocrity. I can comfortably pronounce 2015 a better RPG year than 2014.