Goodness, it's been a while since the last one of these, hasn't it? It seems every time I've gone to write a Game of the Year blog, I end up putting far more focus into my annual music post that this gets left to the side and eventually forgotten. Did y'all even know that Bayonetta 2 was my game of the year for 2014? It's true! And Tearaway the year before that! I'm sure you're all shocked, I'll give you some time to recover before we move on proper. ... All set? Good.

I'm sitting in the Montréal bus depot right now, waiting for my ride to New Hampshire for a short Christmas getaway. It suddenly got crowded, they're playing Christmas music, and the man sitting next to me is frustrated that the outlets here do not accept European power plugs. The conditions are perfect for me to write a blog. Also, like, I'm kind of hungry? I should fix that and just go to the coffee shop and grab something to eat but that would mean giving my seat away and fuck that, I've got an outlet! (Worth noting, I've revised my edits and I am no longer at the bus station. I'm sorry for the confusion in narrative.)

At any rate, here are the ten games I played this year that left quite a mark on me, in order of importance from rather cool to confirmed cool.

Fuck you, I like Destiny. I’ve always kind of liked Destiny. And you know what? The Taken King is good. It’s really, really good. The content in it is fantastic, the tweaks they’ve done to the 2.0 version of the base game are great, and the overall package feels so much more complete. It sucks it took a year for the game to become what it probably should have been from the start but I had fun with the game and that’s all that matters to me.

It was a game I put on while catching up on podcasts or to hang with friends. It was the new social joint, much like MMOs were for me in the past. I like Destiny a whole lot and the moments I had with The Taken King merit its spot on this list.

I'm... kind of amazed Cities: Skylines is a game I'm including on this list? Amazed in that I didn't expect this game to have the kind of impact on me that it did. I OBSESSED over it during its launch and for weeks after. Despite its slightly unintuitive UI, Cities: Skylines was a game I immediately felt comfortable in despite not having played a city builder since Sim City 2000. (Which even then, most of my time was spent inside of SCURK and not the game itself.) It didn't take me long to figure out zoning, power, water, all the resources necessary to make my first dumb little town.

And it failed. Miserably. My town got sick because I didn't take water flow into account and my entire population was poisoned by drinking their own poop. I then started a new town. It went a little better, but traffic was a problem. I started looking into mods, new buildings to add, traffic adjustment tools, new maps, new lighting options, new rewards to build when I achieved milestones. I start looking into posts by civil engineers who organize city streets for efficient traffic flow, seeing what lessons I could take from that to apply into my own game. I started looking at real-world locations, wondering if I could reproduce any of it as best I could.

And when my time with the game had passed, the fire was kept alive inside me by its community. I'd check into the Cities: Skylines subreddit, see posts by other users of the cool cities they had built or the neat tricks they had discovered. I'd read thread replies by the developers actively listening to community members, replying to them promptly and offering the best support they could to players and modders alike. Watching it kept me into the game despite not having touched it in days, and it's something that continues on now. Every day, I'll pop in and see what cool new stuff people have build and made.

Her Story ended up being a binge game for me. I had heard enough good things about it that I decided yep, this was a game I was going to buy, come home to, eat dinner, sit down, and play from start to finish. Two hours later, I got up from my chair, a notebook full of scribbled notes and garbage that largely led to unresolved theories but all pointed me in the right directions. The trash-tier detective work led me to uncover a story that legitimately took me by surprise, subverting the plot twist I was sure it was preparing to unfold.

This is the same praise you’ll hear from anyone else who’s mentioned Her Story on their personal lists: the non-linear progression of the game’s plot is not just presented through a well-realised mechanic, but also gave me a sense of ownership to my discoveries. I did the detective work and I uncovered that video that led to a major breakthrough. It was all there, ready to be discovered, the but the steps that led me to that were 100% of my own doing through interpreting what I believed to be the leading suspect or motive in the investigation. I stepped away from it not just with a huge amount of respect for its mechanics but also for allowing me to feel that. Few games of this style do so this succinctly.

I feel weird including Yakuza 5 on this list because I still have three more characters to play. I feel weird because there's so much content left for me to see when I've completed nearly every other game on this list.

But you know what? I don't feel that weird about it. I don't because what I've played of Yakuza 5, somewhere around 30 hours, I've had more fun with it than most other games I've played this year. It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of the series and have waited a considerable amount of time to play the game, despite @Pepsiman's cruel messages of him playing through the Japanese release three years ago. It felt so good to start the game up and see familiar faces again, walking around the streets of Nagasuguai, hearing the chatter of pedestrians as they walked by and walking into an M-Store to see whatever magazines they had on sale. The familiar felt comforting. I'm back in a place I've loved to be through every iteration of the series. I'm back in a place I love to be.

And atmosphere and all that aside, the new stuff added to the game is great. I mean, it's way silly—I spent the majority of my time in the game riving taxi cabs and hunting bears—but it's great. The combat is still a ton of fun, the writing and localization is still excellent, and the Yakuza "experience" is still exactly what you want it to be. It's more of the same in every way I wanted it to be and what's new is so ridiculous and fun that I can't help but throw my arms up in the air and go "Yup! This is all dumb and great. I'm into it."

I really, really don’t have time to play many games anymore. Less so games that take north of 60 hours to complete, side-quests be damned. The Witcher 3 made my resolution early in the year to "beat every game I start" a real fucker.

But I persevered. 70-some-odd hours later, I had beaten the game. I refused to play any other game while I still had The Witcher 3 going, I refused to start anything else until I had beat it. Work kept me busy and so did contract work so it ended up taking me three months to get 70 hours of play time in but I did and… y’all, that game.

There’s… there’s just so much I could talk about. The Witcher 3 was a game that no matter how long a stretch I played, be it 30 minutes or 3 hours, I came across something that would have me stop and just think to myself “Wow, how is this possible.” Sometimes it was the beautiful scenery and graphics, sometimes it was the quest dialogue and plot lines, sometimes it was character moments or random occurrences in the game’s many cities and woods. The Witcher 3, no matter how long I played, felt like an absolute treasure trove of notable moments. Like at every turn, some scripted AAA-tier shit was waiting for me.

More often than not, it was far more subdued than that but I’m struggling to pull specific examples because there were just. So. Many. There isn’t a game I played for longer this year, nor one that I actually remember more of than The Witcher 3. It’s a brilliant open-world game, one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played, and quite possibly the most complete, polished game I will ever put my hands on. It feels like such a monumentally complete game that it shouldn’t exist, but it does, and I’m really fucking thankful for that.

Bloodborne is my favorite Souls game.

If you’re super invested in the series, I’m sure this comes as some fucking crazy statement to most of you but straight up: Bloodborne is, to me, the Souls games at their purest. It’s missing so much from Dark Souls and Dark Souls II, things that made those games excellent and endlessly replayable, but that’s not what appealed to me in the Souls series. What I loved was its atmosphere, the lore, the combat, and its creature/boss design, and Bloodborne has all of that in a tight, refined way that completely clicked with me. It might be the reduced scope in events and characters, it might be the setting, it might be the more elaborate and explicit means of conveying lore and story—I don’t know. Whatever it is, the lore of Bloodborne clicked with me infinitely more. I was invested my entire way through, in a way I was nowhere near close to being with Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls or DSII.

The lack of variable builds in Bloodborne is a bit of a let down, I’ll admit. There’s less of a free-form approach to what kind of weapons you want to wield because in the end, your combat tactics stay relatively similar. It was a bit of a shock as someone who stuck to pikes and shields in all of Dark Souls but I grew to appreciate and love it. The speed of Bloodborne’s combat is fast, fluid, (despite the framerate) and a fucking godsend of viceralness. It feels incredible. I went back to Bloodborne during my Extra Life stream after having played Dark Souls II a few hours before after the few minutes it took me to find my footing, I immediately felt back at home. The speed, the intensity, the preciseness… I missed all of it. I missed it all so much and I love it all so much.

I could go on, especially about the world and enemy design, but I don’t know how long I want this list to go. Bloodborne isn’t a huge step forward in the series. It’s actually a step back in a lot of ways. It did some new things, changed a lot of other things, and ultimately feels like a branch off instead of a step forward.

What it set to accomplish might not have resonated with a ton of die-hard Souls fans but it really, really did with me. I love Bloodborne and while I might not go back to it like I will Demon’s or DSII, it’s easily my favorite entry to date.

A hunter is a hunter, even in a dream~

This is a very, very difficult one to write because it’s probably the most subjective entry on this list. I could go into great lengths about how and why The Beginner’s Guide resonates with me but it would involve diving into several other topics, which are covered in the game itself, that I don’t think this is the right place for.

By now, you likely know that The Beginner’s Guide is a 90-minute monologue by, and about, Davey Wreden, the creator of the game itself. It’s a monologue about the thoughts behind game design and the mental space of a game developer. It’s also a linear narrative about depression, validation, selfishness, and self-deprication.

It’s a game I relate to in a deeply personal way. Like, right to my core. Some of you who follow me outside Giant Bomb have likely been through some of my depressive episodes, most of which are due to my issues with validation and understanding of my artwork. The Beginner’s Guide isn’t just a game that explores the psyche of a person, it’s also a game that for the first time, I could play and realise, with tears welling up in my eyes, that I wasn’t alone in having these crushing, horrible thoughts. It doesn’t have a solution or an answer. It barely has an explanation. The Beginner’s Guide is just there for me to feel like I’m understood, even if it is in no way about me.

I did an Extra Life stream this year alongside community personalities @matt and @crispy, where a couple hours in we found ourselves playing Rocket League and out of nowhere, mid-way through the match, I had the realisation that if I was to make as “objective” a list as possible… I’d probably put Rocket League as this year’s best game.

I’m not super into the idea of saying that for a multiplayer-only game because a lot of the time, those games live and die by being able to play with friends. Rocket League is a rare exception to the rule, a game so pure in its formula that it’s 100% enjoyable alone, for hours on end or in quick bursts between other tasks. Its controls are precise and fun, its mechanics are simple and easily accessible, its depth is all about skill development and situational awareness, and the cars have hats. THE CARS HAVE HATS. Nearly everything I could pick apart about Rocket League is just done with a polish and perfection unlike any other game. Its music is great, its presentation is top-tier, its developer support has been stellar, and its host of options for custom matches are plentiful.

Rocket League is the kind of game I want to show to all my friends and family, proud of how silly, simple, and fun games can be. It’s this year’s best game, even if it isn’t my personal favorite, and I can’t wait to play hours and hours more of it in the year to come.

I don’t want to talk about SOMA.

I don’t want to talk about SOMA because it examines a topic that fucking terrifies me. It terrifies me to shit and SOMA doesn’t just talk about it, it preys on it.

The conversation about humanity and artificial intelligence is a well-worn one. A sci-fi trope that’s been used again and again, often to wax philosophical about what it means to “be” and as an allegory for class structure. It’s a topic covered in very broad strokes by nearly all of its subjects, yet so rarely covered in a way that’s truly… human.

That’s what SOMA is. SOMA isn’t about the bigger picture, it’s about the personal and human point of view. It’s not about the philosophical meanings or interpretations, it’s about fear. It’s about clinging desperately to the hope that we will continue to be who we are, a fear so vivid in my mind that it’s kept me awake for nights-on-end.

I really don’t want to say more because if you can get past the awful monster/stealth sequences, there’s a truly horrifying game lying underneath. It made my blood run cold and the ending made me cry, not because it was a Bioware-tier emotional buildup but because I was scared in a way that horror games just don’t manage to.

I don’t want to talk about SOMA anymore. It’s incredible and it has probably the best ending I’ve ever seen in a video game.

I’m on my flight back from San Francisco, a short little vacation I took for myself after PAX Prime. I’m sitting at my gate, waiting for the flight to board. It’s early, I’ve got my laptop open, and I decide to dive into the fresh save of Hacknet I started the night before. I fiddle around with the tutorial missions but my flight’s boarding. Time to go.

I get to my connecting flight in Chicago. Once again, I’m sitting at the airport gate, this time for a much longer duration. “Sure, I’ll play more Hacknet” I tell myself. I flip open my laptop and dive into some more objectives. A couple minutes, I get the objective to hack into a rival hacker’s network in an effort to see what he’s been up to. Hacknet’s punchy, atmospheric soundtrack plays in the background as I hack into his terminals but he catches me! My screen flashes red, error messages scroll across the screen and my OS gets wiped. My computer reboots back into nothing but a terminal command prompt. I’m sitting at my airport gate, looking around me, instinctively thinking “Fuck, I can’t let anyone see this! They’ll see what the fuck I’m up to over here!”

The gate attendant calls for passengers to prepare for boarding and I look up in a cold sweat, only to calm down and realise... it's just a game. My heart rate slows down, my palms become less sweaty, my shoulders stop tensing up.

Hacknet is by no means an incredible game and maybe this is because of the specific context I played it in, but no game this year made me feel like more of a badass. Like I was in complete control of some really fucking cool shit. It was some of the most fun I’ve had this year, the ending sequence was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in a game, and its soundtrack had me listening to playlists of it for weeks after. It might not be for everyone but Hacknet is, without a doubt, my favorite game from this year. It didn't make me feel strong emotions, it didn't introduce some really revolutionary game mechanics. All it did was just be at the right place, at the right time, for me and give me a really fucking cool experience.