Games this year that you recommend others play, which you believe may have not gotten a lot of (or enough) attention?

I pose the question, but I pose it because I'm asking you to tell me a game in which you think others and I should play, in which you feel didn't get a lot of peoples attention. I don't personally have a recommendation. I feel the case may be that the answer is going to be a smaller project, rather than a bigger one, like Titanfall 2, Doom, or Uncharted 4 if you will. If I could mention one, it would still be Jotun, which I've recommended in the past a handful of times, though it didn't come out this year other than on consoles (it first released on PC last year). It has great art, a great soundtrack, and great and challenging boss battles. One game I hadn't played in which I can see someone recommend is Abzu. Lastly, I know it sounds somewhat disrespectful, but don't take into account others personal taste in games this time when first commenting (so there's no 'we don't know what you like/played' kind of comments), simply say what you liked and feel deserves more attention from players. People will decide as they read. If you are able to, please say why you recommend it instead of just the name of the game. I've played good games this year, but I hope to expand the list. Alright, thank you! Have a happy holiday everyone!

Titanfall 2 for PC. Not Xbox One. Not PS4. PC. We need more players! It's not dead, but it could certainly use the 10,000+ that were playing during the free weekend. Something about TF2's multiplayer just hit it's stride with me. Working on hitting Gen3 (resetting your level) and can't see myself stopping anytime soon.

@kindgineer: Makes me wish games were cross-play. I get the reasoning behind why they don't, but the whole mouse and keyboard vs. gamepad doesn't matter to me. There should be an easy workaround with it anyways, like filtering how you want to play it in the game. Plus, it'd give me a reason to buy one game on one console, and my brother to buy it on another (which doesn't have to do with mouse and keyboard though).

i wish i didnt buy TF2 for pc - save yourself the time if your on the fence - the first major sale will probably see a boost just wait then

This thread has been made before, but i will say again

Grim dawn

Shadow warrior 2

Everyone with a ps4 should try out let it die as well

Just by virtue of being a niche title on a platform with a small playerbase, Tokyo Mirage Sessions for Wii U probably didn't get a whole lot of attention diverted towards it. As someone who hasn't played a Persona game before and is looking forward to Persona 5, TMS felt like a great intro into the type of game the Persona series is. It had a solid cast of characters with some pretty good music throughout, whether it be the concerts you would see or just some of the battle music. Also, the battle system was fun and downright silly at times with some of the attacks that you could do: Skill unlocked near the end of the game. There were some nice difficulty spikes throughout the game that you could beat without feeling the need to grind for some levels. There were a couple spots near the end where I did feel like I needed to grind out a little bit but going through the game normally felt fine for the most part.

Another thing, even though it's AAA and was a fairly big release, is Dishonored 2. The mixture of a rough PC version and the announcement by Bethesda about no review copies definitely soured the reception of a really good game. Maybe I'm basing this off the GB staff not talking about it all that much but it definitely felt like there wasn't a whole lot of talk about the game. This sequel fixed a lot of the complaints people had about the 1st game and also created another fascinating world to explore. It has one of the best, if not the best, levels in a campaign this year (Personally one of my favorites in a long time) and an overall fantastic level/world design. The amount of work that probably went into that level is astonishing and blew me away like nothing else this year has. There are some issues not related to technical performance like not being able to tell where a sound is coming from easily, which is a real burden in a stealth game but if they fixed it all up, Dishonored 2 could further cement the series into my all time favorites.

@oursin_360: As much as I love Grim Dawn, I played so much of it before release that I keep on forgetting it came out this year. SW2 is also a great game that is a blast in co-op.

Momodora: RUtM

I keep telling people to play Stephen's Sausage Roll, but the game may look too humble for its own good. It for sure is one of the best puzzle games of its type I've ever played!

Picross 3D: Round 2 is fantastic. It is probably my most played game of 2016.

I stumbled upon a couple of mobile games this year such as VOEZ and Tomb of the Mask. (It's kind of weird to recommend these games since I practically never play mobile games, but here we are)

Tomb of the Mask may be the best action-y iPhone game I have played. Last year I admired Downwell for working well on multiple platforms and being a good arcade game regardless of how you played it. Tomb has a similar feeling. It's a fine pick up and play game and it is just fun to play.

VOEZ feels like how rhythm games on mobile should work (for iPad at least; iPhone feels too small for that game). Between its unconventional and interesting music and how fun it was to tap to some of those songs, it was a nice change of pace for me throughout the year, and a good "One last thing" game before I went to bed.

Oxenfree, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, Ladykiller in a Bind, VA-11 Hall-A, and Severed come to mind. All are criminally underrated and all are well worth checking out.

BoxBoxBoy! is great. sure, it's just more BoxBoy!, but at the same time, it's more BoxBoy!!

I've got two:

Final Fantasy XV: Big name release and all that, but I feel like everyone forgot about it or are putting it off until the patches drop. I don't feel the patches are super necessary to wait for because the game is great. Unless you're sure you're only going to play this once, I'd say start now-I'm having a blast.

Azure Striker Gunvolt 2: The Gunvolt games are awesome, even if they're on the short side. Very akin to Megaman Zero and great speedrun games.

JoJo'a Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven.

Good action, great writing, delightful style.

Furi was some of the most fun I had this year. Giant Bomb gave it some love with a upf segment and quick look, which is the only reason I knew it existed. I didn't really see it anywhere else though.

It's a great boss rush hack and slash game where the fights focus on pattern memorization to get your hits in and avoid damage. It reminded me of the boss fights from Kingdom Hearts in that way. Also the character designs were done by the Afro Samurai guy so they all look great.

Insurgency is pretty good if you played a lot of PC shooters in the early/mid 2000's after Counter-Strike exploded in popularity. Speaking of multiplayer games, the Garden Warfare games are often overlooked. They're pretty damn solid games for even hardcore shooter fans.

Adventure Time: Jake & Finn Investigations. I'm glad I remembered this. I've been wanting to recommend this game forever, but it's not really important enough of a game to bring up in a topic of its own. Unlike the Wayforward roguelike Adventure Time games, this one sticks to a pure adventure game formula. It's just a really simplistic adventure game, but it has charm and I really dug the cartoon art style. I don't even watch the cartoon show, but I thought the game was pretty hilarious. I enjoyed the humor and I guess I got to appreciate how relaxing a more simple game is instead of the games I usually play. Though to be clear, I don't play adventure games outside of Telltale, so take that into account.

Edit: Just realized the only 2016 game here is Garden Warfare 2.

While it's by no means a small project, I feel like Dragon Quest Builders has gotten short shrift from everyone this year. Sure, it may be a Minecraft clone, but it's also better. Imagine for a moment that Minecraft was at all intuitive, interesting, or inviting to new players-- there you have DQB. It's my personal runner-up for GOTY and I couldn't recommend it more.

Hyper Light Drifter and XCOM 2 would be my recommendations.

The Witness.

It's one of the best games I've ever played.

Titanfall 2.

Hawken...it's been around in beta form on PC since 12/12/12 and recently the new developers of Reloaded Games have ported it over to Xbone and PS4. The player population has been on a steady decline for sometime now and some view the game on life support if not already dead...........but, there are still people playing between the 3 platforms and matches can be found at any given time.

Hawken : A Mech arena shooter, fast paced movement, Game modes - DM, TDM, Missile Assault & Siege

The new dev team has been working almost exclusively on the console versions to try and get more people into the game and stay there to improve the revenue stream. Which means the PC version has pretty much been left on hold in it's current state with no updates for several years now. But for even being ignored for such a long time the game, for the most part, is still fairly well balanced and plays very well.

To date, there have been numerous updates to the consoles and the first coming to the PC has been announced for February 2017. Hopefully by then, if that is a success, it will encourage more players to come back and new players to try it out and stay because what Hawken needs right now besides updates, new content (mechs. maps, weapons, cosmetics ) etc... is more players.

Hawken is relatively old in terms of game years (like dog years) but it's still a game that's really special and deserves a chance to become what it was meant to be when first introduced 5 og 6 years ago at E3.

Oxenfree

Tokyo Mirage Sessions is a game every fan of crazy/weird/silly Japanese stuff should own. Especially those who also like SMT and/or Persona.

Total War: Warhammer is the best Total War game, and the best Warhammer Fantasy Battles videogame, ever made. My first link is to the quick look on the site. Like a lot of deeper strategy titles, the crew - bless 'em - doesn't make the most of their time with it. Lots of great videos online elsewhere, though.

It has loads of dev support, and - for better or for worse - a ton of DLC both of the paid & free variety. This title is going to have a solid community for years, mark my words... it's that good!

@frostyryan: It is by far my game of the year.

VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action, all the way.

I came into this thread to say Tokyo Mirage Sessions! It really is much better than one would expect. I even wrote it off prior to release, but only through a couple people raving about it (and Austin really putting forward how similar in style it was to Persona), I gave it the chance it deserves. I may not be into much J-Pop (my enjoyment of the genre begins and ends at Utada albums) but that game also features some pretty good songs of that genre.

Adding something else to the pile, I think Abzu might get overlooked as people write it off as another Journey. It's the only game I 100% this year (playing through multiple times) because I enjoyed it so much. The soundtrack is stunning too.

The only game I can think of that's not already on here is Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir. It's a GREAT update to a game that was very outdated in the way it played, making it much more palatable to a modern audience. It still has all its original charm and style AND tons of improvements to just about every part of the game. I had a lot of fun making my way through it, despite a bit of repetition in the areas/enemies.

Hyper Light Drifter and Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen for those who never played the original on 360.
Perhaps Enter The Gungeon as well.

Stephens Sausage Roll. A puzzle game of which Jonathan Blow said:

"Stephens Sausage Roll is such a good game...After this game comes out, if your game design school isn't teaching it, then it is just a bad school, sorry!"

If you dig puzzles, you need to play it.

Kentucky Route Zero act 4 didn't get anywhere near the attention it deserves. I mean that whole series is criminally overlooked by most people.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE

This game OOOOZES style but it utterly got dropped off the radar when Austin left. The Showbiz aesthetic is just everywhere in this game (Switching Party members is called "Casting", the Status Menu is called "Artists" and looks like a profile page in a celebrity magazine including updates on the characters careers, all battles are fought on a stage with an audience, the special additional attack system called "sessions", I could go on an on) and it's so good and colourful I think it could really stick it for best style this year.

That said the battle system is pretty great too. For people who know the Persona 4 Endurance run, they basically take the additional attacks from befriending your allies and say "What if EVERYONE could do that?" and it becomes a core part of the gameplay with every ally jumping in on sessions to help with combat. It feels great once you get to grips with it and makes it really worthwhile to exploit enemy weaknesses.

The game does FANTASTIC side content too, the side stories will unlock new unique abilities, attacks, dope costumes and advance your party member's careers as well. Do a sidequest for the Punk-looking Popstar Kiria and she performs a new song that you get a whole beautifully rendered performance of.

Seeing these cutscenes alone isn't the sole reward, since you can then perform variations on these new performances in battle! For the above song it triggers randomly when you cast an ice spell to become a SUPER ice spell. It's a small nice bonus touch that keeps the battles fresh and exciting because RNG can deal you up any number of interesting little random limits. It also makes you really want to do the sidequests because the rewards are meaningful. Of course for those crying "Oh but RNG limits are bad" then you also unlock performances that can be triggered by spending a limited resource which also do cool cutscene things like that.

It's the perfect Persona-lite for people waiting for Persona 5 and it's got so much silliness but lovingly handcrafted silliness and some real heartfelt moments too. It's dopey most of the time but it's enjoyable. Really I think it's a shame as it'll probably get overlooked for any GOTY stuff due to the lack of Austin to bat for it but it would definitely deserve being talked about and played at least.

If you've got a WiiU it's a pretty good RPG to get.

Edit: Warms my heart to see other folks recommending it here as well.

Furi.

I think Blood and Wine (expansion) and Inside (indie) probably got enough attention, still, due to what's in parenthesis I think they need an extra push.

If you have already heard about those. I would recommend:

Abzû - very relaxing game and with so much quality in terms of visuals and audio.

Klaus - a very solid platformer with some tricks up its sleave.

The Banner Saga 2 - the best viking game on the market.

Stories, The Path of Destines - not spectacular, but has a very innovative take on re-playability.

It's been said twice already, but Hyper Light Drifter!

I think the difficulty puts off a lot of people, but with a little perseverance, it's very doable. And extremely rewarding when you overcome a hard encounter with a string of super cool combos and special attacks. I really enjoy the complete lack of exposition in favor of visual story-telling. Imagination! Gorgeous "pixel art" (hate that term.) There's also meta-stuff like a language to be deciphered if you're into that. Screw some of those achievements though. Complete the game without dying? I died at least 200 times in my first play through. And the game auto-saves all the time, so one death chasing that achievement and BOOM, you're starting over.

The Banner Saga 2, but play Banner Saga 1 first so you have a save that carries over. The way it implements your decisions from the previous game is everything you ever wanted from so many other games that promised such and failed to deliver.

Deadly Tower of Monsters is a criminally underlooked game. It was genuinely one of the funniest games I've played in ages.

It's not quite overlooked, but remember, Darkest Dungeon came out this year and is really quite fantastic.

Kingdom. The expansion that came out earlier this year is really fucking good. My biggest "just one more turn" game this year, and the year before it.

2 Games that I started playing recently and am surprised there isn't a bigger community playing them.

Elite: Dangerous

Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide.

I concur.

Also, Crush Your Enemies and Pharaoh Rebirth+. Most people has never heard of these great games.

STEPHEN'S SAUSAGE ROLL

Momodora is a possible contender, but I think that CrossCode far surpasses it.

Invisible Inc (on PS4), Alienation, Salt and Sanctuary

Shadow Warrior 2. It was a banner year for shooters, which probably didn't help this gem get a lot of exposure. Look, I love the Borderlands series, but I'm still waiting for a BL game that gets it all right. Shadow Warrior 2 IS that game. Play it.

For fans of stealth, especially the old Thief games, DISHONORED 2 is a must try. It leans a little heavily on the "more of the same" approach that sequels have been employing as of late, but even so it's probably the best currently in the genre. That said "the genre" is a barren wasteland.

Did any of you folks check out Particle Fleet: Emergence?

It's pretty decent.

The Turing Test is a pretty dope puzzle game. Some of the setups are needlessly hard to parse, but its worth checking out if you don't mind listening to an AI waxing philosophical. Fair warning though: The game takes itself seriously almost to the point of self-parody, but for me the game never quite crossed that line -- except when they give you the option to straight up murder everyone at the awkward twist ending, which felt hilariously inappropriate.

Definitely Furi. That game is pure action bliss.

Killing Floor 2.