Well folks, we're coming down to the wire now. Soon I'll be working on a finalized GOTY list and an illustrated awards blog for the games of the year I want to commend for specific accomplishments, from best music to best new character to a few new topics like the best game covered by my Indie Game of the Week feature. However, given how much work goes into those doodles (and yes, there is some effort involved with those, despite appearances), I'm limiting the number of categories to ten: any more and I run the risk of burning out before it's done.

But hey, I probably have more than ten awards in me. That's where this edition of the Saturday Summaries comes in: below are a few awards I could've given away, but I either lacked enough experience with this year's games to be as authoritative on them as I'd like - my GOTY list will look a bit strange compared to everyone else's, let's just say - or they weren't categories I was passionate enough about representing. Let's check out a few of them now, as an aperitif for the main course:

• Best Styyyyyyyyle: My pick for best styyyyyyyyle, at least of the 2017 games I actually played, is The Sexy Brutale. I love its intricate little isometric dioramas; its big-headed, witty and flamboyant cast of murderers and murderees; and the extravagance of its titular location. Runners-up include the muted but beautiful NieR: Automata, the surreal floating worlds of Gravity Rush 2, and the equally bizarre locations of Torment: Tides of Numenera (especially The Bloom. Yuckers!).
• Best Surprise: I'm tempted to go for Doki Doki Literature Club, because I think I got in before its twists became common knowledge - there's a lot of stuff that requires content warnings, so it's not like you can avoid knowing what's up - and likewise for Danganronpa 1.2 Reload which I'm still not even sure I should be qualifying, as a 2017 compilation/remaster of two older games. I've also got to give it up for The Sexy Brutale, StarCrawlers and Alwa's Awakening: three games that may end up on my final list, none of which I knew anything about before playing. Screw it, let's go for Doki Doki Literature Club: so much of that game relies on its shocking twists, even if they take a while to arrive (you kind of need an extended period of normalcy for the weirdness to have much of an effect, I suppose).
• Best Debut: I'm going to limit this category to first games in what could work as a franchise. Some games are better off being solo projects, either because I don't see how much further they could take that story, or how much more they could do to expand on the mechanics. I feel like the obvious choice for this year would be Horizon Zero Dawn: one of the most highly rated games that wasn't already part of a franchise (Zelda, Mario, Assassin's Creed, Yakuza, Rabbids) or a sequel (Wolfenstein, Nier, Divinity: Original Sin, Uncharted, Persona). Cuphead and Hollow Knight, neither of which I've played, seem like good choices also.
• Best Story: Oddly, for someone who puts so much stock in the storytelling potential of the video game medium, this is one of the categories I always sleep on. I think it's because I have so much trouble framing it properly. There's two ways you can credit a video game story: either traditionally, in which you look at how the plot progresses and how it handles its themes and the twists and subversions along the way like you would a novel or a movie or a TV show, or conditionally, in which you pay more attention to how being a video game was instrumental in the telling of its tale. So something like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy or Horizon Zero Dawn have some great stories and character moments that would work just as well in another format, whereas something like Doki Doki Literature Club's story works because it's a game, and can mess with your preconceptions and use the game's own mechanics against you. I'm very tempted to put Danganronpa 2 here with how absolutely nuts that story gets, despite the fact it technically doesn't belong (and, really, Danganronpa V3 came out this year and I should've played that), and there's always Nier: Automata, which I might put in second place because it does kind of retread a lot of territory from the first Nier. Instead, I'm going to opt for Torment: Tides of Numenera because of just how much of a ride its main and many side-quests are - and it's one of those games with like a hundred endings, depending on what you did, the choices you made, and who you helped. Special shout out also to its flashback "Merecaster" sequences, in which you relive the life of a former incarnation and can change reality with your choices, which reminded me a lot of Lost Odyssey's "A 1000 Years of Dreams" moments (possibly by design).
• Best Indie Roguelike/Roguelite/Platformercurial: This was something I kept running into during Go! Go! GOTY! this month without intending it, and because these games rely on so much practice and luck, I wasn't going to complete any of them before I was pressed to keep moving through my 2017 shortlist. Instead, I'm just going to give one of them this secondary award for being the top of a crowded genre this year. That game's going to be StarCrawlers, which probably doesn't even count beyond the fact that it has randomized dungeons - all the same, I liked it more than Loot Rascals, Flinthook, Caveblazers and Cryptark, and thought the way it uses procedural generation was more fulfilling - where it's not the core game but simply a means to earn some extra XP, items and cash. A little goes a long way with that approach to content creation, and ultimately I like a well-considered and designed core quest chain to go back to once I've had my randomized jollies.
• Best Moment or Sequence: OK, last one for today. This is another loaner from Giant Bomb's own award categories selection and is, obviously, the most spoilerish. I've included my favorite sequences below, starting with the winner, and making sure to spoiler-block everything besides the names of the games for the sake of those who haven't played them yet. Nier: Automata's Ending E. Just all of it, especially the point when you begrudgingly have to accept help and the development team choir kicks in - it's something so emotional and affecting, yet something only a video game could pull off, which gives me hope for the artistic aspirations for the medium. The Sexy Brutale's reality-warping confession of The Gold Skull. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy's unwinnable first fistfight with Asav, when it becomes clear how much of an indomitable badass the bookish warlord really is. Doki Doki Literature Club's Just Monika. Torment: Tides of Numenera's conflict sequence when the Sorrow shows up in Miel Avest and you realize how ridiculously effed you are.

That's enough awards, at least for now. Be sure to keep an eye out this week for that awards blog and GOTY list, though, where I'll be judging the handful of 2017 games I actually got around to playing and figuring out some kind of order to put them in. As for the past week meanwhile, we have the following:

• The Top Shelf took to the streets for a gang war between Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It was a difficult contest, mostly because of the last two, and I have to confess that I didn't get too far into Vice City before December hit and my priorities changed. That's going to have to be a bucket list entry for another time, because I was really enjoying its world and style. San Andreas pipped the shelf spot in the end, mostly because of how much more impressive its many open-world mechanics feel, even now, and how its ludicruous gangsta bluster combined with jetpacks and other fun nonsense would precipitate the Saints Row series.
• Go! Go! GOTY is more or less finished now, barring one last entry sometime this week. I'm breaking my three day rule for this last game: not only because it's the last one I intend to play before I finalize my GOTY list, so it doesn't need to get out of the way for something else, but because I've been too distracted both today and yesterday by Giant Bomb's final Extra Life streams. Game #6 was StarCrawlers, which I ended up enjoying a lot for its appealing structure and combat, as well as the uncommon sci-fi setting for a dungeon-crawler. Game #7 was Uurnog Uurnlimited, a last-minute entry thanks to a lucky win over at Steamgifts, which proved to be a compelling open-world puzzle-platformer that revolved around colorful blocks of all types and functions. Game #8 will be... well, let's get right into some early impressions, why not?

Prey

Of the few 2017 games I own but have yet to play, Prey seemed the only one I was logically going to complete in less than a week. Even so, I might have been a little optimistic there: Prey's quite massive, and the way I'm playing it might make it take even longer. For those unaware, Arkane Studios - the creators of Dishonored, from which many of the stealth mechanics and incidental world-building techniques have found their way into this game also - decided to pick up the troubled Human Head/3D Realms/2K Games property, which at one point was going to be some wild space-faring bounty hunter sim, and recycled it into their take on System Shock. A game which isolates the player and abandons them to fight for their survival on a spacecraft filled with hostile creatures, with only their wits and the products of some dangerous experiments with which to arm themselves.

What I love about Prey is that it taps into things that I and few others are likely to appreciate. The way you can create items by, essentially, carting around a garbage truck's worth of random trash until you find a "Mr. Fusion" style recycler machine and turn them into raw materials, and then use a fabricator machine to turn those materials into anything you might need. The way it gives you multiple ways to play a situation, especially when there are tough enemies prowling around that you probably won't be able to defeat in a straight fight. The way it lets you get to know the crew members of the doomed space station, and how you can find out how each of them died: the sort of incidental storytelling that I thought SOMA did a fine job weaving, but didn't quite take as far as I'd like - whereas Prey actually lets you add corpses to the map by accessing security consoles, telling the stories of their sad fates while allowing you to loot a handful of items from their bodies. The fact that water fountains heal exactly one hit point each, and the developers know there are likely to be people who will stand next to them and spam the use button until they're back to full health, despite the abundance of minor healing items. I really like its alternate-history timeline too; it's subtle, and a smart way of explaining the retro aesthetic of the game's furnishings despite being set in the 2030s.

Prey's definitely what I would call a deliberately-paced game. It's going for a sci-fi horror vibe, and the way it builds suspense is nothing short of masterful. The weakest enemy in the game are mimics, so-called because they can resemble any item - including flashing items that the game wants you to pick up, like guns lying next to bodies - and the number of times you walk into one or go to pick one up without recognizing its mendacious burlesque is the game's most reliable source of jumpscares. They're not even the cheap kind where they script a door to suddenly slam shut as you pass, or a shadow to suddenly dance across the wall in front of you: there are means of knowing where the mimics are, from special upgrades that highlight them for you to simply being more alert and less in a rush, since they wriggle occasionally and the music takes on a more anxious tone whenever they're close. The latter is what makes the early game slow and suspenseful, and when the tougher enemies start showing up - humanoid phantoms to start with, and then increasingly wilder foes - it's always a good idea to hide somewhere and take in the lay of the land before acting rashly. Maybe you can sneak past by staying crouched, maybe you can take advantage of the station's ailing security measures by fixing a turret, or maybe using an environmental hazard against it such as an explosive barrel. The GLOO gun, one of the earliest weapons you can find, can be used to temporarily freeze an enemy in place or create platforms against walls with which to climb up and towards safety, which makes it equally valuable for fighters and cowards alike. Either way, the Talos I is a big space station which the player should be in no hurry to move through, for the sake of their own sanity.

Right now, I couldn't say where Prey will rank on my GOTY list. However, I can guarantee that it will make the top ten list - not too difficult, given I've only played about 15 games from this year - so until I've seen it through to the end, the year's GOTY list will not be finalized. Thus, all my GOTY material will be left hanging until I've seen credits roll. My absolute deadline is the holidays, A) because I'll be pretty busy and B) because the site's own GOTY features will be popping up, and I'd rather get in ahead of all that and the many guest lists. So... while there's no exact date for when GOTY stuff should be dropping, expect it to show up later this week. Until then, thanks for stopping by.

Prey is pretty fantastic, and definitely up there on my personal list. The combat is a bit messy but as far as creating a cohesive, "lived-in" environment for you to poke around in, read notes, and steal everything that isn't nailed down, it's best-in-class.