This blog post has also been posted on my blog and can be found here.

Hey, internet. You might remember me from such hit gaming crit pieces like the game of the year list I wrote last year, or the 0 other things I wrote about games because I’m a lazy idiot and I didn’t have the time or energy to write anything else in the time from then till now. Woops. I meant to write more, I swear.

Anyways, a lot of bad, scary shit happened this year and I’m sure if you possess both a heartbeat and the ability to understand communication about the outside world you know that already, so attempting to address any of that in a silly video game ranking list seems like a bad idea. But if we were to judge 2016 purely by how good its video games were (which, as we all know, is the only metric that matters), I’d say 2016 was a pretty good year.

So good, in fact, that I kind of feel bad that I either didn’t even get the chance to play certain games, or that I wasn’t as into certain other games that others seemed to love. Sorry, DOOM, I just don’t love you the way everyone else does. I appreciate your tongue-in-cheek tone, fast-paced action, and the mere fact that a critically acclaimed Doom game exists in 2016, but you just didn’t click for me. Sorry Civilization VI and Dark Souls III, you both surprised me that I actually liked you, given that I didn’t care for Civilization V or any of the other Souls games, but you’re both unfortunate victims to me just plain liking other games better than you. And finally, sorry to Planet Coaster, Thumper, Titanfall 2, Brigador, Watch Dogs 2, Darkest Dungeon and probably a few more I’m forgetting. I just didn’t have the time and/or money to get to play much of any of you. I probably would have liked at least a few of you if time and money weren’t obstacles.

But enough doom and gloom and apologia. It’s time to get to the games I enjoyed the hell out of in 2016.

11. Death Road to Canada

Adding Death Road to Canada to this list feels a bit weird to me. Not because I don’t enjoy it – I do, quite a bit, actually. It’s just that despite how much I enjoy my time playing it, it’s a hard game for me to recommend.

For those of you that don’t know what the game is, the premise is as follows: After a zombie apocalypse destroyed most nations on Earth, only Canada exists as a last bastion of uninterrupted civilized life. You play as a group of up to four either custom made, randomly generated, or rare special event survivors as you make your increasingly difficult trip through generic American towns seeking shelter in Canada. Throughout your trip, you’ll fight off zombies, gather supplies, build your survival skills up, and try to have your group of survivors not kill or double cross each other. It’s essentially Oregon Trail but with zombies (and way better than the other game that tried to do the same thing).

Despite the premise, the game is pretty goofy, with jaunty 8-bit rockabilly tracks and humorous dialog and events littering the death road. Which is actually one of the first reasons I might not recommend it for everyone, actually. The comedic writing hits more than it misses, but when it misses, boy does it miss. Between its actually funny original writing there’s the occasional joke that’s referential for the sake of being referential, as well as enough jokes about Canadian stereotypes that it’s actually occasionally grating.

The combat in it could also be better. It’s essentially one button to attack, with your character’s effectiveness with their weapon of choice (as well as their stamina and ability to repeatedly use it, if it’s a melee weapon) being based on said character’s stats. It works, but it might be a bit too shallow for some.

But despite that, I still really, really enjoyed most of the time I spent playing this game this year. The game’s RPG mechanics are actually surprisingly well done, with much of your characters’ stats being initially hidden until it actually comes time for them to use them. The random events that happen between resource gathering missions are usually pretty funnily written and occasionally oddly humanizing in their pettiness, involving things like arguments over who let a nasty fart rip in the car, or what song to play on the radio. Sometimes, some of your characters will even be bummed out if you do something good like help other survivors with no reward if they’re assholes. It’s things like that that give the game its real charm and appeal to me, and what gets me invested in making sure my group of survivors makes their way to Canada.

I’ve already written way more than I expected to about this game, so I’ll close by saying that despite the relatively low amount of songs in the game’s soundtrack leading it to be a bit repetitive, what’s in there is pretty stellar. This one in particular is my favorite.

10. Superhot

Superhot is probably one of the most stylish and cohesive games I’ve ever played. It’s very short, but only because it doesn’t need to be any longer. It busts down your door, delivers a gut punch of stylized hyperviolence, then puts a shotgun under your chin and blows your head off with its unexpectedly off-the-wall narrative, leaving you shattered in pieces by the time it’s done like the many red, featureless enemies featured throughout the game.

In other words, Superhot is the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years.

9. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2

For me, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is the video game equivalent of comfort food. I’ve already stated in my list last year for the previous installment in this game series how I have a kind of nostalgia for Dragon Ball Z, fueled by how often I watched it with my brother when we were kids. Playing Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 takes me back to the show’s overly dramatic storylines and over the top battles that are endearingly cheesy to watch as an adult.

But this sequel has quite a bit more going for it than pure nostalgia factor. The mission structure feels much more smartly designed than its predecessor. I’ve also felt like there’s just overall more to do in this sequel than I did with the last game. I’m not sure if there’s actually more side quests or if the game has just guided me through all it has to offer better than the last one did, but the end result is the same.

Sure, the combat is still pretty button mashy, but that almost feels appropriate to the source material. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 isn’t the deepest fighting game ever (and probably not even a fighting game at all but I don’t give a shit about that argument at all), and I don’t know if someone who doesn’t have at least a bit of reverence for the Dragon Ball universe would enjoy playing it, but none of that matters to me. It makes me feel all warm and happy inside when I play it and I love it for that.

8. Pokémon Moon

Despite considering myself a fan of the Pokémon franchise, I haven’t played most of the Pokémon games. My first was Pokémon Red/Blue when I was a kid. Being a certified 90’s Baby™, I was the perfect age to fall in love with both that game and the cartoon that spawned from it.

After I stopped watching the show or caring about the first game, I lapsed on playing any Pokémon games all the way until Pokémon X/Y came out a few years ago. While I enjoyed that game for what it was, in a lot of ways it felt like it was clinging onto to a few old design decisions, either out of complacency or some misguided notion of what a game in the series should be. I kind of checked out on playing it before I beat it, likely because of how clunky it could be at times.

With Pokémon Sun/Moon, it feels like Game Freak has learned this lesson and made the game feel a lot more like a modern video game, at least for the most part. There’s still a few weird clunky bits and questionable design decisions here and there (I’m looking straight at you, theoretically infinite calling-for-help mechanic), but overall, it’s much more pleasant to both navigate and play. For example, once you battle an individual Pokémon at least one time, the next time you battle the same type of Pokémon, the game will tell you which of your moves will be super effective, effective, or not effective. Quality of life improvements like that have gone a long way in improving my experience with the game.

The game’s fake Hawaii setting of Alola is also a really pleasant place to be. Everything about it from the music to the palm trees and tropical clothing make the game just feel chill, man. It’s an inviting world that was a joy to visit every time I launched the game this year.

Also Team Litten 4 lyfe

7. Stellaris

I’ve been a huge fan of the Paradox style of grand strategy games ever since Crusader Kings II stole many hours of my life a few years ago. Since then, I’ve spent countless more hours in Paradox’s other offerings, such as Victoria II and Europa Universalis IV. But despite how much I enjoyed their more historically-oriented offerings, I always felt like they could apply this formula to more fantastical settings.

So needless to say, when Stellaris was announced, I was super excited for it. So much so that it almost feels like a bit of a disappointment that it’s not higher (lower? How do lists work) on my list. A relatively shaky launch marred with an almost nonexistent midgame and a few technical issues soured me a bit on the game initially.

That being said, after a few post-release patches addressing this and a few other balancing issues, the game feels like it’s most of the way to where it should be. The political ethos system you can set for your race at the start of the game is the perfect springboard for thinking about how you want to roleplay your empire, which has been the most enjoyable part of the game for me. It’s easy to get lost for hours playing the game and tackling any issues that come your way how you think your empire would handle them, not necessarily how you would personally handle them.

I still wish the game had the political and economic complexity of Victoria II and the depth of character of Crusader Kings II, but nonetheless Stellaris has been another Paradox grand strategy title worthy of the hours it’s sucked from my life.

6. My Summer Car

So, I know what you’re probably thinking seeing this game on my list. This has gotta be a joke, right? Nobody would enjoy this clunky, bizarre mess of a game enough to have it on their game of the year list, right?

Believe me, I felt similarly when I first started playing My Summer Car. The premise and all the pre-release trailers almost made it feel like a joke game, like your Surgeon Simulators or your Goat Simulators. But at some point during my time with My Summer Car, it stopped being a joke for me.

At least not entirely. It’s still a game with a dry, distinctly Finnish sense of humor, but the crude humor almost belies the game’s mechanical depth. When you’re putting your car together, you literally have to put your car together, piece by piece, bolt by bolt. It’s strangely therapeutic to put your digital hoopty together. There’s a real sense of accomplishment once you finish your build and fire your car up for the first time.

What’s great is the fact that your car will always kind of be a piece of shit in My Summer Car. When I first started my car up after my initial build, the car kept making a horrifying grinding sound. Also it was eating through brake fluid like nobody’s business. It felt like I was really struggling to put a piece of shit old car into a semi-drivable state.

It’s an extremely janky game for sure, but its intricate car building mechanics punctuated with bizarre Finnish pop songs and copious amounts of drinking make My Summer Car legitimately one of the most unique video games I’ve ever played. I can’t wait to see it come out of early access.

5. Motorsport Manager

In a lot of ways, Motorsport Manager is the game I’ve wanted to make for years. Ever since I got into F1 thanks to Giant Bomb’s Alt+F1 podcast, I dreamed of a modern F1 management game that had Crusader Kings II-like traits for all the characters in the game. To be fair, there have definitely been well-received F1 management games made in the past, but Motorsport Manager is a great, modern take on the idea.

A deep set of skills and traits make a lot of the drivers that populate your game’s race world feel unique. If your driver is a bit of a primadonna, they could refuse any orders you attempt to give to them, as they want all the glory for themselves. Drivers can fall in and out of love with each other, which affects their relationships with each other as well as their performance.

It’s not just a spreadsheet game, either. Outside of the more menu driven ways you micromanage the more minute details of your team, you also manage your race strategy on the fly during the actual race. You decide when your drivers pit, as well as when they push their cars to the limit and when they ease off to conserve fuel and car part wear.

There’s a few problems I have with the game, such as the fact that, despite the game’s use of fictional drivers, the pool of rookies and drivers signed to teams at the start of the game is set in stone and not randomly generated, meaning you can just remember which drivers and staff members are good to sign at the start of every game, rather than a more dynamic hiring process that randomly generated drivers and staff would allow. There’s also a few issues the race AI has in regards to respecting blue flags, making overtakes when they have the opportunity to, and making pit stops that make sense.

But a few minor quibbles didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the game that much. The loop of the game is engrossing enough that I often found myself playing the game for hours on end without intending to, telling myself that I’d play for just one more race. It’s got some room for improvement for sure, but Motorsport Manager is pretty much everything I want out of an F1 management game.

4. American Truck Simulator

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself appreciating games that embrace mundanity more and more. Games like American Truck Simulator appeal to me because I feel like it respects me enough to simply enjoy driving in the space between towns that are often ignored in games. There’s probably a million different ways that SCS Software could have made the game feel more “gamey”, like the boring racing and other types of minigames that other open world games have at such a rate that it almost feels like they are required to by law, but they didn’t. The game doesn’t cut down the long and winding roads between major cities out of a fear of a lack of excitement. Rather, it revels in those spaces.

The game currently simulates California, Nevada, and Arizona, with plans to eventually get to the rest of the country stated by the developers. Despite this relatively large area, the world of American Truck Simulator is surprisingly detailed. Little bits of personality like roadside sculptures made from propane tanks, burned out hotels with bare mattresses laid on the floor, and billboards around Las Vegas for divorce lawyers are littered all over, making the world feel more lived in than you might expect from a game like this.

It’s a game that many people describe as a “podcast game”, and while that’s not an inaccurate statement, I prefer to make a playlist of my favorite sad, slow, contemplative songs and hit the road. There’s in-game internet radio, much like Euro Truck Simulator 2, and while it’s fun to listen to hokey country music stations and the like, there’s a certain zen-like state that my mind goes to when driving down long highways and through small towns while listening to my playlist that kept me wanting to come back to this game throughout the year.

I can’t wait for them to expand the game’s map as time goes on (especially into Illinois, which is my neck of the woods), and I definitely see myself coming back to this game to explore more of this digital version of the States for a long time.

3. Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley came completely out of left field to me. I didn’t follow the game’s development process, only first hearing about it once it had already came out and was generating a lot of positive buzz. I didn’t play any of the Harvest Moon games before, so I don’t have any particular nostalgia or affinity for this type of game, so I wasn’t really sure if I’d like it or not. Imagine my surprise when it ended up being one of my favorite games of the year.

The game’s premise is fairly simple. You inherit a farm after your grandfather’s death, available for you to move to whenever your corporate cubicle farm job gets to be too much. After taking up this offer and setting off for the titular town, you have to turn the overgrown remains of your grandfather’s farm into something he’d be proud of, all the while making friends and lovers with the town’s residents along the way.

It’s a bit of an overly romantic view of country life as simple living, but that’s easily forgivable. The game is charming as hell, with so many different things you can do and unlock that it’s mindblowing that the game was made by one person. Throughout my time in Stardew Valley, I’ve never felt like I didn’t have anything to do. Quite the opposite in fact, as I usually felt like there was a glut of different things I could do at any given time, even after sinking dozens of hours into the game.

I’m a sucker for games with a lot of heart and empathy in them, both of which are qualities that Stardew Valley possess. There’s really humanizing moments to be had with characters that are homeless, suffer war-induced PTSD, alcoholism, depression, and more. The game doesn’t really turn its nose up at many of the characters and make them 100% irredeemable assholes, even if they might appear that way at first glance.

Given that it appears that I haven’t even seen close to what the game offers combined with the fact that the game keeps getting additional content added in via updates, I can see myself getting lost in Stardew Valley well into the new year and beyond.

2. Overwatch

I’ve kind of fell off competitive shooters as I’ve gotten older. I used to play games like Halo and Rainbow Six: Vegas all the time when I was younger, but their appeal to me waned after high school. I’ve definitely put some time into a few of them over the years, especially after getting my own gaming PC a few years back, but not like I used to.

Because of that, I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m surprised by how much I enjoyed Overwatch, but it’s the most I’ve enjoyed a competitive shooter in years. Nearly everything about the way the game is designed seems like it was made to minimize the feeling of letting your team down that turns many away from competitive shooters. The game rarely highlights your shortcomings to your team, instead opting to show everyone the best play of the game and several cards with the players that did the best at the end of every match.

The different heroes in the game (which are basically just classes) not only give you many different ways to play the game, but also inject lots of personality into the game as well. It doesn’t too long of searching through any social media site’s gaming tag to find the myriad of fan art and jokes that build off of the different personalities that inhabit the world of Overwatch.

There’s also been a good amount of post-release content as well, with new heroes and new maps joining the fray at a pretty frequent rate. It’s enough to get me back into competitive shooters and make Overwatch one of my favorite multiplayer shooters in recent memory.

1. Hitman

After 2012’s Hitman: Absolution failed to recognize what made previous games in the franchise so good, I cynically thought there’d never be another good Hitman game. I was so sure that games like Hitman: Blood Money could never be made in the modern games industry, at least not with the budget and team size needed to make it truly great. So if anything, Hitman has taught me to not be so cynical about the state of the games industry, as it is an incredible game.

With it, IO Interactive has found a way to have their cake and eat it too in regards to being both highly accessible for players new to the franchise and deep enough to hold the interest of veterans to the series. The challenges system is the perfect introduction to both any given map as well as the game’s mechanics, guiding you step-by-step through a hit designed by the developers. The brilliance of it is that through tackling these different challenges, you naturally learn the intricacies of the map and how the systems in the game interact through doing, not through some more boring and traditional tutorial system.

The masterful design doesn’t stop at the challenges system, either. Each map is designed to be just one or two steps away from mayhem, just waiting for you to spring the trap like a murderous game of Mouse Trap. And even where the designers didn’t intend for chaos to unfold, there’s enough of a variety of tools at your disposal to create your own brand of murder wherever and whenever you’d like.

While the episodic nature of the game was much maligned prior to its release, it actually ended up being one of the game’s strongest suits. The steady trickle of escalation missions and elusive targets punctuated by new map releases gave me plenty of reason to keep coming back to the game throughout the year. It makes the case for the episodic release structure better than any other game I’ve ever seen.

Speaking of elusive targets, I can’t end this piece without mentioning how incredible of an idea they are. For the uninitiated, they are one-time assassinations that are available only for a limited window of (real-life) time that you only have one chance to complete. If you mess it up or miss the window, it’s gone forever. This elimination of the safety net of save scumming and infinite retries makes elusive targets some of the most intense and rewarding things I’ve done in a video game all year. There aren’t many words that can describe the feeling of coming up with a plan and executing on it perfectly, all the while knowing that any slight misstep will lock you out of any future attempts and permanently mark your failure on your record.

Top to bottom, Hitman is a masterstroke of game design that not only lives up to the name of previous entries in the series, but far surpasses them. And with the prospect of a season two nearing us, it seems like the fun times in this world of assassination are just beginning.

I don’t generally write game of the year stuff (or game stuff in general), but 2015 feels like a special year for games. Enough really good games came out this year that I get the feeling that people will look back at it as one of those great years in gaming. It seems like no matter what kinds of games you are into, something neat came out that would interest you. Here’s a few that I enjoyed this year.

10. Dragon Ball XenoVerse

While I haven’t spent as much time with this game as I would have liked, my short time with it was enjoyable enough for it to earn this spot on my list. The Dragon Ball franchise is nearer and dearer to my heart than I would care to admit (thanks mostly in part to childhood viewing sessions with my brother) and XenoVerse plays with the long-running series’ timeline and characters enough to keep any fan happy. That combined with a pretty robust character creation system and fun multiplayer make Dragon Ball XenoVerse earn a respectable number 10 on my list.

9. Duck Game

I have mostly been a jealous sideline observer of the recent local couch multiplayer indie game trend due to most of these games having either nonexistent or poor online support. I also have a hard time getting people crowded around a gaming machine at this point in my life, so even when I do pick up these types of games, I rarely get a chance to play them as intended. Duck Game bucks this trend, however, and has pretty good online support, making semi-frequent multiplayer sessions of this game with friends much easier to set up.

And every multiplayer session of Duck Game I have played has been blast. The frantic pace of the game and its plethora of zany weaponry make it feel like a fast-paced, real-time Worms crossed with Super Smash Bros. Every session also left me and my friends in fits of laughter, as unexpected hilarity happens in almost every round. The rounds also tend to be very short, so even if you do get killed, you’ll be back in action in no time.

This fast-paced, goofy fun makes Duck Game feel like a shotgun blast of light-hearted joy to the face. Also there’s a dedicated quack button. Quack quack!

8. Project CARS

Sim racing is a fairly new hobby to me. When I first decided to give it a try in mid-2014, I bought a wheel and a subscription to iRacing.com, which was a trial-by-fire sort of thing for sure. I actually ended up really enjoying it, despite the initial learning curve. There’s something about spending hours practicing with one car on one track and tuning both the car and your driving style to be just so that I find to be oddly relaxing. But before I could get to that level, there was plenty of crashing and frustration as I learned how to wrestle a race car around a track in one piece.

I mention this because I think sim racing can be somewhat hostile to newcomers. Most race sims are just pure simulators more akin to flight sims and train sims in the sense that they don’t have many traditional “gamey” trappings like career modes or a sense of progression. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it just can be somewhat overwhelming to have a ton of cars and tracks thrown at you without any idea of where to start.

Project CARS stands out from this as it has an actually pretty good career mode that takes you through the full career of a race car driver, starting with go-kart racing and ending with Formula 1-style open wheel racing and Le Mans style prototype racing. This combined with a nice UI and a general ease of use makes Project CARS probably the friendliest racing sim for beginners to the genre. It’s also a ton of fun for more experienced people as well.

Shame Wii U owners were shafted, though.

7. Kerbal Space Program

Most of my play time with Kerbal Space Program was actually in the game’s alpha and beta stages. But now that the game has finally been actually released as a final product, I can see myself putting even more time into this amazing game. There’s a certain sense of pride that you get from iterating on terrible rocket idea after terrible rocket idea until you finally make a rocket that is slightly not terrible enough to actually get to Mun and back that not many games can achieve.

It’s also one of those games that is as complicated as you want it to be. It’s possible to both be satisfied with simple to-the-Mun-and-back rockets, and to have the urge to dig deeper and make ridiculous expeditions into the deeper planets in the solar system and experiment with space stations and docking and modded content and all kinds of stuff like that.

Kerbal Space Program is a shining example of how sandbox building games like these should be made.

6. Splatoon

If you had told me prior to the E3 reveal of Splatoon that Nintendo’s freshest new IP would be a multiplayer-focused third person shooter, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Nintendo’s notoriously bad online support seems like it would have set Splatoon up to fail, but somehow they managed to make one of the most unique and gleefully fun shooters in recent memory.

There’s still some weird Nintendo-y hangups with the online system, such as the low number of maps in rotation every day in comparison to the game’s now decent total number of maps, but that’s honestly not enough of a hindrance to really detract that much from the game.

I can’t close this section on Splatoon without mentioning its awesome soundtrack. At times the game’s funky fresh beats sound like something straight out of a Jet Set Radio game, which is a definite plus in my book.

5. Rocket League

Rocket League is probably the closest a game has ever gotten to simulating what it feels like to actually physically play a sport.

Or at least that’s what I’ve heard others say, since my fat ass hasn’t actually played a physical sport since volleyball in high school gym class, but I definitely believe it. There’s a certain amount of ungainly shifting around of your supersonic rocket-powered battle-car that you have to do in order to smack the ball in your desired direction that is a lot like gyrating your unshapely, stupid body in a way to hit a ball in a real sport (or totally whiff it most of the time, in my case both in real life and in the game).

When you actually manage to connect with the ball in the right way to make a sweet aerial goal, or actually succeed with a frantic last-ditch attempt at stopping your opponent from scoring on you, you feel like a million bucks. It’s these types of moments that propel Rocket League to one of the best games of the year for me.

4. Cities: Skylines

The city-building genre is one that is near and dear to my heart. One of my first gaming obsessions was SimCity 2000, with its sequels SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 also stealing a lot of my adolescent time. With the disaster that was the most recent SimCity game, I had all but given up hope on the genre ever making a comeback.

From these ashes rose Cities: Skylines with a fresh new take on the genre. It takes the best bits of the old SimCity games and a few of the small number of good bits from the newest SimCity game to make a game that is just a joy to play. While it can be weird to manage at times, the road building tools are pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted a city-building game’s road tools to be since I discovered all the weird hacky ways that people would come up with to make complex highway systems in SimCity 4’s limited grid-based system.

The game’s extensive modding support is to its great benefit as well. A lot of the small, weird things about the game can be fixed via Steam Workshop mods, as well as the ability to add new buildings and road types to make any kind of city you can think of. I’ve added enough modded near-future buildings that my cities now look vaguely cyberpunk-ish and that’s awesome.

3. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

This game is a real weird one for me in the sense that my initial reaction to it was so overwhelmingly positive that I thought it was a surefire GOTY for me, with me souring on it slightly over time due to the weird microtransaction stuff that Konami’s done and the fact that its immense length honestly made the game feel like it overstayed its welcome a bit for me (I still haven’t beaten it yet, though I plan to soon).

But that’s not enough to make me think of it as anything less than a phenomenal game, however – it’s still number 3 on my list, after all. While it’s a pity that the story is really lean when compared to previous games in the Metal Gear series, the gameplay picks up the story’s dropped ball and runs with it.

Lots of open-world games like to tout that they give players TOTAL FREEDOM™ to do WHATEVER YOU WANT™, but MGS V is one of the few games that actually make good on that promise. Any base can be tackled from any number of ways, and most gadgets have at least some kind of a use, even the more gimmicky and joke ones. It really feels like the game can accommodate any kind of play style, from my preferred style of stealthy nonlethal super spy stuff to the loud, fuck-you-you’re-all-dead-now, guns blazing approach, with no play style feeling unloved or useless.

It’s a pity that Konami has burned its bridges so thoroughly with Kojima and the game industry in general, because I would have loved to see what could have been made in a follow up to this game.

2. Super Mario Maker

Super Mario Maker is an incredibly special game. I almost don’t even know where to begin with how good it is, so I’ll start with the obvious. The creation tools are as intuitive as you’d want them to be, with you simply clicking the blocks that you’d like to place and dragging them across where you’d like them to be. The different games you can make levels in the style of (Super Mario Bros. 1, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros., to be specific) all behave pretty much in the way you’d expect them to and take advantage of the things that are unique to each game. And while sharing and exploring levels could definitely be better, even with the launch of their new bookmark site, it’s not terrible either.

But what makes Super Mario Maker so special to me is how it forces players of the game to think about game design. Exactly why do those enemy-spam levels suck? Why do those expertly-planned puzzle levels work so well? And how do I make levels that good? These are all questions that players of the game come to at some point, even the ones that don’t really make any levels. It’s really rare for a game to make people think about games in this way, and even rarer for it to come from an industry giant like Nintendo. For these reasons, I see myself coming back to Super Mario Maker for many years to come.

Also here’s a shameless plug to my levels please play them and give me all the stars please and thank you.

1. Undertale

By the time you scrolled down and saw this as my number 1 pick of the year, you probably either rolled your eyes and groaned or nodded your head in agreement. It’s so weird to me that this game is as divisive as it is. Not because I don’t see why people can’t like it – if its sense of humor and characters don’t grab you, you probably won’t care about the story, which is the main appeal of the game – but rather because it’s just a humble little game that doesn’t really seem to me like it tried to become the phenomenon that it has. But none of that really matters, honestly, at least not to this list. What matters is what it is that makes Undertale so special, and why it was my favorite gaming experience of this year.

When you first see the game, it’s pretty easy to dismiss it as yet another retro style indie game that does nothing but vainly attempt to pull on your nostalgic heartstrings. Yet, while I am definitely a huge fan of EarthBound, the game’s main inspiration, Undertale does so much more than just violently nudge you and scream, “HEY, REMEMBER THE 90’s, KIDS?” It takes the expectations that old RPG games have implanted in your brain and fucks with them. Wanna kill some monsters to grind for levels to get some higher HP to make the game’s bullet hell battles easier? Well, they all have unique personalities and relationships to other monsters that you’re callously slashing away for your own gain, you asshole! The game will call you out on that in more ways than you would expect. It might be easy to read that and think it’s just gimmicky bullshit, but you’re going to have to trust me when I say it does it in a way that is genuine and interesting.

The game is also funny as hell. I’m going to steal what Austin said in his review of the game and say that the humor feels less like a joke being told to you and more like just bullshitting with old friends. The game utilizes its humor in such a way that it endears and disarms you to the game’s cast of characters enough to make you give enough of a shit about them for you to genuinely care when the game gets dark and serious.

And boy, that ending. The good ending to Undertale is genuinely one of the best endings to any video game I have ever played in my life, if not the best, and I don’t say that lightly. The stakes get raised ever so gradually until it dramatically spikes in such a way that genuinely captivated me in a way not many games (or any work in any medium, really) ever has before. I know the phrase “rollercoaster of emotions” gets thrown around enough when talking about this game to be groan-inducing for even its biggest fans, but there’s really no other way to describe it.

To anyone still skeptical of the hype around the game, I would recommend you just cast all your expectations aside, both negative and positive, and give the game a try. It’s not expensive and isn’t much of a time investment. If it’s not for you, then hey, that’s okay. Not everything is for everyone. But if Undertale grabs you, it doesn’t let go until the very end, and takes you an amazing journey along the way that was not only my favorite game of 2015, but one of my favorite games of all time.

Games I Wish I Had Played/Played More Of In 2015: Invisible, Inc., Her Story, Grow Home, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, Downwell, DiRT Rally, RaceRoom Racing Experience (not a 2015 game but whatever), and MGS V (like I said, I still haven’t beaten it yet despite my ~55 hours dumped into it). I probably missed out on more cool games than that, but that's all I can think of at the moment.