Best game I did not finish yet: Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

I just finished the first World as of writing this and I think I'm falling in love with this game. To think Rabbids and Mario universes collide in order to make XCOM-like, and it being this good, would be absolutely nuts. But they make it work...so far. It looks great and all the Rabbid fusions have been funny and creative. You can tell from all the little animations and backgrounds how much work has been put into it. Combat system presents interesting challenges, mainly due to the addition of DASH damage. It makes the battles feel more like puzzles, but it still maintains a certain amount of strategy. Hopefully new abilities will keep coming and enemies won't get too repetitive and I might slide it into the my next year's list.

#5 - PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

Coming from thousands of hours sunk into CS:GO, it is actually not that surprising i would enjoy another tense high stakes high reward multiplayer shooter. PUBG delivers the terror of distant sniper shooting at you better than most horror games. Every engagement feels as tense as a cooking pot about to explode under the pressure, culminating in a dopamine shot in a form of chicken dinner. Reason it’s not higher on the list is probably the technical side still not being up to snuff. PC 1.0 launch feels more like a marketing push rather than it actually being in a „finished“ state. Once these rough patches are smoothed out, we could have a game whose lasting power counts in the span of years.

Best part of a game: FIFA 18 – The Journey

Singleplayer story mode from this year’s entry to the soccer simulation series should serve as a primary example of how sports games can evolve . Despite the multitude of issues that plague FIFA18’s gameplay in general, story of Alex Hunter was a shining beacon that made me way more positive about the whole package. Your dialogue choices could definitely have a little more impact than just an arbitrary number of fans, but that is a small dent in an otherwise compeling story with interesting characters and great cinematic aproach. And big props to EA for willingness to go with a main character of colour with a game that is mainly selling to european market, where especially among certain football fans, racism is still scarily prevalent.

#4 - A Normal Lost Phone

It is kind of incredible that such a simple game can immerse someone as hard as Normal Lost Phone. There became a point I totally forgot I am playing a videogame on my PC and just treated it as if I actually found someone’s phone. Few puzzles that make you feel like a detective are just a clever side dish to a game that is primarily about its story. You get a voyeuristic glimpse into a both chilling and heartwarming story of a previous owner of this phone. This creepy feeling like you are rummaging through someone’s private stuff just out of your own morbid curiosity works great in contrast with its themes and message. Don’t sleep on this game, try it, it’s very short and really good.

Game whose flaws made me angry because of how good the rest of the game is: Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods achieved one weird thing with me. It made me appreciate Oxenfree on a whole another level. It would be so easy to imagine Oxenfree with the same core gameplay loop of Night in the Woods. You would have to go silently from place to place and click away each sentence while being rooted in place (instead of the dynamic voice-acted system currently in place). And the end of the story would reveal that the kids only got poisoned in that cave and fainted, and it was all just a dream.

I hate when games disrespect my time and Night in the Woods is a serious offender in this category. Game made you run across the city way too many times for not making it an effective world building tool. It felt like a chore. Maybe that is what they were going for, but i feel like there are better ways to accomplish that. And to top it off the amount and loading screens and their length were in huge disparity compared to amount of „content“ behind them. I mean you even have to go through the loading screen just to look at the bulletin board... The ending fell extremely flat and the game did not earn it in any way, especially compared to the themes it sets up all throughout.

That said, Night in the Woods has some of the best writing and most endearing moments of the videogames i have ever played. Characters are both interesting and believable and it makes you excited to just talk to any one of them (#momforthebestcharacter). Writing is what kept me going. It is a shame that the art and (for the most part) story are being let down by design and technical elements of the game.

#3 - Solitairica

Technically, Solitairica came out in 2016, but on Android (platform i played it on first) it was released in late December and I only found out about it when Drew brought it to UPF earlier this year. It became by far my most played phone game and then I even bought it on PC just because of how good and addictive it is.

Look, Solitaire is a good game, I think we can all agree on that. When you make it competitive and throw in some meaningful and well thought out RPG mechanics, it should only improve. And that's exactly what developers of Solitairica did.

Most innovative game: What Remains of Edith Finch

I really wanted to put Edith Finch in my top five, but the story did not grab me personally that much. However, the game accomplished maybe something far better? The game, I think, sets the new benchmark for what adventure games in this century can do. From now on, every time I’m going to be playing a „walking simulator“ or listening to an audio log in Ken Levine’s game, all I’m gonna be thinking of is how they could have made it as interactive as Edith Finch is. Whoever came up with all those little gameplay intermissions and natural feeling control schemes for them, deserves some major praise.

#2 - Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

Not a single game occupied my mind as much as Wolfenstein sequel. I think about it on a near daily basis still to this day. I did the fortunate thing and put it on the lowest difficulty the very first mission. I breezed my way through the shooting sequences in a similar fashion like one would in DOOM. Though I am still a bit disappointed that unlike the previous game, stealth and shooting from cover are not a valid option anymore. Luckily, the story more than makes up for what the game lacks in gameplay department or level design. It felt like almost every subsequent moment one-uped the previous one and it kept building and building... Not only that, but the environmental worldbuilding through newspaper clippings and recording is top-class. So much so, that i wished they would just automatically unlocked all of them after finishing the game so I could go through them all without having to search for them in the environments being afraid I might have missed some. MachineGames somehow managed to turn such an overused trope of shooting nazis into the most progressive AAA game ever; without the need of tacked-on multiplayer or microtransactions. It is possibly the most and the least 2017 game released in the calendar year 2017.

Best game that left me wanting more: High Hell

Surprise, surprise! I loved Heavy Bullets. With High Hell, developer Terri Vellmann has quickly became one of my favourites. These high stakes shooters where every bullet counts are totally my jam! I only wish that there was more. I blasted through High Hell in one sitting in less than 90 minutes. Don’t get me wrong, it was fantastic 90 minutes. But it left me desperately wanting more. It wouldn‘t even have to be more than the current 20 levels. Just giving people tools to make their own levels supported by Workshop would be nice. However, some people are going to come to this game just for leaderboards and will have no issues running these levels over and over again, and these people will be served well.

#1 - Picross S

When i got the Switch this fall i bought Picross on a whim to test how eshop works rather than actually thinking i will love it, despite the fact that I occasionally enjoy some crosswords or sudoku. Three months later and Picross S is by far my most played game on the system. The fact that it is a great portable game and does not require sound certainly helps, but nights where i don’t solve at least one puzzle before going to sleep are few and far between. After trying some knock-offs on Switch itself and Android it became clear how hard it actually is to make boards that are challenging yet rewarding, and don’t resort to forcing you to guess your way to the solution. I have to give it some time, but I might start ranking Picross S on the similar levels as such a classic as Tetris.

This is my first stab at this sort of long-form writing here on videogames.com, so please be nice. I'm also not a native speaker so if youu find a glaring mistake feel free to point it out to me. Here is my 2016 GOTY list:

10. Paladins / Slime Rancher

I couldn't decide for one complete 2016 game for my last spot so I just took 2 incomplete games. That works, right?

So these are both still in Steam Early Access but are some of the most fun experiences I had this year even in their unfinished state. This is especially true of Slime Rancher which is still long ways from being what it needs to be. The core concept of catching (extremely cute) slimes and expanding the farm through harvesting (still somehow cute) slime poop is very addictive and scratching my OCD itch. However, when I thought about it, the things that stands out is probably the vacuum gun with which you collect everything. It sort of supplements inventory management and makes fetch-quest-like qualities of the core gameplay actually super fun and satisfying.

Paladins on the other hand is mostly complete and just needs more characters and proper balancing of both in-game and free-to-play aspects. People are, sort of as a derogatory, describing it as a poor man's Overwatch. I haven't played the Blizzards shooter so I can't comment on how these two compare, but Paladins definitely makes the case for low barrier of entry (which is 0$). I did not spend a dime yet and I'm still having a ton of fun and will probably stick with it for some time.

9. DOOM

Despite the context in which I am writing about it, it is hard to stay entirely positive about DOOM when such huge components of the game are not up to snuff or are just straight up bad. Multiplayer could have been just a Quake Live clone and we might be talking about #1 on this list. Maybe. Snapmap sounded cool and I click on that option in the menu from time to time, but Ii never ended up playing anything on there other than classic levels (from id itself).

I don't have much reverence for the original Doom as it came out it even before I was born, though coming back to it with curiosity not too long ago I could see its merit. DOOM 2016 brings such a stylish and metal singleplayer shooter campaign, that it makes me want go play through all those other games. I am not 100-percent sold on the glory kills and myriads of upgrade options yet as I'm somewhere past the halfway point and I bumped into an obstacle. I collected most of the secrets up until this point so I already got the upgrades I wanted for all the weapons and min-maxed my damage potential. This leads to a bit frustrating loop where I do too much damage for glory kills, which sort of forces me to shoot slower the longer I shoot at an enemy to get the glory kill prompt. With all that said, DOOM probably hast best feeling gunplay, probably ever. And that is no small feat. Couple that with the very well written codex entries (and I don't ever read those in video games) along with this weird mysticism and overall attitude that make me laugh out loud playing alone in my room.

8. SUPERHOT

This game is just dripping with styyyyyyyle. To some degree I, and most people, play video games to feel cool. SUPERHOT is the distillation of this sensation to its purest form. It makes you feel like the rawest motherfucker walking the surface of the Earth. It makes you want Matrix to become a real thing.

Thing is, I really liked the core concept back in its game-jam beginnings but I was afraid it is going to get tedious when blown out into a full game. But then they slapped this insane and surprisingly good story on top of that and it sealed the deal. This game should never have been this good and is the one on this list that I definitely want to see more of (though maybe not SUPERHOT 2 exactly). Also Tree Dude rocks.

PS: Notice how I haven't said "SUPER. HOT." once.

7. F1 2016

There's not much to be said about F1 2016. It is what you expect and that is good. Last time I tried it, multiplayer would have benefited from some polish and better matchmaking options and I could definitely use some customization options when creating a driver for Career mode. Other than that, it is more than a solid driving game with my favourite license. Nyeooooooh!

6. Human Resource Machine

I know, I know. This is technically an old game. But it came out pretty late in the year, I think, and stands out the most to me of the 2015 games I only got around to in 2016. I know next to nothing about programming and its language neither am I a maths genius. I did not finish this game and truth is despite loving it I probably never will.

However, just seeing each puzzle makes me feel smarter. And solving them even amplifies this feeling. Tomorrow Corporation's (creators of Little Inferno, and you can see it in the aesthetic) metaphor for scripting language with conveyor belts and simple command buttons is very smart. Difficulty is ramping up in exact way it should, which is crucial for puzzle game, and the only limiter is one’s logical thinking capabilities (which are getting thin for me around the halfway mark).

5. Firewatch

I love Firewatch. I hate its ending. I don’t like adventure games due to its superficial or almost non-existent gameplay mechanics and Telltale model was bearable for me only for one series. The reason I enjoyed Firewatch so much is probably the way it evolves this genre into something much more engaging. There is something granular, almost physical about pulling out the map and being (technically) free to move anywhere in this environment. Fact that it looks absolutely gorgeous does not hurt either. This “walking simulator” is accompanied by excellent dialogue with a co-worker with surprising amount of depth and realism despite the game being somewhat mysterious. Neither of these two “parts” of the game would work alone, or at least not nearly as good as they work in conjunction.

I’ll say that some people praised it for how it handles Henry’s relationship with wife and related dialogue. Thing is, I got almost none of that because I chose the “silence” option almost whenever that topic came up with Delilah. I just thought that is what Henry would act like. And it is awesome something like that can happen. It is such a shame that the ending (or bad pacing of the information given to the player) fell so flat. As it was happening I still thought that’s just this little sidestory before the real ending comes. In the end, though, I am happy I played through Firewatch and can’t wait for the next thing from Campo Santo guys.

4. Ultimate Chicken Horse

Ultimate Chicken Horse to is both most fun and most mechanically interesting of the local-multiplayer games that are seeing their boom these past years. I did not touch the single-player (and I won’t in the future neither) but when playing the party mode with friends, my stomach actually hurt by the end from laughter.

Controls are not as good or precise as they could be, but that doesn’t matter, actually it probably makes for more fun. I would prefer to have more maps unlocked from the get-go though, instead of having just one and having to work your way through. It is especially annoying when you don’t have access to the internet, which were the places that I played it. However, those are all just very minor smudges on a game that manages to stimulate creativity and willingness to fuck over everyone and anyone in the most fun way possible.

3. HITMAN

I was sort of just looking at HITMAN from the sideline throughout the year thinking that is not a game for me, because as much as I like freedom, I hate restrictive stealth the same way. I need an option to shoot a way through in my games (line that Far Cry 3 walked really good) and HITMAN never looked like it was interested in giving a player that option. What HITMAN did though is to let you “spaghetti-can” your way through. While I’m not adverse to using a silenced pistol in this game, no other video game that I can remember made throwing weapons feel as good as HITMAN.

Then there is a myriad of options for players to tune their difficulty to their liking with an almost unmatched amount of UI/hint options. It is fun in both ways, following opportunities and seeing the dumb scenarios Io came up with, as well as then turning those hints of once you are familiar with the maps and creating your own stories. This is supported by the surprisingly fitting business model which was another thing that was turning me off of the game. I felt like I was missing so much when I didn’t get in at the start of the whole saga of elusive targets and whatnot. This was immediately dispersed when I finally got into the game and saw so much permanent content already. I’m looking forward to my “hits” for the years to come.

2. Tharsis

Tharsis was the biggest out of left field surprise for me this year. I very much dislike both card games and roguelikes and only learned about it from Alex’s quicklook. And even then I was a bit sceptical. I don’t even know how I got to owning this game (humble bundle? I won it?). But maaaaan I sunk whole afternoons for a good week or two trying to beat the main game and all challenges they added later on. I guess some people hate themselves for (or while) playing Dark Souls. Tharsis was this love/hate relationship for me. Despite being really unforgiving and partially based on RNG, it always has that one carrot on a stick right in front of your facewith your mistake written on it and you just know you can do better, so you will try again.

1. Titanfall 2

There is not much more to be written about Titanfall that people don’t already know. It was tight and perfect package for a guy whose main gaming interests throughout the years were (mostly) multiplayer first person shooters. First game showed promise but the lack of solo campaign really hurt it. Well, singleplayer in Titanfall 2 is in my opinion the best shooter campaign since Modern Warfare. It moves, always brings something new, had multiple moments when I was screaming out loud with joy alone in my room. Your robot buddy BT has more personality than most human video game characters. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and is a great jumping off point for those who missed the first one.

Titanfall 2 nails the parkour in a way that not a lot of games did, certainly not any FPS and it seeps through to the multiplayer as well. It just feels good. I also liked the changes they made to Titan loadouts and increase of player customizability. Multiplayer would have had lasting power for years to come had it not been so crippled by EAs weird business decisions. It’s a shame that it is getting increasingly hard to find people playing and therefore not being able to play any mode any time because they are all fun.

Special No. 1 – That Dragon, Cancer

That Dragon, Cancer is the hardest game I have ever played. It is a game I wanted to tell everyone and no one about at the same time because of how hard is to even talk/write about it. This game just wrecked me, on a level no other piece of media ever had. It is the toughest gut punch one can get – reality.

For those who don’t know, That Dragon, Cancer is game made by parents of a child who suffered from cancer about said child, their relationship and hardships of tending someone who suffers from this illness. In its visuals and gameplay elements it is very simplistic and abstract. However there are audio recordings these parents made and real life letters and postcards that are really unsettling and put it all together. It almost has this metaphorical documentary style.

The thing is, I never had anyone close to me die to cancer, neither am I even close to having a child. This game still made me cry (and I mean REALLY cry) throughout its entirety and made me feel horrible for several days after my playthrough. I think That Dragon changed me as a person in some way. For the eternity of my life I just want sit with Joel in this clearing blowing bubbles and eating pancakes with his dog and do nothing else, because nothing feels as important and fulfilling in comparison.