Official Game of the Year stuff! This is my "static" list, which will remain unchanged forevermore (at least after the 31st). I'll have another, ever-changing "adjusted" list up eventually that will also incorporate the 2016 games I didn't get to play in 2016.
For posterity, here are my three runners-up: Dreamfall Chapters, The Jackbox Party Pack 3 and Her Majesty's SPIFFING. All fine games, but just didn't quite make the top ten.
Stardew Valley excels because it's one of those open-world games that's predicated on letting the player discover. Not just in the Bethesda sense of walking in one direction and hitting a dozen identikit dungeons, but in the manner of regularly learning something new about the game or some other way one might spend their time playing it. Stardew is built from a familiar blueprint - Natsume's bucolic Harvest Moon/Rune Factory simulators with a touch of Animal Crossing variety - but expands ever outwards, moving from horticulture to angling to dungeoneering to socializing. A week will go by in-game and a new area of the map will suddenly be revealed, or you'll discover some new recipes to try out, or you'll uncover a new way to make a bit of cash to pay off some necessary investments. Special events come and go. You learn to love the people of Stardew Valley, and endeavor to rebuild their Community Center and shower gifts on them which unlock additional scenes that allow you to get to know them better. It's all surface-level stuff, admittedly, but there's so much surface to cover that it scarcely matters. That I've played this game for close to a hundred hours and could play it for another hundred, provided the new content keeps coming, is why this game is my favorite of 2016.
Favorite part: Discovering the spa. It's a method of restoring energy that also requires a few in-game hours to tick by, making its usefulness very limited and conditional, but I only discovered it by poking around. No-one told me it was there, no-one recommended I'd try it out or what benefits I might enjoy. Just an old building on the edge of town with a purpose to uncover. The game is filled with discoveries such as this; you just have to wander around a bit to find them.
It's easy to get caught up in the moment-to-moment demon vivisecting and the deliberate absurd machismo humor of id Software's reboot without considering what Doom has going on underneath, but what the game actually does to revitalize the venerable 90s FPS series is nothing short of spectacular. By digging deep to find enough brand new mechanics to ensure that the cycle of clearing out rooms of monsters and strafing madly to avoid their retribution works in a modern context is a coup of contemporary game design, and I'm someone who raises up game design as of paramount importance in this medium. Decisions such as making the chainsaw a rare use, insta-kill weapon that almost entirely replenishes your ammo or how the game's showy "glory kills" will dispense additional health drops are both means to keep the player in the fight for just a little while longer, even if they don't make a whole lot of logical sense. And that's really the other half of what makes Doom so much fun: it goes all in on the capricious nature of video game logic, presenting its Hell-infested world as one of extremes with no middle-ground. Every enemy's a demon or a demon-worshipper, almost everything explodes into a pile of goo, and the protagonist is a millennia-old force of vengeance that even the demons write about in awed, hushed tones. Both the game's under-the-hood and over-the-top facets are built for a singular purpose: to do for FPS games now what Doom did for FPS games back then, and not lose an iota of the ridiculous heavy metal adrenaline rush that Doom has always been. I'd say they succeeded.
Favorite part: Reaching the end of a level and panicking because I hadn't completed one of the mission challenges, something about killing X number of monsters while under the influence of one of the game's many temporary power-ups. On the way to the exit, passing through a room I'd already cleared, the doors suddenly came down and locked me in. As the place filled with demons, I noticed a brand new "berserk" power-up appear in the middle of the chamber. They knew!
It's hard to give FromSoftware too much credit for their new Dark Souls, as it cribs mercilessly from those that came before in the Souls series. All the same, we're talking about a developer at the peak of their ability right now, and every new Souls game is a blessing. FromSoftware uses this third chapter of the trilogy to tie together the narrative connective tissue of the two games prior, presenting the journey to rekindle the flame as one that has persisted for thousands of years with naught but a handful of near-forgotten remnants to memorialize the journeys of those that came before. As each former lord of cinder falls, a new one rises to take its place, and so has it ever been and shall ever be. When it isn't dabbling in legacy fan service, the game presents a solid entry in the Souls franchise that not only cherrypicks the best mechanics to carry over from the earlier games, including the more aggressive combat of side-game Bloodborne, but course-corrects after the disappointing second game with much of its level and monster design, giving the players ample variation with its boss encounters and some truly memorable regions, like the picturesque winter city of Irithyll of the Boreal Valley or the foreboding and trap-laden Catacombs of Carthus. It can definitely feel like a greatest hits of Dark Souls at times, which I suppose is both a compliment and a condemnation.
Favorite part: It's really tough to top that Pontiff Sulyvahn fight. Not only did he look like a total ethereal badass, but his ferocious dual-wielding style and the way he incorporated a shadow clone made for one of the most difficult video game challenges of the year.
Hitman goes back to what I was talking about with Stardew, in that there's so much packed into this game mechanically-speaking that you're always discovering something new, even in maps you've played a dozen times before. Your goal is straightforward - kill someone, or someones - yet the method to do so can be as elaborate or as blunt as you choose. While it takes a while to get used to the game's rules - knowing how trespassing works, for one - the game isn't the impenetrable puzzle-based stealth game it appears to be. On the contrary, it goes out of its way to be hospitable: the player can save anywhere before they try something risky, with few exceptions, and the game presents a number of "opportunities" that act as tutorials for what each of the game's diverse mission settings has to offer. With its step-by-step guide to some of the more impressive assassinations and a truly challenging set of "Escalation" missions, the game becomes suitable for players of all skill levels, not just the tactical geniuses who know exactly what they need, where to go, and when to be there for the perfect hit. Add to this an incredible amount of content, even for an episodic game, a wickedly subversive sense of gallows humor that manifests in delightfully unexpected ways, and controls that feel a hell of a lot more intuitive than you'd expect. Were I more attached to the genre that Hitman exemplifies, or maybe had the chance to play some of its other episodes, I've no doubt this would be my game of the year. It certainly deserves the acclaim.
Favorite part: How can I choose? Winning the auction as the Sheikh and then dropping a chandelier on Dalia's head when she called me into her office to congratulate me ranks pretty high. Can't go wrong with that exploding camera trap either. Actually, my favorite part might well be any one of Giant Bomb's many on-screen mishaps.
Inside is a case of tight-plotting and puzzle design that does what it sets out to do with a confidence generally unseen in Indie games, if not games as a whole. While it's not particularly interested in deep mechanics or rich storytelling, what it does do is fully immerse the player in a grim dystopian world almost beyond comprehension, and then simply has them survive for as long as possible. Outrunning guard dogs, leaping over precarious structures and evading the wordless adults that will break the protagonist's neck should they happen to spot him, it's a dimly lit world of nightmares where escape is only ever transitory. However, for as aimless as its hero's perambulations seem, the game itself is leading up to something. And what a something. It's a game that is owed a single afternoon, ideally one that would let you see the game from start to finish in a single session, just to see how it all comes together.
Favorite part: Right at the end, of course. When you [REDACTED] for like thirty minutes straight.
Lumo won't be on many GOTY lists, and that's because it nostalgically hearkens back to a specific type of game from a specific era that most were just not around for. That doesn't mean that the game can't be enjoyed without that background, more that it purposefully aims for that niche audience with all its heart. As a large-hatted wizard stuck in an isometric world of traps and monsters, the player must rely on naught but their skill and wits to survive, and to that effect the game introduces all its mechanics early to ensure any roadblocks are entirely of the player's design. The game successfully resurrects the long-abandoned isometric puzzle-platformer genre, previously last seen decades back with the likes of Equinox or Head Over Heels, and then stuffs it with callbacks and one-off sequences meant to bring together an entire world of Spectrum/C64/Amiga/Atari ST gaming in a way that would probably feel slightly exclusionary to most outside of the UK, barring a few instances where American/Japanese games get their due. But hey, if I don't give this game some props, who will?
Favorite part: Seeing the first screen from The Bitmap Brothers's Cadaver recreated in-game while watching the Giant Bomb Quick Look, and knowing I had to buy the game then and there. I can be an easy mark at times.
Let It Die's been a slow burn for me, because its systems and design decisions feel so deliberately weird and off-putting. Yet, and this appears to be a theme this year, that's because there's so much to discover in the game. I've come to appreciate the choices the game's made as a means of balancing certain areas where the game might otherwise falter: weapons and equipment break easily because the game wants you to try new items you recover from the bodies of enemies and get invested in their particular skill trees, and the compulsory PvP puts your currency resources at risk but the game is adamant that those resources aren't actually all that important and can be easily recovered, either by playing the game longer or by raiding those who stole from you in the first place. This doesn't even go into Suda51's penchant for the bizarre, jumping between a modern gaming arcade and a post-apocalyptic tower where a Japanese city once stood featuring characters which almost resemble archetypes and beasts that, rather than make animal noises, tend to say their own names in Japanese with goofy voices. Most impressive is how lenient the game's been with its F2P elements: it's free to download, and I'm some 30 hours in without having to purchase a thing, or feeling like I'm required to do so to enjoy the game more. It's likely I'll get everything I want from Let It Die before I ever reach a point where the paid boosts are required. Let It Die really did come out of nowhere, and I'm glad to have encountered a game so singularly odd this year.
Favorite part: Everything with the first boss, from the Amped 3 papercraft intro cutscene to the group photo afterwards. The music's growing on me too.
In many respects Headlander follows the Double Fine blueprint to a tee: a game without much in the way of deeper mechanics or challenge, but buoyed by a fantastic presentation and an adherence to a specific brand of underutilized aesthetic. Specifically for this game, that aesthetic is sci-fi cinema of the 60s and 70s. While the game is by most metrics a very standard Indie SpaceWhipper with angular laser gun combat and helpfully detailed maps, its many references to movies like Zardoz, Logan's Run, Silent Running, Soylent Green, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mars Attacks and Barbarella are a treat for genre fans, and while it's hardly rare that we see a game built by movie buffs - perhaps distressingly so, as many would prefer game developers to be influenced by literature instead - these are at least classic movies that haven't been adapted endlessly, nor are they filled with tired tropes we've seen in a million sci-fi themed games since. It might not hang with some of the year's true greats, but like Lumo it was a game that spoke to me more personally than most this year.
Favorite part: The chess-obsessed "Battle Zone" part of the game. Some really smart ideas involved, like the way each "piece" fights.
Speaking of solid SpaceWhippers, Momodora is a little game that appeared without much fanfare, but offers an interesting variation on the Indie genre darling with a few challenge-increasing additions, like a finite but replenishing supply of healing items and a physically fragile heroine. The game's difficulty curve is on the harsh side as a result, though not quite as brutal as Pid's one-hit deaths, and requires that the player carefully make their way to the next save point or lose a whole lot of progress after one stupid fault too many. The game's pixel-art style, while also not unusual, has some wonderful animation and backdrops, and the bosses are well designed in a style equivalent to a Ys game: a combination of enormous foes with obvious weak points and more human opponents who move as quickly as you do. It came and went in the shadows of this year's giants, but I hope this placement on my GOTY list might convince others to check it out.
Favorite part: Maybe the second time a certain tenacious boss shows up, or the ending. Oh, maybe it's that time where an NPC helped me fight a random boss.
I'm once again faced with the prospect of trying to defend a game that makes almost zero new contributions to its predecessor's blueprint, and yet the strength of the series is such that I can't help but commend it. Last year's Grow Home was a dichotomy of frustration and chill, giving you a loveable robotic protagonist that couldn't control its own momentum and required a RSI-inducing alternate-hand system for climbing the game's vertical world. Yet, Ubisoft Reflections managed to make this game as relaxed as possible, with a combination of quiet musical ambience and an endless parade of breath-stealing vistas. There was no rush to complete the game, no linear path to pursue (besides "up") and by finding the humming crystals the player could make the game easier on themselves with handy upgrades that mitigated the few traversal annoyances the game still had. Grow Up doesn't change a lot, besides making the world more horizontal and giving the player more horizontal-movement abilities to compensate, but the same relaxing loop is here and accounted for. The ring challenges added nothing, the ability to clone spring and launcher plants ceased being useful as soon as the player earned enough upgrades to fly wherever they wanted, and hiding most of the optional ability-enabling costumes behind Ubisoft's obnoxious online "Ubisoft Club" service was a tad gross, but all that didn't distract from what was essentially one of last year's best games rebuilt from scratch.
Favorite part: Discovering the glider/jetpack combo. After that, getting around was a piece of cake.
