I was going to start this with some spiel about how the year went, but then I realized it made me sound like a pretentious twat so I tossed it. Instead, immediately into the breach we go!

• 10. Frog Fractions 2: My opinion of Frog Fractions 2 lies in that fuzzy area of enjoying my time with it while believing it wasn't worth the amount I paid for it. Perhaps that's due to how many other great games came out this year, or my frustrations with the puzzles in the early- & lategame, but there was about 4-5 moments in Frog Fractions where I stopped a minute to laugh they had actually gone that far with a joke. Not in terms of offensiveness, mind you, but sheer amount of work for a one-off joke. A glitch. A secret. A merger of two wholly different genres. The moment Frog Fractions 2 won me over was when I ended up in a Carmen Sandiego homage set in Dante's Inferno, complete with Rockapella-esque choir music. The almanac you use to figure out where to go next? The entire translated text of Dante's Inferno. I scrolled through the entire thing, thinking, "Did they really put in the whole thing?" They did. It ended with an I Agree checkbox (a joke that wouldn't have worked if it was shorter) and a Continue button. I agreed and continued... into a translation of Dante's Inferno New Game Plus. Which is apparently the same as the original, except Dante's guide is now Macho Man Randy Savage. With exactly the type of dialogue you'd expect. It even references the Dante's Inferno action game EA released years ago. When I mentioned it on Twitter, this is the response I got:

Everything about Frog Fractions 2 is a joke. Including its very creation. And that's why I love it.

• 9. Orcs Must Die Unchained!: This is frankly even iffier than Frog Fractions 2. I joined the open beta in March and fell in love with its multiplayer, which was a third-player MOBA where you used traps to prevent enemy minions from reaching your nexus. This foundational change affected everything from discrete roles for defense/offense, to the increasingly frantic ebb and flow of battle as waves survived longer and longer, and even allowed for player creativity in trap selection and killbox layout. I put over 300 hours into the game, despite its many bugs and flaws, and considered it a breath of fresh air after playing League of Legends for years.
  Then they gutted it from the game completely, citing a lack of players, and instead focused all their attention on the traditional (boring) co-op mode. I quit the game and uninstalled it soon after.
  The game I sunk hundreds of hours into, that I believed was a fun branch off of the standard MOBA formula, is no longer playable. It's only memories and Let's Play videos now. One of my favorite games of the year is also a cautionary tale on the fickle nature of multiplayer modes and early access games.
• 8. Salt and Sanctuary: In a year where I couldn't run the actual Dark Souls sequel, this served as a valid substitute. Sure, it blatantly rips off Dark Souls' style, but the simple move to 2D, along with a host of minor tweaks (replacing stat upgrades with a skill tree, Metroidvania-style movement upgrades and exploration, and choosing which vendors to install at each save point) keeps it feeling fresh.
• 7. Dragon's Crown: My guilty pleasure of the year. Decades ago, I was awestruck when I found Capcom's D&D: Tower of Doom in the arcades; I deemed it my favorite side-scrolling brawler ever. This topped it easily, mainly by adding randomized encounters and loot drops akin to the Diablo series. The biggest standout, however, is the boss battles. From screen-filling dragons to a single small and extremely vicious rabbit to fighting hordes of pirates over a genie's lamp, there's enough variety in Dragon's Crown stages and bosses to power me through playing through it twice over. And amazingly, for a 2-year old PS3 game, it still has enough people playing online you can occasionally partner up, even if they're usually on the other side of the Pacific. The usual Vanillaware art style doesn't hurt, either.
• 6. MechWarrior Online: In Paul Barnett's Top 6 of 2016, he mentioned the difference between young people's shooters (Call of Duty) and old people's shooters (World of Tanks). MWO is an old people's shooter, except it has giant walking mechs instead of tanks. This is a game where positioning, tactics, and recon win fights, and the mechs move/turn slowly enough that hair-trigger reflexes and pinpoint accuracy aren't necessary. Oh, and you're giant mechs that crush tanks underfoot and use buildings as cover.
• 5. Darkest Dungeon: I love Lovecraftian horror. I love art that looks like Hellboy. I love interesting and unusual RPG mechanics. This game scratches all of those itches.
• 4. Stardew Valley: I played the original Harvest Moon for the SNES; I never got as deep into it as I did Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley combines a well-crafted daily/monthly cycle with a map that's just barely large enough that you can't visit every location each day. Toss in multiple giant farms you can customize to your heart's content and a cast of characters that are flawed, quirky individuals and you have one of the most appealing gameworlds created all year.
• 3. Overwatch: I put hundreds of hours into Team Fortress 2, and Overwatch is a worthy successor to it, with various abilities making timing and combos more vital than ever. It doesn't hurt the characters have a ton of charm to them, even if the background plot is cobbled together and taken almost too seriously for its own good (compared to Team Fortress 2's plot, whose tongue is so firmly-in-cheek the futility of constantly fighting battles over the same territory is a plot point). It's become my go-to game for whenever I just want to play against other people for a half-hour or so.
• 2. Hitman: I always admired the Hitman series from a distance, but could never really get into it. I got into the latest Hitman hard, cackling with glee at all the stupid things I could do that alternated between satisfyingly easy and brow-furrowing hard. While it can often be a thriller, it is usually a comedy show where 47 plays the straight man to everyone's antics (including his own). It is a game where a can of expired spaghetti sauce being more dangerous than an AK-47 fits perfectly. It is a game where, having spent 30 minutes setting up the target to have an interview while sitting beneath a precariously hanging stuffed moose, it will let you drop the moose when you decide to, confident that any player with a hint of panache will listen to nearly the whole interview waiting for the perfect statement to drop the moose for maximum irony. And of course those perfect statements are in there, because the writing's sharp and self-aware. Hitman is a game of performance art, even if the audience is just you.
• 1. RimWorld: I know it's in Early Access, but I've sunk over 400 hours into various failed and/or abandoned colonies, picking wildly randomized starting conditions, just to see what results. I've had a colony run by a supervillain who harvested prisoners' organs to sell for income on the black market. I've had a colony who was forced to kill an uber-powerful thrumbos just to have enough food to survive the winter. I've had a colony that barely survived a tribal assault because the survivors did guerrilla warfare while the tribals were looting the interior buildings. I've had a colony where the sole survivor got taken down by an enraged pet because its owner died. I've had drug farms. I've had polar bases. I've had desert mountain bases where giant bugs tunneled into my freezer so I cranked up the air conditioners to freeze them to death. I've had (most recently) a tundra base whose goal for the past two years was making enough food to last a month-long trek to the temperate coastal region, complete with a half-year delay due to toxic fallout. I've even had a single colony that survived long enough to build an escape spaceship. It is the perfect game to play while watching a stream or listening to a podcast, and the numerous randomized locations/colonists, strategic choices, and storytelling beats ensure that each game could be memorable.