Top Games of 2016

I spent most of 2016 working through my backlog from 2015, a year where I barely played any games, so this list is somewhat odd as a result. It doesn't have a lot of the games I've played this year that I cared the most about, like Pillars of Eternity or Bayonetta 2, and much of the bottom half of the list I didn't put any significant time into. It's also missing some games I wanted to play but didn't get around to, like DOOM, XCOM2 and Tokyo Mirage Sessions.

Still, there's a ton of good stuff on here. 2016 was a really good year for video games.

List items

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  1. Dishonored 2

  In most immersion sims, I tend to find a style of play that seems to suit the game most, and stick with it, so I rarely feel any compulsion to play it again. After finishing Dishonored 2 as Emily, I immediately started a new game as Corvo.

  I've convinced myself to take alternate routes through each of the areas, and to play the game differently, and it's even more fun the second time through. It has the 5 hours of frustration that come with every game like it, where you have to dial in exactly what you can do without alerting the enemy, but once you get past that, it becomes an open-ended puzzle where everything you can do feels satisfying, and leads naturally to even more puzzles.

  The story bounces between forgettable and excruciating, and the world feels like it has an art style instead of a personality, but nonetheless, it feels like the fulfillment of the promise of games like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex.

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  2. The Witness

  I normally can't get into puzzle games, but I was transfixed by the Witness for weeks. Instead of just being a collection of puzzles, it uses the concepts the puzzles teach to point to a sensation of wonder and discovery, or to provide an excuse to thoroughly explore a beautiful space.

  It also has the most extensive and wonderful collection of secrets I've ever seen in a game. Perfect for a game about exploration and epiphany.

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  3. My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him and Now I Have to Deal with a Geeky Stalker and a Domme Beauty Who Want Me in a Bind!!

  I've played a bunch of visual novels, and even the best ones tend to feel like prose novels that someone tried to cram game mechanics into, usually to justify a cringe-worthy sex scene written by someone with only a cursory familiarity with the subject.

  Ladykiller in a Bind is the first one I can recommend without any reservations. It's funny, briskly written, and deals with sex more maturely than any other game I can think of.

  It handles complicated topics like consent with grace and elegance. It's incredibly creative in the options it gives you for how to play out every single one of its scenes.

  It makes being mean playful and satisfying better than any other game I've played. It makes you want to be mean, which is good, because the only way to play through Ladykiller in a Bind is to be mean.

  Everyone should play Ladykiller in a Bind, even the people who get weirded out reading lesbian BDSM sex scenes. Especially the people who get weirded out reading lesbian BDSM sex scenes.

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  4. Overwatch

  Everything about Overwatch feels precise and engineered, designed from the ground up to be Blizzard's next blockbuster franchise. In any other medium, that'd be pretty boring, but for better or worse, games are the one industry where that can work in your favor. The game itself is fast-moving and fun--the team-based shooter style of Team Fortress with the character abilities and knowledge requirements of a MOBA, turning half-hour stalemates into matches that last ten minutes at most.

  Every character is a ton of fun to play, and the structure around the matches seems aimed at removing as much of the obnoxiousness and toxicity that every other multiplayer game accepts as a given (although I still wish there was an option to turn off text chat altogther, like there is with voice chat).

  It also has one of the best fan communities I've seen for a game, one that has taken its boring-yet-well-designed characters and given them their own personality.

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  5. Titanfall 2

  This is probably as close as we'll get to Half-Life 3, isn't it? It's one of the best shooter campaigns in years, a well-paced rush of novelty and the same tight, precise controls as the multiplayer. It should by rights be higher on the list, but everything above it is even better.

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  6. No Man's Sky

  No Man's Sky is a game about jetpacking through gorgeous vistas that look like the covers of scifi novels from the 70s. I don't know why everyone--Hello Games included--wants it to be something else. That's enough.

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  7. Stellaris

  Stellaris is this high on the list more for its promise than its reality. You can see that promise most in the early game--the exploration phase opening up thread after thread of space opera plot, filling you with eager anticipation for how it was initially pitched--a space 4X game with writing that lives up to the promise of space opera, merged with the political mechanics of Paradox's grand strategy games.

  At the moment, that promise is unfulfilled. The space opera threads lead to game events that either go nowhere or end up making the game more tedious, rather than driving it to strange and interesting new heights, and the strategic nuance Paradox is known for is absent. Political features are absent or broken, the sector system--automation necessary to prevent the mid and late-game from bogging down--does only a fraction of what it needs to, meaning the game devolves into tedium quickly.

  But when it hits its high notes, Stellaris is one of the best strategy games I've ever played. If they can smooth out the rough edges, it's going to be amazing.

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  8. Dark Souls III

  I was excited for this after burning out on Dark Souls 2 about halfway through, but this ended up being the Dark Souls I've spent the least time with. I liked what I played of it, and keep telling myself I'll go back to it, but I think what I really mean is that I've had my fill of Dark Souls for now.

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  9. Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus

  I stumbled across this game in my (as yet unsuccessful) search for a game as good as Gundam Extreme VS that doesn't require me to have a Japanese PSN account. There's a lot of good things here, swirling around in a big old mess of caveats.

  The game plays really well, once you turn off the mid-fight cutscenes of special move callouts and characters' clothes getting blown off (...). The 1v1 (or 1v2) fights are a ton of fun, once you've waded through Dynasty Warriors-esque sequences that feel included solely to make each route last more than an hour.

  The story is better than it has any right to be, but even then there are caveats. Each of the 20 characters has their own arc, and about half of them are sympathetic and interesting. The rest are either incredibly dull, or the kind of tonedeaf cluelessness you'd expect from an action game where the characters' clothes fall off when you hit them.

  I can't help but think that if they'd spent more time making a balanced fighting game, and less time creating outfits for you to dress up your characters, or a panty lottery to spend in-game money on, this would be a pretty good game.

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  10. Superhot

  SUPER HOT

  SUPER HOT

  SUPER HOT

  SUPER HOT

  SUPER HOT