It’s great, affordable fun, and a lesson in how far smart design, good writing and respect for players’ intelligence can take a game.

This War of Mine is a great counterpoint to the yearly influx of war games, and uses the language of video games to present a harrowing real-life experience in a way that’s often particularly engaging. It’s dark, it’s sad, it’s often crushing and difficult. It might not be fun, but it’s definitely worth experiencing.

The easy learning curve, the variety of characters, the sprawling levels, and the lovely sound and art all combine to make an extremely appealing and replayable game. It may only be April, but Monaco is already a strong contender for Game of the Year.

There’s a great game in Transistor, and a deceptive and strange world, and a touching character relationship between Red and the sword, even if it only makes sense once you’ve seen the ending cinematic. But Transistor won’t give you those things up front; you’ll have to earn them. That means putting up with a story that seems meaningless and a battle system that starts out feeling limited to the point of being potentially annoying.

Blacklist sees Sam Fisher and his covert posse returning to the series’ sneaky-happy roots in good form, and it’s easily one of the best stealth offerings I’ve delved into in a long time.

Antichamber requires you to realign your thinking, and there’s little that’s more satisfying than breaking through the mental barrier you’ve erected for yourself to discover a solution.

Overall, I would recommend Dragon’s Crown, but would warn people that the game still does suffer from that age-old problem that faces all 2D beat-em-ups: repetition.

For players who like story and experience to trump all else, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a low-key journey with some interesting ideas.

Most importantly, Last Light incorporates a lot of lessons learned from the previous iteration. The big step from Metro 2033 in design, gameplay and polish make Last Light one of my favorite games of the year so far.

Perhaps when Broken Age is complete, it’ll feel like a stronger offering — it was never meant to be divided in half anyway, and the forced split feels like it comes just as the game finally hits a comfortable stride. But for a game about young people striking out on their own, made by a developer that set out to gain the financial freedom to do exactly what it wanted, Broken Age feels like it plays it safe; a cushy adventure game with some heart, but absent any sharp edges.

A fantastic little indie gem, and the addition of online matchmaking allows me to recommend it without it being conditional on whether you have friends to play it with. It’s got simple, but deep combat and a well-designed, if a bit paltry, selection of levels, and it’s just a blast to play. Say hello to 2014’s first great game.

Battlefield 4 isn’t perfect — its campaign definitely sees to that — but the multiplayer component is one of the best you’ll see in 2014.

What The Walking Dead is about is people, and in Episode 3, the game continues to deliver those well-written and interesting characters with whom Clementine interacts and relates. As the episodes before it, Episode 3 delivers on a series of moments in which players must balance relationships and survival, freedom and security, and as always, there are never any easy answers.

There’s something beautiful about Alien: Isolation’s intensity, about the way it ebbs and flows, about how you learn when you’re a modicum safer than you were just a minute ago, and you can and should move a little faster, or risk waiting too long. It’s amazing how much it looks and feels like a film, translated into another medium, using that medium to make something similar and yet differently powerful.

Kentucky Route Zero is gorgeous, haunting and effecting. It's the kind of experience that's difficult to get out of your head once you've had it, and I'm hoping to go through and try different choices and paths for a chance to squeeze a little more out of this little chunk of the world.

A House Divided is another powerful, emotional installment, and continues to make a beautiful, tense experience about finding and trusting one another the end of the world.

Fact is, I had more unadulterated fun playing Sunset Overdrive than nearly any other game this year. You can tell that Insomniac had a blast making this game, and that joy transferred directly into me as I bounced on balloons in an amusement park, on to the rails of a rollercoaster, and then rained down explosive hairspray bombs to result in a brilliant orange explosion of goo.

Defense Grid 2 is hard. Make no mistake about it. I hit my first wall at level 8 and found an uphill climb after that. Those new to the tower defense genre will find its difficulty curve unforgiving. Yet, somehow, this challenge ends up feeling rewarding.

Blood Dragon’s distinctive concept provides some lively visuals and some funny jokes. But in its rush to cash in on the popularity of Far Cry 3 and the popularity of ’80s nostalgia in gaming in a general (and after Hotline: Miami in particular), Ubisoft released a game that lacks the cohesion between tone, art direction, and gameplay required to make it truly memorable. It’s a good gimmick — perhaps at that price point, a great one — but it’s still a gimmick.

Ultimately, Beyond Earth is an exceedingly polished 4x experience, taking you and humanity through space exploration, frustrations and all.

Minor complaints aside, Wasteland 2 is a deep and addictive experience that will grab and hold you hard for its duration. Is it for everyone? Probably not. It has a decidedly old-school foundations that could be a put-off for new and younger gamers raised on modern day Fallouts and Skyrims. That said, for its target audience and for gamers looking for a deep and lengthy role-playing experience that steps well outside the current norm, Wasteland 2 is a near-perfect product.

The Company of Heroes 2: Western Front Armies DLC is a nice addition to a strategy game that was already pretty darn good to start with. While the cost might be a bit steep for those of us who already own the game, it’s almost a no-brainer for folks who want to see what all the fuss is about without breaking the bank.

The intangible thing that ties everything together is the mood of the game — grim and somber in a way that fits the setting perfectly. Whether it’s the hard-bitten characters, the swirling snow, or the haunting score by Journey composer Austin Wintory, The Banner Saga is a game about an apocalypse that actually feels like there’s something being lost, not one that feels like a chance for an unkillable hero to simply kick more ass.

Even late in the game, it had the ability to get my blood racing and my spine tingling. It’s possible that by the end, Outlast does, in fact, slightly outlast its mechanics and AI, but the novelty of running and hiding and its phenomenal, no-holds-barred presentation definitely make up for it. This is a gross, scary, disturbing game: you should play it.

In an industry that values selling content in an effort to keep game discs rooted in their trays despite the constant ebb and flow of novelty, Brigmore Witches shows how developers can really get expansion content right, making the extra expense worth it and increasing the value of the experience delivered from the original title.

Multiplayer issues aside, Elite: Dangerous is a pretty slick single-player game. If you can look past the always-online connection, this game is the next-gen remastering that space sim fans have longed for since the 1990s. Any faults it does embody are countered by impressively unique features that make it well worth breaking out your joystick once more.

The star is the multiplayer mode, and it’s often inventive and fun to play if you’re willing to stick with it. And single-player is no slouch either, packing around eight or so hours of play, but it’s both not as polished or engaging as earlier titles, and not as exciting a story to work through — even though I don’t hate Kratos this time out.

It’s a shame that it’s so often frustrating and inscrutable, and a bigger shame that some of the humor skews toward the cringe-worthy. Goodbye Deponia feels as though this trilogy never quite made it to its own comedy Elysium, even though it was capable of reaching those heights.