Owlboy is itself as joyful and powerful an example of such art as I can recall. That it also happens to be an exceptionally well-crafted and tasteful videogame made by a very small group of people may not entirely be a coincidence.

There’s something to be said for the sensation of Thumper’s mid-game, where survival is the goal, ignorant of whatever score comes along with it.

I will likely return to Pavilion to get lost in its digital labyrinths, to discover how objects can be rearranged to play with the narrative of a faceless man in a suit. When I return to Pavilion’s twisty little passages in Chapter 2 next year, I hope recall that feeling of blissful disorientation I felt in the dizzying corridors of Borges’ prose.

By bridging the gap between our daily struggles and the daydreams that surround them, it suggests that the one space we truly own is our imagination. There is a certain beauty hidden in that sentiment; that it is the fantastic, the surreal, the strange, that might liberate us.

Don’t expect to find touchscreens, paper-thin televisions, or computers any smaller than a child here.

With Obduction, Cyan has created another game that’s an art of personal journaling. What you know, what you’ve gathered, will save you. The tools seem familiar but it is details that are your weapons. As the otherworldly overlaps the banal, you’re trapped in a labyrinth of places and things.

If Starbound has one major downside it’s that there is no pause button. A pithy consideration, I know, but it means if you’re exploring a cavern found deep within the recesses of a new planet, you cannot pause to take a much-needed bathroom break. And since enemies can spawn at any time, you can’t walk away from your computer in confidence, either. But the lack of a pause button almost feels apt: in Starbound, there can be no pause button, no way to suspend you from this childhood fantasy.

This is the experience of playing No Man’s Sky, a series of recurring structures that overlap and intersect, a surprisingly knowable collection of repeatable actions.

Like Journey, Abzû is in some sense a game about archetypes and archetypicality, letting you dwell within and among them as though to remind you of their firm embeddedness at the foundation of other things. And yet, in a significant structural twist, it’s about recovering archetypes that no longer seem to have potency, rather than playing through an archetypal sequence—the Journey—that’s still going strong.

With Quadrilateral Cowboy, Chung eschews the filmic jump-cuts he experimented with in Thirty Flights of Loving. Still, the fragmented plot produces a similar result: as it happens, it already feels like a collection of memories.

From the room of VHS tapes, to the security footage, to the bat sanctuary, to the theremin performance, to the camera’s final, extended retreat up the rickety helix of a spiral staircase; Act IV confronts us with scenarios that test and limit our perception. Like Snow’s Wavelength, it gives us just enough to trick us into feeling like we’ve glimpsed something real.

Practice is for tryhards, and Videoball’s greatest strength is that it understands the value of isolated, localized competition.

Furi is undoubtedly repetitive, but that doesn’t need to be a strike against it.

If the game has any message, it’s that the only thing more rewarding than admiring a lovely cathedral is watching it explode.

Playdead’s greatest feat in creating Inside was making it look like they never created it in the first place.

At its core, VA-11 Hall-A is the rare cyberpunk story that has heart, and even goes so far as to give its female characters agency in their own lives. It’s a story where we, the player, take the backseat, and soak it all in. Just like a good book.

Warhammer’s world is sketched out by an ocean of rules, obsessed with the collision of fantasy with the specter of realism.

Push Me Pull You proves that the “new arcade” of previous years is not dead; it’s been developing into something weirder, funnier, and brighter than we’d expected.

It’s a game with confidence in the worth of revisiting its history and an earnest belief that doing so can result in much more than an empty exercise in nostalgia.

Uncharted 4 offers nothing profound, assured in its own way that it has nothing to prove.

At its best, Fragments of Him says, “No, you really don’t understand. Let me show you.”

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is tough and tumbly, with a greater emphasis on one’s own form than any other puzzle game, which usually waiver the avatar as too grotesque of its gorgeous world.

Dark Souls III isn’t the kind of melancholy original that Demon’s Souls was, and it doesn’t pivot to another genre like Bloodborne turned toward horror. Instead it leans into the absurdity of bringing together every idea the series ever had and throws a pretty amazing going-away party for it.

Despite the kinks, some of which may be ironed out in future installments, 1979 Revolution represents an unusual and largely successful mix of an adventure game and history lesson.

Out of the void, Hyper Light Drifter meticulously crafts a post-apocalyptic samurai story, one that bends and folds the tenets of zen’s vivid ambience alongside the warrior path of bushido, something familiar yet fresh, quiet yet resonant.

What begins as a weighty trudge through the festering underbelly of dark forests and abandoned keeps slowly evolves, growing lighter and more nuanced and intuitive.

Recursion through each of the game’s three paths from that originary fork forces you to rethink your place in its world and drives the game’s argument home: Fire Emblem Fates rejects fatalism beautifully.

Maybe the best way to play Samorost 3 is to play with it, to think of it as a bizarrely-shaped thing that prompts one to appreciate the ways oddities can spark and delight the imagination. At least that’s the way I’ll continue to play it, curiously wandering through alien environments, turning each sight and sound over and over in my head, very much like I once did with a strange piece of wood I encountered when I was young.

Street Fighter V has traded a physical space for the intimacy of a digital one: an internet meeting with a mysterious stranger. When a match announces itself, loudly, it’s impossible to not get excited. And suddenly, you’re fighting: you, some anonymous other, and the small, limited locale in which you’ve agreed to meet.

There is no shooter quite as willing to prostrate itself before its audience as SUPERHOT while always reminding them that, no matter how tough the game may make them feel, that same sensation can be stolen from them in a heartbeat.

Under these terms, XCOM 2 isn’t so much a game about liberating humanity from its extraterrestrial overlords, but a statement about the kinds of stories our games can tell and allow to be told, even when they aren’t especially valued for their narrative. It speaks to the sense that we might not just want stories in our games, but authored fields of narrative possibility.

For all of the precise, rigid design of The Witness, playing in its world remains a human endeavor—one where the rocks aren’t always as solid as they look.

It is a throwback in many senses, not just to the history of its own series, but to images of war that came to us already cold, already distant.

It is a beautifully gothic dungeon-crawler with a wealth of clever mechanics, the most unique of which is that, as your adventurers delve deeper into Lovecraftian tunnels, coves, and ruins, they become stressed.

For a game that has zero puzzle elements Nuclear Throne sure feels like a seeing-eye puzzle.

In the end, Oxenfree is absolutely a game about teenage bullshit (forgive me for being a little disingenuous earlier). But it manages to revitalize that narrative by focusing on feeling more than substance; it glances at each character’s inner struggle rather than serving it up for a full meal.

Like a city that leaves its streets to pedestrians, pushing highways underground and elevating trains overhead, the game seeks to avoid the anxious hustle of a traditional simulation by reducing clutter and keeping things at a more intimate, human level.

Bethesda’s team creates maps that are a joy to explore.

What the game wants you to appreciate is how difficult it is be morally and cosmically right when no less than love itself is the alternative.

Halo Moments are revelations of accidental mastery, happenstance perfection, the butterfly effect of a shock wave blooming out from the epicenter of a frag grenade. A grenade that only you could have thrown. It only matters that it happened, and that you and your friend, for a simultaneous second, remembered why it was you loved playing games in the first place.

You might laugh as the cartoon blob tumbles into the vat of purple acid, but your time will come too.

It is fun and addictive, but moreover it’s adrenaline-pumping and shocking in its barbarity.

Jotun turns the elements of an ancient poetic tradition into a digital myth.

Shadowrun Hong Kong’s success boils down to a smart early decision to stay true to Hong Kong, and exaggerate the flaws of the city’s bizarre governing philosophy to find a new, urgent relevance in the cyberpunk genre.

Yes, The Beginner’s Guide occasionally fumbles its narrative, Wreden sometimes overacts, and the writing can be a little ham-fisted—but the game also provokes incisive, critical thought about the way we read and evaluate games, and does so not by laying out a definitive “message” to be delivered to players, but by prompting us, through play, with open-ended questions.

What Mario Maker is at heart: a mash-up machine.

The Taken King shows Destiny is willing to reach for everything it might be, and it's hard not to look forward to what comes next.

As the title suggests, SOMA wears its sci-fi influences proudly on its sleeve.

Panoramical is Ramallo and Kanaga’s vision of what music can look like. It’s an interactive music visualizer and generator that’s content with illustrating the magic of musical arrangement, and on that front, it plays beautifully.

Until Dawn is a game constructed by people who understand how to manipulate its players’ sense of control. It’s informed by a deep study of horror films and smart in its consideration of how to employ this understanding in an interactive medium. It only fails in its uncharacteristic acceptance of a few outmoded tropes.

It’s too bad that half the game—the half that tries so hard to be a game—makes you wish you could double jump with some rocket implants.

A throwback to the twitch platformers of old.

It finds, despite everything, the light; it dwells there, and asks you to walk in it.

At its heart, Road to Gehenna carries forward both the original game’s thoughtful examination of how we interact with the world and its engaging brainteasers. But it is saved from becoming more of the same by examining how we interact with the world now, and how that world’s end might be understood.

Sylvio succeeds at every single thing it wants to do. Games don’t do this kind of hermetic horror often, and Sylvio makes zero concessions. The car, the gun, the reel-to-reel, the black blobs: they’re all secondary to Juliette Waters and her journey through the abyss.

No other developer has brought an open world to life the way CD Projekt Red has here.

The reason why I’ve developed such an immense respect for Splatoon it is that it’s a huge risk that scarcely comes off as risky.

Not a Hero’s ultimate statement is a brutally cynical one, but its political nihilism is always portrayed with such glee and good cheer that the unease is hard to feel until the game is shut down.

The game hangs like a pendulum, waiting for the player’s hand to send it this way or that, to pass through the darkness of civil war, and cast their own meaning—like sunlight—upon the action.

Rather than relying on the same emotional tricks, Schafer and Double Fine opted to tell a different kind of story; like Shay and Vella, they learned from those that came before without feeling compelled to follow in their predecessors’ exact footsteps. As a result, Broken Age is a resounding success; a charming, quietly subversive, and ultimately uplifting parable about finding beauty in the broken.

MLB 15: The Show is remarkable in that it adheres to a method of gameplay that's absent in most sports games. By privileging patience, attention to detail, and creating a system that rewards minor adjustments to the way we play (not unlike strategy adjustments in the real life MLB), MLB 15: The Show remains one of the only sports games on the market that not only has a distinctive and engaging look and feel, but also pushes an admirable ideology that, however subtly, explores how we engage with sports and videogames.

Titan Souls takes a motif in film that’s so played out as to be empty, and uses it to create joy, triumph, and meaning in a context where we’ve come to expect the absence of all three. It’s an argument for what games can do that other media can’t because of their interactive and iterative natures.

Like Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines before it, Pillars of Eternity is a feat of world-building.

Bloodborne is built on this transcendent love. A love of the crumbling ruin, of the screeching banshee, of the shape in the shadows whose eyes catch the candlelight. A love of heaven-scratching spires, ever-descending staircases and fog-cloaked alleys. A love of all the magnificent horrors that have filled the minds of humans since they learned to light fires to stave off the dark.

Hotline Miami 2 cares deeply for politics. It wants to make its brutality meaningful, to say something about media and culture and desensitization. But its sprawling narrative only shows that it has forgotten its own lessons: the way Hotline Miami plays, its spatial violence puzzle, is what Hotline Miami means.

Helldivers measures its brutal difficulty against a dehumanizing military and political complex that results in humor and violence, both about as subtle and hard-hitting as a freight train. Such is the price of liberty, paid in full with a pile of shell casings and the sickening splat of another expendable soldier.

Rarely does a game acknowledge the cycle of play, die, repeat, and finally, succeed. Oblitus instead not only acknowledges it but embraces it; draws a parallel between its protagonist and its player, their movements synchronized, following the same unknown task.

If this collection of friendly, yet faceless, alphabetized words can at some level help her learn an appreciation of language, imagination and technology, then maybe it’s just best to admit that the device in your hands really is a baby’s toy.

Life Is Strange has a charm that is hard to resist.

Each individual piece of the game has been crafted with the knowledge that, should the (imperfect) humans controlling the action play their part properly, the systems are in place to make every hunt look, sound, and feel hugely exciting.

It confounds me with slips of the tongue and leaves me wondering if what I’ve seen are the hidden gems of something like an X-Files or Fringe—shows whose truly great episodes are not self-contained but instead have effects that permeate and bleed through.

Lisa has a way of allowing you to revel in a joyfulness of pain—a place and feeling where all the agony and loneliness becomes an idiotic caricature of life.

It’s a well-read and high-reaching story and discourse on the nature of existence, but it’s not just in the backseat to a seemingly disparate puzzle game.

And so it’s a strange mix. Lumino City is a real world filled with relationships as thin as its papercraft inhabitants. Whether intentional or not, it seems to be the focus, given that there’s not much in the way of “adventure” in this point-and-click adventure.

Never Alone remains graceful. Its most depressing moment reminds us that if a small girl can survive the harshest of conditions and the meanest of fates, so can we. Life goes on; the spirits never leave us.

It’s clear it likes pinball as much as it likes role-playing games, because the whole game is one big love letter to both, the things mashed together into some odd blender without reason or deeper purpose.

11 bit Studios’ greatest success with This War of Mine, it turns out, is in creating a videogame that is profoundly unpleasant to experience.

Here, then, is another sign that Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is self-aware: It knows the difference between those who win and those who get in the winner’s way, and that one is no better or worse than the other.

Nevertheless, these new elements have been seamlessly integrated into the recognizable LittleBigPlanet foundation, and as a consequence never feel like the source of drastic change. What they offer instead is rejuvenation: a jolt of exhilaration—of imagination—from a series whose novelty had perhaps begun to wane.

Inquisition feels slick but siloed. The story and exploration parts of the game are boxed separately, and the latter is full of prefab errands with few ties to the themes of the Dragon Age setting.

The inclusion of real clips from sideline interviews is a revelation.

There’s no way to take back what it has said in the past—its trivialization of history with Black Ops and shift toward jingoistic chest-thumping in Modern Warfare 2 and 3—but in Advanced Warfare’s recognition of death as a by-product of war there is a chance for a new way forward.

If you are looking for a space to contemplate, a place to linger, a path to walk in patient consideration, you will find yourself at home in The Sailor’s Dream for quite some time. And in the moments when you are not playing, you will hear the voices within the labyrinth sing to you.

And so it makes sense that Helix’s triumph is also its downfall. All loops close the way they start.

It's both love letter and time capsule, for fans and for the newly curious. In a few years, when it's faded almost completely from memory again, I look forward, not to playing it, but to finishing it, and remembering it fondly yet again.

This is why Styx's greatest strength is in always providing another option when a passageway appears to be impenetrable.

Bayonetta 2 erects some of the most solid fighting mechanics and phantasmagorically gonzo visuals in gaming to date—certainly, something as compulsive and massive as this boosts the Wii U to the front of the pack—and through its formal choices communicates a singular, unfiltered vision of sexualization.

This may seem superficial, but in a lot of important ways—its music, language, representation, and sense of joy—FIFA 15 is a more cosmopolitan and worldly sports game. We could use one.

The details of the visual and ludic design, then, do more than keep the terror fresh—they create within the player a demand for more.

These theoretical games are why it can feel like Shadow of Mordor is not “a good Lord of the Rings game” but simply a good game. But the truth is that it is a good game in spite of the fact that it has bones that threaten to burst from the fantasy skin laid overtop; that it is yearning to mutate out of this Lord of the Rings form and into something truly revolutionary.

Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS is all things. A videogame soundtrack for the ages. A digital hoarder’s dream. A virtual cock-fighting ring. A magnifying glass from space. A do-it-yourself 3D diorama kit. That it’s a fun game too is almost frosting at this point.

Owners of the first game might be chagrined to find out they could have waited two years to get all the content on one game card for a single price. But newcomers to this musical take on a venerable series will be pleased to get what they should have always had in the first place.

Madden NFL 15 is a truly impressive football videogame, and probably the best I’ve ever played.

Unrest is a short, smart work. Most roleplaying games are about those in power, but Unrest is also about those who aren't.

The game is a throwback to the old-style point-and-click adventure game, requiring you to solve puzzles with limited assets within a constantly shifting scaffold of constraints that limits what is and is not possible. For the most part, the game avoids the exasperating opacity that once plagued adventure games—flush the pickle down the toilet in order to get the car keys—but there is nevertheless little room for variation in how one solves the puzzles, and little room for choice within the story.

The game is not about death or life but about the soul leaving the body and heading someplace new. It’s about the brief moment it spends flying.

O’Reilly’s work dances around the intersection between the quiet, meditative moments of life and the broader technological world always encroaching on that serenity, but he’s never been afraid to throw out a curveball every once in awhile.

But somehow, the small scale trials found in the levels of 1001 Spikes bring me back. Grabbing the key and making it inches from the stage door before dying carries a similar weight, and makes realizing the far-fetched goal all the sweeter.