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

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.

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.

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.

This is a strategy game, but not really by design. It is a very good representation of being a baseball manager; it just happens that being a baseball manager is a pretty good strategy game.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Transistor’s combat engages with the same dualism that informs the game’s central tension between coded performativity and human agency.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Like The Walking Dead, Republique is now freed of needing to instruct the player of their goals and how to achieve them. It is, instead, refocusing its efforts, in wonderfully surprising ways.