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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Throats are ripped out, bones snap, and The Wolf Among Us proves that it still has more than enough bite to back up its bark.

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.

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.

The cumulative effect is a game that is as bright, rich, and lovely as nostalgia would have us believe our favorite NES games always were.

This is the National Pastime deconstructed. This is also Nintendo’s past commingling with its future: A perfect, tiny game, forced into this strange new shape and sold piecemeal.