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The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

This was the year of the sea change, a crucial moment where the medium found maturity and diversity.

The 25 Best Video Games of 2016
Photo: Campo Santo

If there’s any one area of culture that didn’t suffer a crippling lesson in humility in 2016, it was video games. In fact, in most respects, it was the one area that managed to creatively thrive, where even typically under-ambitious annual mainstays like Call of Duty managed to perform strong pivots toward the new and fascinating. Meanwhile, stronger but less bombastic statements of artistic intent that would’ve gone quietly into the good night in years past became the massive success stories of the day. This was the year of the sea change, a crucial moment where the medium found maturity and diversity, because of and occasionally in spite of its audience, which is what all good art does. The 25 games we named the best of the year are the most stellar examples of that, and the promise of progress we desperately needed to see in this of all years. Justin Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

25. Stardew Valley

It’s tempting to call Stardew Valley the most unlikely hit of 2016, considering its stunning success on the charts. After all, the game painstakingly imitates Harvest Moon, a series that hasn’t reared its head much in recent years. But such a pedestrian label undersells developer ConcernedApe’s colossal achievement. Those of us looking for an escape from this year’s dire extremities might find solace in the titular valley, but good luck retrieving yourself when you’ve fully burrowed into it. The particulars of farm management, mining, and crop bundling will likely keep you occupied for weeks upon weeks, and that’s before you even try to start a family. Running a farm isn’t easy, but Stardew Valley makes it irresistible. Steven Wright


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

24. Final Fantasy XV

Playing Final Fantasy XV is almost like playing through the recent history of video games, spanning the full 10 years of the game’s development. Its core mechanics, its graphics, even its story in spots all feel like a newer game built over the ruins of another. The game spends hours upon hours breezing past everything expected and easy about a Final Fantasy game. The heart of Final Fantasy XV is a tale of brotherhood, an ersatz bachelor road trip marred by a massive familial loss. Literally and figuratively, prince Noctis and his crew can never go home again. Though a more traditional Final Fantasy story is going on around them, it’s peripheral to a game far more interested in bonds between brothers, with no self-consciousness about their emotions, their interests, the people and places they love. Imagine Y Tu Mamá También, only Gael García Bernal can teleport. That may be an insane comparison to make about a JRPG, and yet, this is the strange but utterly compelling caliber of storytelling Final Fantasy XV has stepped into. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

23. Quantum Break

Quantum Break feels like the game Remedy had been building up to since the first Max Payne, a riot of various media smashing against each other, vying for dominance. It’s not exactly a fluid transition going from game to live-action footage, from character to character, from timeline to timeline, but it’s so very easy to fall in love with the audacity of the attempt, especially when the game hits kinetic pay dirt, playing around with and being constantly threatened by the very fabric of time and space. The actual action feel like a persistent God Mode, the stakes of the plot are the heaviest imaginable, and all of it performed by a slate of character actors blessedly refusing to phone this one in. Remedy hasn’t so much reinvented the action game so much as played holy havoc with it with an evil grin. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

22. Ratchet & Clank

It might seem like a long time ago now, but back in 2003, a gun-toting lombax, Ratchet, and his tiny robot pal, Clank, saved us from the legion of humorless military shooters that flooded onto platforms like so much rancid tar. Even now, as that tide of camouflaged fatigues seems apt to recede the colorful, chromed-out weapons and goofy self-deprecation that first lured children and adults alike to the series’s side are still just as refreshing as the first steps you took on Veldin so many years ago. But this isn’t just a nostalgia trip, as Insomniac retooled virtually every mechanic of the first game in the series, and it all handles like a dream. As a remaster, Ratchet & Clank might be overlooked in favor of newer fare, but this is one adventure worth revisiting. Wright

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

21. No Man’s Sky

There are three versions of No Man’s Sky: the one Hello Games hyped up, the one gamers expected, and the one we got. Only one of those versions matters, and it’s the one devoid of the expectations of the mob. It’s the one Sean Murray and his team built for years, a world-birthing engine of infinite exploration and possibility. It’s a game that feels vast, infinite, and somehow so small and limiting. And yet, the Herculean achievement of creating a nigh-seamless universe teeming with not just life but ways to live cannot be denied. An international team of hundreds could’ve made No Man’s Sky palatable and easy, or made gunplay a priority. Instead, it’s a beautifully massive game that serves no other master than presenting the means and resources to explore an unending universe. There’s no other video game that so intrinsically trusts and nurtures the great human need to be in the stars than this. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

20. Kentucky Route Zero Act IV

The Kentucky Route Zero experiment continues to roll on at its own solemn, elegiac pace, and though the wait between the third and fourth episodes was as interminably long as usual, its timing couldn’t have been better. Conway’s journey through the nowhere place of the Zero acts as a sort of long-form eulogy to all the versions of the American dream that no longer carry any import in the 21st century, and in Act IV, he’s passed the point of raging at the dying of the light, but accepted it with a martyr’s serenity, just as all the travelers down Act IV’s Lake Lethe have. There’s sadness in the dignity upheld by the denizens of the Zero in this episode, and there’s joy in moving past the need to mourn here, a complex sea of emotions common in the greatest novels written about forgotten Americas but wholly unique and beautiful to see in gaming. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

19. The Last Guardian

Nothing this year was more endearing than Trico, an adorable catbird with a puppyish personality, attempting to follow The Last Guardian’s amnesiac boy through a tiny archway, the result being that his feathered face became temporarily stuck. The gameplay revolves around this giant creature and the more massive prison that holds you both, but little, unexpected mannerisms are what stick with players. Trico cannot be controlled, only persuaded (or outright tricked), and there’s a compelling frustration to interactions that successfully emulates the experience of having an actual pet. Treat Trico well, by feeding him hidden barrels, and he’ll respond more quickly; refuse to pull enemy spears from his body or decline to pet him when he nuzzles beside you and he’ll throw a time-wasting tantrum. Whether you catch Trico relieving himself or he catches you falling from a ledge, The Last Guardian will surprise you. Aaron Riccio


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

18. Kirby: Planet Robobot

Kirby games are praised for being cute, simple, pleasant, and dreamy, but Kirby: Planet Robobot unexpectedly moves away from tradition with the peace and subtlety of a lightning bolt. After all, this time Kirby can obliterate foes and obstacles via a series of mecha suits, often to the “Heart of Steel” theme, an uptempo, crescendoing hard-rock loop that grants a newfound urgency to the series. When one suit morphs into a vehicle, the feeling of dominance is exhilarating as you do flips between background and foreground planes. Provocatively, this power fantasy becomes somewhat of a distant memory by the end of the game, as you ride an elevator to a series of boss fights where you must overcome oppressors in technologically advanced, demeaning, and humiliating forms, from a robotic update of classic villain Meta Knight to a watch-shaped machine that will suck you into its mouth, complete with the camera following you in, and spit you out. The phallic climax, which involves Robobot Kirby plowing a hole all the way through the final boss, is a daring final reversal on what the puffy, pink Nintendo hero has always represented in pop-game culture. Jed Pressgrove

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

17. Firewatch

The hazy amber skyscapes of Firewatch do much to emphasize the loneliness of the game’s two major characters. Such artistic flourishes are undoubtedly intentional; while most games reduce the bonds between the characters that inhabit them to the purely functional, Firewatch hangs its hat, cloak, and even its boots on the relationship between player-controlled Henry and Delilah, his foul-mouthed co-worker who he never even sees. Both he and Delilah reside in towers that have the express purpose of watching for fires in the game’s fictional national park. And while a partnership based entirely on voice communication might seem a difficult task to pull off, the performances of the two leads elevate the emotional tenor to a level rarely seen in the narrative game genre. Wright


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

16. Watch Dogs 2

There are many mischievous hackers out there simply in it for the “lulz,” and Watch Dogs 2 is filled with plenty of moments in which to punk the San Francisco Bay Area’s populace. But the discrimination suffered by black protagonist Marcus Holloway and his band of misfits urges players to actually stand for something. Every activity in the game serves to immerse players deeper within this world, whether it’s taking selfies in front of Haight Street’s Famous Fishnet Legs, listening in as your colleagues geekily expound on the merits of Alien versus Predator, or serving up a cathartic form of social justice against unsubtle analogues of Martin Shkreli and Scientology. New in-game gadgets like a remote-controlled car only heighten this visceral connection to the physical world. As one mission puts it, players are genuinely, ambitiously expected to “Hack teh World.” Riccio


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

15. Layers of Fear

Evoking and surpassing the tension of the Hideo Kojima playable teaser P.T., Layers of Fear throws nonstop environmental curve balls at you that play into its unambiguous themes of madness and family destruction: doors that only open to brick walls with words like “DRUNK” and “SELFISH” painted on them; generic lit-up toy houses adorning shelves in an otherwise bleak hall; and, of course, an unfinished painting that transforms the ordinary into the horrific, such as bloody flamingo demons, as you, an artist in despair, add new touches to the canvas to discover insight about the state of your soul. You never know how or when a room or object might change, but Layers of Fear’s tale of misguided male frustration is what truly makes the game resonate. Many fathers may recognize the insane anger of the painter when he, for example, recalls a memory of berating his wife for buying baby shoes before the unborn child’s sex is identified. Developer Bloober Team’s portrait of the man of the house is unflinching, unsettling, and, most disturbingly, believable. Pressgrove


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

14. Battlefield 1

Many play Battlefield 1 for its frenetic and massive multiplayer, in which up to 64 players simultaneously use everything from desperate bayonet charges and horseback maneuvers to all-in tank sieges and zeppelin bombardments in order to seize objectives. It’s a grand-scale reminder of how horrible and chaotic war can be. For all that, it’s the specificity of the single-player’s vignettes that pays a fitting tribute to those who fought in World War I, and of those, the moments that linger are the slowest and least chaotic, the ones in which not even a single shot is fired: a young scout creeping through the occupied countryside, scavenging parts for his mired tank; a cavalier American pilot finally putting his own neck on the line to carry his comrade through the labyrinthine trenches in the no man’s land; and an unarmed messenger pigeon flying home through the tracer-teared sky. Riccio

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

13. Pony Island

For certain forms of subversive entertainments, like Twinbeard’s 2012 game Frog Fractions and Adult Swim’s 2014 television show Too Many Cooks, the less you know, the better, and that’s certainly the case with Pony Island. The game consistently plays with expectations: The “Play” button doesn’t work until a puzzle has been solved in the glitching Options, and the loading screen is more than it appears. Pony Island is a deconstruction of just about every game that’s sucked away your time (and soul), a clever and unique experience that somehow gamifies its critiques of gamification. The game does all this while savagely satirizing the history of games, from minimalist text adventures to laughably rendered first-person 3D. Under the auspices of its cute and thoughtless mascot, Pony Island dives deep into the question of what a game actually is, what it should be, and why we play them, finding meaning in every level and each keystroke. Riccio


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

12. Doom

The original Doom and its sequel are perhaps unmatchable in their vigor: high-octane destruction of labyrinthine locales, darting through fireballs and slimy orbs, brazenly stolen heavy-metal riffs punctuated with the ever-present cocking of a super shotgun. The Doom reboot represents perhaps the closest we’ll ever come to that high-water mark, transforming the classic two-plane gunplay with vertically vast spaces that require not just a quick trigger finger, but also a pair of deft dancing feet. The pedants among us might note that the glut of insta-hit enemies and the addition of jumping render this Doom more akin to 1996’s Quake than was perhaps intended, but such complaints miss the point entirely. The incipient dominance of the militarized mega shooter made it seem like we were never going to get another classic single-player arena blaster, so, please, just enjoy the carnage. Wright


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

11. That Dragon, Cancer

Although the 14 vignettes in That Dragon, Cancer are uneven in quality, everything is undeniably personal in Ryan and Amy Green’s game, which details the struggle with their young boy Joel’s fatal fight with cancer. That Dragon, Cancer could have easily been a one-dimensional expression of sadness and grief or a simple call for pity. Instead, among sentiments of frustration, despair, doubt, resignation, and even hatred, the couple holds true to their Christian belief that God’s grace should shape one’s perception of circumstances, not the other way around. The sequence where you can light candles to hear different people asking God to have mercy on Joel is the most moving spiritual moment in games since the worldwide prayer in the final battle of Earthbound. Unlike that classic RPG, That Dragon, Cancer doesn’t seem to end in victory, yet a paradox in the final vignette cements the Greens’ unwavering message and place in video-game history: “And the air is emptier without his laugh, and yet our hearts are still full.” Pressgrove


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

10. Inside

While the cult of the indie puzzle-platformer has waned in recent years, Playdead’s follow-up to the critically beloved Limbo lit a pale, shimmering fire right in the heart of the genre. Deft configurations of the familiar crates, levers, and ladders that make up the expected trappings of Inside’s puzzles produce some of the most memorable conundrums of the past few years in gaming. Rather than trying to ignore the long shadow cast by its predecessor, the game maintains an active, fruitful conversation with Limbo but never to the point of sheer repetition. Immaculately authored and coiffured by six long years of development, Inside has some of the most memorable moments that the genre has yet seen. The game may only have a few tricks in its repertoire, but its success at those is difficult to overstate. Wright

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

9. Superhot

While 2016 was a great year for the big-budget first-person genre, Superhot proves that the restraint of the indie scene is still a creative force to be reckoned with. It’s a simple five-word concept that opens the door to brilliance on par with the best action films and games of recent years: Time moves when you do. It’s bullet time in its loosest, freewheeling form. Every stage is the kind of bullet carnival that would make John Wick applaud. Because time grinds to a snail’s pace until you make your move, the tension of every split-second decision stretches out forever. Every hit, then, is given time to simmer, and every new target opens up a world of possibilities no longer reliant on the player’s twitch reflexes, but rather on your creativity and deviousness. All the while, the game’s framework takes a paranoid, cyberpunk, Existenz-style tack that somehow fits in with the minimalist aesthetic of the core game perfectly. Superhot takes the blissfully familiar and completely twists the whole first-person shooter genre to fit its own ends. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

8. Dark Souls III

One of the suppositions of the Dark Souls series has always been that true beauty cannot be earned without suffering, and Dark Souls III remains as relentless as its predecessors. It’s also far more accessible, thanks to a wider variety of options in combat, smoother controls, and a more navigable labyrinth of horrors. Players who wish to earn their stunning glimpses of the kingdom still have to survive a gauntlet of reanimated knights and a giant, icy, armored dog, but they’ll spend far less time in loading screens and will almost always be aware of why they’re dying. It helps, too, that even the monsters take on a grim sort of glamor, whether it’s an extra appendage abruptly erupting from a creature’s back like a flock of ravens or the way Lord Wolnir’s fashionable gold jewelry glistens against the spectral onyx of his long-dead skin: Beauty in death, indeed. Riccio


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

7. Hyper Light Drifter

It’s tempting to call Hyper Light Drifter a clone, as its world design—a town surrounded by four monster- and puzzle-saturated areas—heavily recalls that of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. But creator Alex Preston, rather than tell a concrete legend, imbues his adventure with impressions about the impermanence and unfairness of life. The anthropomorphic characters speak in images, with many of them depicting violent ethnic discrimination in a nod to Art Spiegelman’s comic-book masterpiece Maus. These pictures stick in the back of your mind as you traverse brightly colored environments full of nonlinear and hidden paths, the pixelations of the graphics encouraging a conflicted perception of beauty and fragility. As in any good action game, learning how to utilize techniques to survive the advances of antagonists comes with pleasure, but this satisfaction is counterbalanced by the blood your protagonist coughs up and drips as you take damage. Even if you conquer everything and discover all of its secrets, Hyper Light Drifter is ultimately a tough reminder of the fleeting and surreal nature of existence. Pressgrove


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

6. The Witness

Jonathan Blow’s long-awaited sequel to his 2008 indie megahit Braid is a puzzle game powered by ideology, a series of conundrums designed to inspire real-life note-taking and challenge your geometric savvy. The Witness can be as difficult as any game released this year, all-consuming in its mystery, eating up hours and hours of your time with its demanding and exacting logic. And while this love letter to the power of knowledge and science might come off a tad smug in its hyper-rationalist worldview, the cumulative effect of its swaths of mind-melting riddles ultimately serves as a complete portrait of its creator himself: beguiling and enigmatic but thoroughly appealing nonetheless. Wright

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

5. Assault Android Cactus

Developer Witch Beam’s Assault Android Cactus is one of the most emotional shooters of all time. The game supercharges the drama of destroying the hundreds of foes that pour into any given level by requiring you, amid all the constant repositioning, to look out for power-ups that recharge your dying battery. Other design choices further suggest a rebellious vision of the genre. A couple of the nine selectable characters don’t fire bullets, demanding one to rethink how to carve out paths in claustrophobic situations. For most playable heroes, a dodge move is automatically initiated before and after you fire a secondary weapon that must charge back up for another shot, forcing unusual foresight for evasion. These innovations come packaged with brilliant work by musician Jeff van Dyck, who, when your battery runs out, punctuates your failure with a five-minute song that makes ample use of AutoTune, campily and convincingly expressing the pathos of a defeated robotic hero: “I’m not half the droid I used to be. I’m not half the droid I want to be.” Pressgrove


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

4. Severed

It wasn’t terribly long ago that tech/gaming bloggers preached of the end of the console gaming world as we know it, and that the sword of Damocles would have the App Store logo engraved on it. Severed, in a strange sort of way, feels like the ultimate in thumbed noses to that doomsaying, taking a very mobile-game concept—an RPG where you slay enemies by slashing their limbs off using the touchscreen—and not just adding a console game’s depth and artistry, but using the framework to tell a deeply affecting tale about loss and grief. It’s a delicate balance to strike, but DrinkBox Studios, fresh off the firmly tongue-in-cheek Guacamelee!, makes it seem effortless, like this is the kind of RPG we get all the time, instead of a beautifully innovative gem, one that might very well be the last of its kind. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

3. Overwatch

Overwatch is a game that succeeds in spite of itself. There’s nothing inherently special about Yet Another Multiplayer Shooter, especially one so profoundly threadbare in terms of modes of play compared to its peers. Yet, like Team Fortress 2 before it, the game is an incredible triumph due to the world built around it. It’s a place of bountiful color, dizzying heights, and wide-eyed, uncynical heroes, defined by the smallest interactions between its wildly diverse cast of characters at any given moment during gameplay. To switch characters in Overwatch is to play an entirely different game every single time, with an entirely new story and gameplay. The only truly common thread in each match is the ever-present need for teamwork, where killing the most players might help, but still represents a path to failure without a group of compatriots willing to sacrifice glory for the greater goal. This is the first-person multiplayer shooter at its inclusionary best. Clark


The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

2. Titanfall 2

Given its predecessor’s sole emphasis on multiplayer matches, it’s almost shocking that Titanfall 2 sets such a high bar for single-player missions. The game’s focus on the creative integration of wall-running, double-jumping, sliding, shooting, and melee attacks makes even the tutorial section a blast. More importantly, this highly customizable action encourages the player to take risks that would be suicidal or impossible in everyday first-person shooters. But that’s only half the fun: Titanfall 2 ingeniously alternates between this fluid soldier-based play and weighty, deliberate mech face-offs—a juxtaposition of styles cleverly hammered home by the dialogue between the go-getter pilot and Spock-like AI of the walking machine. Everything in the campaign is designed to give you a rush, from laughably over-the-top villains to the remarkably fast burrowing through tight places to platforming sections that will make you think you’re seeing sideways. The greatness of the game’s campaign raises a controversial question in our globalized world: Who needs an Internet connection or other players when the proceedings are this electrifying alone? Pressgrove

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The 25 Best Video Games of 2016

1. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

There’s an old moral lesson in which, after discovering that the perilously recovered treasure chest was empty, the hero realizes that the true reward was the quest itself. There’s no such moral lesson in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, which is both a rewarding adventure in and of itself and an overflowing bounty of innovation, a last-hurrah that throws everything at its fans without ever once feeling derivative. There are daring escapes from Panamanian jails, shootouts at an Italian manor’s gala, car chases through the streets of modern King’s Bay—and that’s hardly scratching the surface. The graphics come uncannily close to the game’s cinematic aspirations, a new grappling hook mechanic enhances the already epic gunfights, and sequences in the Madagascan outback add a much-needed dose of semi-open-world exploration to the series. Despite needing to encompass all of these features, the ambitious story never feels stretched or shoehorned, and delivers an emotional closure to the series as protagonist Nathan Drake must choose between his gilded obsessions and the life of his rogue brother, Sam. Given all that, Uncharted 4 avoids another moral: You can’t have too much of a good thing. Riccio

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