I don’t think I played too much new stuff this year. Breath of the Wild and Agents of Mayhem are both waiting in the wings still.
Edit:
The forum software keeps hijacking my countdown and reordering it!
Edit edit:
I can’t bring myself to call that Battlegrounds game by it’s full name. Why does this dude with such a shitty handle want to position himself as the Betty Crocker of this thing? Why are people letting him get away with it?
I mean, calling it Plunkbat is right up there with CoDBlOps
Does it reach the heights of MGS: PoOps, though
I’ll post more detailed reviews later if I can dig them out of the IGF site, but two games listed in this thread that I’d like to second are Oikospiel and West of Loathing.
Oikospiel is a videogame dog opera about labor and art by David Kanaga. It has very well thought-out moments of performance and performativity and is altogether brilliant.
West of Loathing was a game that I thought was going to be dogshit – something about the stick-figure aesthetic made me assume it was going to be smarmy. It isn’t. Although I found nothing in the game hilarious, I also found nothing in poor taste (neither re: offensiveness, nor re: jokes falling flat) and was constantly amused. What is worth drawing attention to is the ease with which the game reacts and branches based on your behavior. It’s totally invisible and natural and feels quite a bit like playing a tabletop RPG with a good DM. It’s the perfect counter-point to a BioWare or Bethesda RPG hitting you over the head with Obvious Decisions with Telegraphed Consequences & Moralities.
I agree that the name sucks, but I also can’t blame him for wanting to build a brand around his take on battle royale games, given how much his other games were cloned (and how quickly PUBG was cloned in Fortnite, and in a hundred mobile ripoffs, and and and).
oh man idk this year…
NIER AUTOMATA aka NEARLY ROBOTS
this is the best game for 2017. if you have a hot take about YOKO TARO’S UPSKIRT ROBOTS you’re wrong: you’re the most wrong person who’s alive. what’s wrong with you? NIER: AUTOMATA is an aesthetically pure game that uses the advantageous hardware processing of LOOKING LIKE A PS2 GAME and worrying more about how to nail the aesthetic beauty of the world then outright hardware manipulation to be the best playing looking and sounding game out all year. it is a contrast to the cartoonish reality of horizon: zero dawn and its rubber grass. this game will make you laugh and cry and it’s the best yoko taro has ever been.
NIER: AUTOMATA is worth exactly FIVE COPIES of DRAKENGARD 3
MAGIC WAND is probably FOUR AND A HALF (that’s good!) copies of FINAL FANTASY XV
fuck you. let it die counts. let it dies totally counts. it got a bunch of huge updates this year and it released too late last year to really count for 2016 anyway. fuck you. let it die is great. let it die is like a labyrinth that you can leave alone for awhile. nothing is better than coming back 666666666after three months to find out all of your shit is broken, your dudes are all captured and a different song is playing cuz the radio doesn’t work in this game. this game is murder hypnosis.
aka the only multiplayer game they played all year aka the only game I saw my roommates get excited about aka the game I spent 20$ on instead of eating for two weeks aka sonic insanity aka I still haven’t beat it and that’s okay cuz every level is interesting to look at and experience aka DOCTOR ROBOTNIK’S MEAN BEAN MACHINE
ronk described this game in a more colorful way than I can think of and that’s why it’s only number five. if I had a better way to joke about this game it would definitely be higher on this list, but not above #2 which is the slot I promised the catamites.
alright everybody, that’s the whole list. that’s every new game from 2017 I played this year, you’re welcome.
I feel weird about how wrong my heart is about Nier. For a game about depressed robots it left me cold. I’m sorry skeleton man. 
it’s okay
I’m with you on the first two. They don’t look appealing to me in the least. The new Zelda is good, though, even if it is largely refinement of familiar formulas.
Did anyone actually play Rime? I’m in danger of never bothering with that one, but I don’t want to miss out if it’s worthwhile.
Most of the titles I would list have been mentioned, other than maybe Hob.
the thing with PUBG aesthetically is that every milsim looks exactly like that, like an ill conceived budget item from a Ukrainian 3D asset render shop (the recent camel toe controversy is a good reminder that this is literally how they’re made) and this one is actually a good game
well they only discovered last month they could make a map with actual map design involved, so maybe one day they will hire a 3D artist or two
i heard hellblade was actually good can anyone confirm? seems unlikely
anecdotally they didn’t totally fuck up the mental health angle the way everyone thought they would but the game is a bunch of sub-uncharted setpieces and pixel hunts
so, peculiarly, while they didn’t reveal themselves as being totally out of their depth, the most laudable aspect of this is … audio engineering
I almost added a “WORST GAMES OF 2017” list but thought that was too mean, but yeah, RIME was on it.
It’s that bad? I figured at worst it would be derivative
was figuring despite how it looked, maybe there was a reason every publisher in the world dropped it
I’ve met one of the guys responsible for the audio
He was really proud!
do you think if i pray hard enough and do all my chores and be kind to everyone, Santa will bring me the announcement of a Switch port of Nier Automata?
because i’d really like that
If you played anything but Donk the only thing you played was yourself.