Danny O'Dwyer's Top 10 Games of 2016

Danny O’Dwyer left GameSpot earlier this year to make video __game documentaries at Noclip. You can also find him ranting about speedy-race-cars with Drew on Giant Bomb’s Alt+F1 podcast.

Another year, another Danny O’Dwyer GOTY list on VideoGames.com--though the site’s new layout makes it really hard for me to find the Star Wars meme section. Anyway, here are my top 10 distractions from the dumpster fire that was 2016.

(in order of appearance)

The Witness

Nobody makes games like Jonathan Blow, and it’s probably just as well because I don’t think I’d be able to subject myself to a __game like The Witness more than once every couple of years. The Witness is like an exam. One you prepare for, and complete, and feel really good about yourself, and then immediately forget about and get on with your life.

Except, I’ve never completed it.

The Witness haunts me. When people talk about that game I feel like the only adult in the room without a high-school diploma. A faker. A charlatan. Whenever Jon Blow tweets I’m reminded of my island of incomplete puzzles. My island of shame. Shame Isle. Will I ever figure out what those videos were about? How many strange shapes in the horizon are yet to be discovered? Will I ever return to Shame Isle? Let’s talk in 2017.

Hitman

A late entry here, based almost entirely on Brad and Dan’s adventures. What I love about this year’s Hitman is that it rewards the things people actually enjoyed about the old games; replaying levels, playing sloppily, and uncovering the puppet strings of its digital worlds. The old Hitman games tried so hard to pretend they were real places, but this Hitman seems to relish the idea that this is all just a game. The training level with its ridiculous wooden helicopter was a good early indicator. In the old games you were encouraged to be perfect. In this Hitman, you’re encouraged to have fun. To mess up, go down in a blaze of glory and start from the beginning. They made a game where replaying the levels from the start was fun again thanks to the ridiculous amount of well-written opportunities each location presents.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Uncharted 4 is the best Uncharted game. You travel the world with your brother murdering people in exotic places. It has at least five Monkey Island references, and they even have a storyline that suggests a life of ceaseless killing may be having negative effects on Nate’s marriage. It looks great, and the contextual voice acting is the best in the business. The flashback levels are clever, the epilogue is sweet, and the driving section is one of the best gaming moments of the year. If you own a PlayStation 4 and don’t have this game you deserve to be shot in the face like every other human Nathan Drake has ever met.

Doom

Doom is probably the best game I played this year, but I’m not doing a numbered list because I work FOR MYSELF NOW GODDAMMIT AND DON’T HAVE TO PRESCRIBE TO OUTDATED WAYS OF COVERING *cough* sorry.

Doom does something we all thought impossible--it evokes the feeling of the old Doom games while actively working to try and the fix their failings. The glory-kill system keeps you in the fight and removes those medipack hunts of old. The combat chess makes using all of your arsenal essential. It even has good hell levels. The multiplayer was an afterthought, but when a campaign is as solid, long, and replayable (see Arcade mode) as this I don’t think it needs anything else to justify the package. From a technical perspective this game is an incredible achievement, running at 60 on consoles and looking incredible as it does it. I love almost everything about Doom. The demon design, their animation, the gun modifications, double jump, it’s terrific self-aware tone. Doom is the best shooter we’ve had in years, and the fact that it took us all by surprise makes it even more glorious.

Overwatch

By the time Overwatch had come out I’d spent months playing the beta, so I’ve basically not played it since the far side of E3. Regardless, it’s one of my favorite games of the year, blending dozens of shooter styles together to make an infinitely replayable team game with a skill ceiling that’s only limited by your team’s ability to communicate. I think my favorite thing about Overwatch is that it could have been a much more dumbed down version of what it is. But Blizzard are so good at teaching the player new tricks that they just built the game they wanted and figured out how to get players up to speed later. Overwatch, unlike so many online shooters, respects the player's intelligence. Except for the loot crates. They blow.

Inside

I played Inside in one sitting while my wife read a book beside me. When the final chapter happened, my mouth was basically agape for five minutes straight. She had been peering at the screen over the top of her book this whole time, tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Do video games usually do things like this?”. I turned, stared directly into her eyes and said, “No."

Pokémon GO

I don’t care about Pokémon. I’ve never played any of the games, I’m not into weird Japanese shit, and I hate leaving the house. So on paper this weird app was never for me. But for a good two months it became the only game people were talking about outside of our tech bubble. One of the guests to our wedding in Ireland promised her mother she’d catch a rare Pokémon that was only available in Europe. For weeks there were packs of tweens walking around Oakland with their phones out. And one evening myself and a bunch of my mates got in a car and drove to our old school to catch a fucking Snorlax because it popped up on a Pokémon GPS Tracker. Good job Pokémon GO! You made the list.

Overcooked!

Overcooked is the best couch co-op game released this year, and though myself and my wife knocked it out in a week, we enjoyed every minute. It seems perfectly designed for two people, with the initial levels retaining challenge and the ending levels getting to Tokyo Jungle co-op levels of impossibility. New mechanics were layered in at expert pace, and critically for a game of this nature, the controls felt tight and fair. Grab a friend, and fight over cutting lettuce.

Titanfall 2

It’s actually kind of sad that Titanfall 2’s campaign is such a breath of fresh air, because it walks pretty familiar territory for anyone who played a first person campaign in the mid 2000s. What I love about Titanfall 2’s campaign is that it uses the mobility in that game in ways that the multiplayer never could. The shackles came off, and it seemed like every idea the team had accumulated over their five years working on the franchise bubbled to the surface all at once. Once the campaign got going, each new chapter introduced a new bizarre twist on the gameplay that made it a joy to keep playing. The final third of the campaign is one of the best in living memory. Great job Respawn, you reminded us how good these games should be. The multiplayer was cool too.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality doesn’t have a singular experience that deserves to get on this list, but taken as a whole it is most certainly one of the best gaming experiences of the year. It has fun, snackable games like Accounting, Job Simulator and The Lab. Visiting all my old haunts around the world in Google Maps VR gave me one of the most emotional moments of the year. My wife happily lost herself in Tilt Brush for hours at a time. And I’ll never forget the time I played paintball with a team of children in Rec Room. The Vive has been a consistent source of escapism in my household, and I look forward to using it even more next year.

Late to the Party Award: Spelunky (Runner up: Ocarina of Time)

Wish I played more Award: XCOM 2

Best 2015 game of 2016 Award: Rocket League

Wife’s game of the Year Award: Banished

Best VR Game Award: Accounting

Best Open World: Watch Dogs 2

Best Beta: Battlefield 1

Most played game that didn’t make the list award: Jackbox Party Pack 3

Filed under:

Inside

Overwatch

Pokémon Go

Doom

The Witness

Overcooked!

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Virtual Reality

Game of the Year 2016

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Giant Bomb's 2016 Game of the Year Awards: Day Five

Watch the Day Five Deliberations here:

On our final day of __game of the Year deliberations, we came to some of the biggest conclusions of 2016. Who's the best at protecting the payload? What story grabbed us more than any other? Most importantly, what is the worst and the best __game of the year? Find out below.

Overwatch Character of the Year

Reinhardt

There are a lot of great Overwatch characters, sure. Some have their funny little magic tricks, some are oh-so-angsty-and-scary, and some like to sit in one spot and just shoot at things. There’s only one character, though, that is there to move you to the point, capture it, and let you forever hold it. That character is Reinhardt. Watch as Soldier 76s and McCrees literally lay down and die as they see it relentlessly marching across the map, an army in tow. Conversely, as you approach the objective and see an opposing Reinhardt you know it’s time to rethink that head-on assault. Rip-tire? No problem for a well-aimed Fire Strike. Exploding D.Va? Let’s just Charge and push her away from all our little friends. High noon? Big shield. I could on and on, except about Earthshatter, that one… well, the man needs to have some limits to his greatness... I suppose. Do your friends a favor, learn and play Bastion… so I can destroy you with Reinhardt.

Runners-up: Lucio, Pharah

Best Story

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Naughty Dog has shown that it's more than capable of penning a great video game story, most notably in The Last of Us. During the Uncharted series, their work has been impressive in terms of dialogue, but most of the characters and overall story beats felt like typical adventure fare. With Uncharted 4, the studio finally made these characters feel like human beings, more often during low-key moments than during bombastic action sequences.

Twitter may have loved the Crash Bandicoot bonus during the chapter with Nathan and Elena at home, but the dynamic between the now-married couple does more of a service toward the game as a whole. They discuss Nathan's "retirement" in believable terms, with the excellent facial capture helping to sell Elena's desire to keep her husband out of harm's way.

Human moments like this are found throughout A Thief's End. From Nathan's reunion to his brother, to the betrayal Elena feels when she discovers that Nathan has lied to her, to the fitting epilogue, it's the well-told story that feels newer to the series than any gameplay mechanic or setpiece moment. Sure, there's also the story of a sniveling antagonist and a pirate treasure, but for the first time, the story of Nathan and those close to him was the real standout of an Uncharted game.

Runners-up: DOOM, Firewatch

Worst Game

Soviet Monsters: Ekranoplans

The subjects of Soviet Monsters: Ekranoplans are undeniably cool: gigantic, real-world quasi-hovercraft that look like what Hideo Kojima would make with Kerbal Space Program. Too bad everything about the game is as drab as a Stalingrad apartment complex and about as functional as a Trabi. You can pick from a long list of ammo types and crew members to take with you on your missions, but good luck determining if any of that makes a difference. There are 27 missions in the game, but unless you’re a part of some secret Soviet telepathy program, you’ll have no idea what to do. Oh, is the “Ground Effect” light in your cockpit illuminated? The entire concept this game hinges on? Press it. See if anything happens. No? Exactly. This game has more bugs than Siberia in summer. I’d rather stand in a breadline.

Runners-up: Mighty No. 9, Lost Reavers

Best Game

Hitman

You'd have been forgiven if you weren't over the moon at the initial announcement of a new Hitman game. 2012's Hitman: Absolution seemed to forget what made the series fun to begin with, opting for a more straightforward experience instead of the possibility-filled sandboxes of previous entries. Fans were already worried that the series was heading in the wrong direction, and even more eyebrows were raised when IO Interactive delayed the new game and announced at the last minute that it would be switching to an episodic structure. Signs of development turmoil were starting to pop up, and an already skeptical fan base began to temper their expectations.

Little did we know that the new Hitman would be one of the best entries yet (if not the best), and that its episodic nature would work wonders. New locations were released on a regular basis, and we found ourselves coming back each time we had a new playground to explore and cause chaos in. Elusive targets became can't-miss opportunities -- we had to try our hand at these limited time contracts whenever they appeared. If the full game had been released all at once, we may have burnt out on these tense, detailed, open-ended maps if we played them end-to-end. With the new business model, Hitman stayed at the forefront of our minds for the entirety of 2016.

A good business model doesn't mean much if we didn't have fun playing the game. Thankfully, Hitman excels in all of the areas that the series has done right in the past. Everything just feels better this time, as well. Its controls and mechanics aren't perfect and missions sometimes involve the occasional bug, but it's a smoother experience overall than its ever been before. Possibilities seem endless thanks to the wide variety of outfits and implements of assassination. The amount of trouble you can get into is truly impressive, as is the way the game allows you to miraculously slip away from it all if you play your cards right.

2016 was filled with huge debuts, finales, and resurrections, but the surprise success of Hitman had us talking, sweating, cursing, and laughing more than any other game this year.

Runners-up:

2. DOOM

3. Overwatch

4. The Witness

5. Titanfall 2

6. Superhot

7. Inside

8. Hyper Light Drifter

9. Thumper

10. Stardew Valley

Filed under:

Overwatch

Hitman

Soviet Monsters: Ekranoplans

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Game of the Year 2016

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Sonny Coming to Steam

The all-new remake of classic RPG series Sonny is headed to Steam.

Remember when we released Sonny on iOS earlier this year? Remember when you were all, “You should release it for Steam”? And remember when we were all, “We’ll make an announcement as soon as we have everything finalized and know for sure”? Well… surprise! Announcement time.

Sonny is coming to Steam! And not even, like, “eventually” or “next year” or “if you wish upon a star”. But soon! You can check out Sonny right now on iOS for a limited-time price of $0.99. Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far!

• Get Sonny on iOS!
• Check out our Sonny Tips and Tricks Guide!

As on iOS, Sonny will release on Steam with a single flat fee. The game’s interface is currently being tweaked and polished to make the transition to desktop, along with other small changes, though at the moment our primary concern is balancing the __game to address player comments about overall difficulty and balance. This extra polish means we don’t have an exact date for you yet, but we will let you know as soon as we do. In the meantime, thank you for your support of indie developers.

For more on Sonny, get Sonny on iTunes, check out Sonny’s official press kit, check of the official Sonny Launch Trailer, visit Sonny on Indie DB, follow the official Sonny Twitter account, and follow Armor Games on Twitter and Facebook.

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Scott Benson's Top 10 Games of 2016

What a year.

Maybe you had a great year somehow living on a private island, chatting with the pod of talking dolphins that live in the lagoon by your beachfront house. But I gotta say, a whole lot of folks did not have a great time in 2016.

There’s a song off Sleater-Kinney’s most recent record that contains probably the most perfect description of right now:

We’re sick with worry/

These nerveless days/

We live on dread/

In our own gilded age

This year we lived on dread. Try as you might to block it out, it was like anxious music buzzing through your skull. It seems everyone I know is scared, angry, worried, poor, and tired. You just want a nap and a moment of peace but the world rolls on, with you hanging onto it. And like all art, video games can speak to that. This year some games did. And for that I’m thankful. In the loudness and the confusion and the one-thing-after-another, there were some perfect moments with games in 2016. And they often involved skeletons.

Spoilers ahead for all of these games, especially #1, which should not be spoiled if you haven’t played it yet. This list is in no particular order aside from the top 4.

10. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

I don’t actually play a lot of big blockbuster games like this, so my first thought was GEEZ THIS LOOKS EXPENSIVE. I’ve never been big into the shooting part of Uncharted games, and I like the traversal stuff fine, but it’s not the main draw for me. SECRET: There’s a gosh-dang walking simulator hidden in Uncharted 4. It’s been there in previous games, but in U4 it’s given almost as much space as the shooting and the swinging. There’s this chill exploration/relationship __game at the heart of Uncharted 4, and I am a sucker for that kind of thing. It’s a __game that gives you plenty of time to just be somewhere, with someone. I was like the reverse of the gamer cliche--I was hammering through the combat to get to the next bit where Nathan and Elena could wander around and work through their weird superhero adventurer relationship. All the times Nathan and Sam could just sit down and hang out, chat about life or whatever else was on their minds at the time. I wanted to wander in that world with these characters. The epilogue and double epilogue of that game I think show where its heart is. And there’s a really mind-blowing motorcycle chase midway through the game too. That was cool.

9. Hyper Light Drifter

Hyper Light Drifter is cool. It just is. It looks cool. It sounds cool. Even that title--what even is a Hyper Light Drifter? I think that’s the main character? Either way it sounds super cool. Once I got a feel for it I was zipping around the screen dispatching all manner of mutants and robots, slashing and shooting and dashing all over the place. It’s clearly a labor of love, which comes through in the small details--the idles of NPCS, their little stories, the pains the game takes to impress upon you the frailty of your character. That whole world feels so fragile. It’s already seen its great catastrophe, but it isn’t dead--rather, things feel tenuous. When you do see massive, unconquerable, earth-shattering things, they’re lying dead on the ground, or on the side of a mountain. You’re climbing over their corpses. The giants are dead in Hyper Light Drifter, but little you goes on.

8. Firewatch

First off--god this game was gorgeous, right? There are a few bits where you’re out during the gloaming, and it’s just a red and orange haze drifting into blues as night falls. Lovely.

Firewatch is part of my favorite genre, the modern post-point and click adventure game. It’s a huge umbrella and for my money it’s the most exciting place to be for games right now. A lot has been said about Firewatch’s story and characters and dialogue, but what I remember most about it was actually how it captured a certain sort of creepiness. The creepiness that someone is standing near you. The creepiness that you are alone, in the middle of nowhere, and someone is there too. And you have no idea what they’re doing or where they are, or if you’re just being paranoid. I used to feel this when I was hiking around the woodsy north Jersey town I grew up in. At some point you stop and realize it’s very quiet, and it’s just you. Alone. Out here. Back then I had my headphones. Here you have a radio and the voice of someone in the distance. Firewatch captures that uncanniness of solitude precisely because it’s so mundane. For how many games hang their hat on solitude and isolation, it’s remarkable how Firewatch does it so much better than almost any other.

7. What I Played Of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

I was an idiot and started playing The Witcher 3 this fall. I have no time to play the Witcher 3. I got through the first two areas of the game and am now in some northern place, and that’s where I had to leave off. The Witcher has maybe the most living open world I’ve ever hung out in. The landscapes are complicated and beautiful. The villages seem like villages. I spent so much time just walking around being like, “Hey, that person’s doing laundry,” and, “Hey, there are stockpiles of food,” and, “Look! Geese!" There are several large towns as well, and they just feel alive. There are gutters, and different widths of streets, and the markets sell a range of things you’d find in a market. There are cats.

There’s a focus on the effects of war in this one--not the actual fighting of wars per se, but the effects on people and land. There are refugees and card checks. There are borders separating families. And it’s all there in front of you on the same roads you’re riding on. Not some mythical hardship far away, but there occupying the same space with you. Human-sized. The twisting Bloody Baron storyline lived up to the hype I’d absorbed in the year or so since the game came out. It is a truly stunning, rambling yarn that goes much farther into weirdness than it first appears. But even when the story isn’t riding at that very impressive high, the world more than makes up for it. And I grew to love Geralt, who is a grumpy detective dad. Video games are packed with grizzled dads, but Geralt has a lightness to him, a no-nonsense humanism. He’s there to help, to solve problems, to be of some comfort if he can. That’s some decent dad stuff.

6. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

My friends and I talk about The Fear. The Fear is the awareness of living in precarity, that state of instability caused by not having security of finances, job, healthcare, etc. You get The Fear through contact--you were evicted, you lost your job, you went a long time with nothing, you lost everything, you barely scraped by. If you’ve never had The Fear, it can be difficult to convey how deep and abiding this thing is. But once you have it you will probably never lose it. Over time it becomes a part of you, and you might even have some fondness for it.

It’s tough to come up with a good visual metaphor for The Fear. Diaries Of A Spaceport Janitor has a floating, barking skull. And your quest is to rid yourself of it, to survive, and maybe get off the planet. Not unlike the crucial Cart Life, Diaries has a fixation on the ritual of low wage work. Get up, check your bank balance, pray for a good day, go to work all day, budget your cash, come home at night, hope for better days. It’s the most common story as far as our lived experiences, and yet so few games are based on it. I loved Diaries of A Spaceport Janitor for telling that story, but with rad aliens and music.

5. Grim Dawn

OK I’m not gonna try to make anything of this. There is no deeper meaning. Sometime you just need to annihilate a horde of skeletons. Grim Dawn will give you that and more, in unending waves. It’s extremely good and fun. It’s ridiculous nonsense and it’s rad as hell.

4. Thumper

Thumper is the feeling of a panic attack, and I know from regular experience. The knowledge that everything is tenuous and unstable, and that if you fuck up, your life will come crashing down. Thumper is having little control of the systems that control your life. Thumper is about having no ability to escape the unknown blows that come out of nowhere, at great speed. Thumper’s beetle’s situation is so unfair, but that doesn’t stop that situation from happening. Fast. Thumper is doom. Thumper is about learning how to glide, how to dance, how to learn the tells, and learning how to fight back--in glorious, glorious style. I will never beat Thumper. It’s also probably the best rhythm game I’ve ever played. Go play Thumper. It’s pure.

3. Dark Souls III

Dark Souls III sees yet another reframing of the central identity split that goes all the way back to Demon’s Souls. Alive vs Soul form. Human vs Hollowed. Kindled and Unkindled. Dark Souls III burns bright and goes dark. It doesn’t fade. It flames out. I loved the hell out of it.

I’m a big Souls games enjoyer, having discovered Demon’s Souls right as it came to the US in 2009. Who knows how final it will actually be, but Dark Souls III is kind of a victory lap for the whole mess of games that came before it, containing references to, and subversions of elements from all of them. There’s the obvious Dark Souls formula, there's some Bloodborne in there, along with plenty of Demon’s Souls (and thankfully little of Dark Souls). I don’t know if I can rightly say how it stands up in the series, because my love of it was informed in part by my love of what came before.

I don’t know how much the sheer love in this game comes though if you’re not hip to everything it’s waving farewell to. I shouted “OH MY GOD I’M BACK IN LATRIA” at one point and laughed out loud. The catacombs feature some of the best skeleton content (this is important to me if this list is any indication) in any game ever. And it’s really funny. The Souls games have a really underrated sense of dry, absurd humor. Dark Souls III is about endings. It can talk about doomed cycles it wants, but this feels like the one last glance. The period on the sentence. The specific ending I got saw me sitting next to someone, watching the light go out together. It was beautiful. And then it was over.

2. Kentucky Route Zero Act 4

KR0 Act 4 takes place on a river. You can make decisions about where to stop and what to do there, but you can’t change the direction the river flows. The river is unpredictable--things appear and disappear, only to show up again in new places. A ship full of cats. A beach resort deep in the darkness of the cave. A memorial set up for a mine long gone, with a message left by the miners spitting one last insult at the company that sold them out. Bats. And as always with this series, people using or repurposing the old. Rebuilding themselves. Working obsolete equipment. Making homes where you wouldn’t expect there to be.

By this point in the game the cast has grown to include all kinds of interesting folks, and you play as all of them at one point or another. But the sad, slow descent of original protagonist Conway in this episode is what hit me hardest. At some point he just drifts away. Debt and alcohol. KR0 tells these stories. It humanizes and dignifies these places and struggles so many of us are familiar with. Working people. Flyover country. Our lives, our dreams, the magic of the world we live in, and the hardships we experience. KR0 is special. There’s one final episode to come at some point in the future. I hope we see Conway again. I want to know he’s ok. I want to know he got out alive.

1. Inside

Inside is untouchable. It is horrific. It is beautiful. A game where the music was actually created by buzzing it through a human skull (no seriously look it up) is the only game that can sum up this year. It’s a masterpiece of the small genre of narrative platformers. The art direction and animations are impeccable and subtle. The game is understatedly brutal and interested in body horror, which makes sense given that it’s from the makers of Limbo.

In the world Inside sets up you’re a small boy and it’s immediately apparent that you are unwanted in whatever this comfortably fascistic ruined world is. Every single human, nonhuman, or random dog that spots you wants to kill you and can, easily. You see other people, maybe like you, lined up, being loaded onto busses and trains. They’re mindless but not without voices, and you soon discover how they’re being controlled. These shambling people become your compatriots. They wear laborer clothes. No one else in the game does. Are they beings grown to order for labor and entertainment? It doesn’t really matter--you’re all up against the same people. These cops, these tie-wearing professionals, these people at their desks. Presumably some of them were responsible for the bizarre state the world is in. You’ll never know because if even you tried to ask they’d kill you on sight for the crime of… what? Being what you are? The game never answers this question. It doesn’t need to.

You are fragile, and scared, and it can feel hopeless. But you’ll make it through. You’ll join up with us, and together we’ll be something massive. We’ll crash through walls and run right over the people who ruined the world, who put us in lines, who killed us, who experimented on us, who caged us, who made us work, who treated us as less than human.

We’ll be a monster together, because we had no other choice. And this way we get to be together. And we’ll get free. You were small. Now we’re massive.

We’ll be horrific. We’ll be beautiful. Here’s to a better 2017.

Filed under:

Scott Benson

Night in the Woods

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

Thumper

Hyper Light Drifter

Firewatch

Grim Dawn

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Kentucky Route Zero

Dark Souls III

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

game of the Year 2016

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Back to the Freezer | New Penguin Quest

We promised you a quest, and by golly you've got one. Belly-slide into __game right away and enjoy Back to the Freezer � the very latest Penguin quest.

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How to Start

Speak to Chuck at Ardougne Zoo

Requirements

RuneScape membership

Ernest the Chicken

Some Like It Cold

50 Divination

45 Runecrafting

37 Slayer

The penguins are back for another slippery tale of subterfuge and ramshackle science that'll leave you questioning the very fabric of reality�as well as the good taste of its puns.

Rewards include hearty chunks of XP to ward off the polar chill, as well as improvements to the XP rewards from Penguin Hide & Seek and the Circus.

And with that, you're on your own. Can you circumvent the latest flashpoint in Gielinor's coldest war? There's only one way to find out.

---

Enjoy!

There's nothing more RuneScape than a quest about penguins, and Mod Helen and Mod Nexus have really put their all into this one. Have fun, and let us know what you think over on the forums.

The RuneScape Team

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In Other News

See the patch notes for further details of today's update.

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Live Streams this Week

Check out our live streams over on Twitch. Find a full streaming schedule on the channel too.

Friday 3rd March | 21:00 __game Time | Community update with Mod Shauny

Join Mod Shauny for a sneak-peek of some of next Monday�s updates.

Sunday 5th March | 19:00 Game Time | PvM with Mod Lee

Get your weekly dose of PvM goodness with Mod Lee � don�t miss it!

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Nick Capozzoli's Top 10 Games of 2016

Nick Capozzoli is a video __game critic and practicing architect, whose reviews have previously been featured on GameSpot. You can find him on twitter at @nickcapozzoli, and his reviews at nickcapozzoli.com.

I have the easiest “me at the beginning of 2016/me at the end of 2016” meme. I’d just put the usual portrait on one side, and in the other frame, a bunch of x-rays. It’s like I was collecting injuries to go with the year’s various insults. I’m literally limping to the finish here, y'all.

Jia Tolentino, reflecting on the year that spawned the meme, wrote that “It’s in the nature of years to feel exhausting in retrospect. The world is punishing; we have short collective memories and a cognitive bias that makes us recall bad events more vividly than good ones.” Maybe that makes an exercise like this one, where we all sift through the past year and pick out ten very good objects, all the more important. If only to apply a little jitter to the downward spiral that was 2016.

Too dark? I mean, I still have to talk about Inside...

10. Brigador

What’s the point of doing things with mechs, if you’re just going to have them perform the same semi-athletic acts the human body can do? If they’re just pulling triggers, hacking away with swords, or throwing clumsy haymakers, I’m probably out.

In the best mech fiction, the giant robots are a means, not an end. Their existence should be saying something about the world they’re in. Like how the synaptic superhumanity of the “frames” in Zone of the Enders lets you know that they’re a species on its way up, while mankind’s going into relegation. Or you could lean into the industrial horror of it all, like MissionForce: Cyberstorm. Brigador is one of the latter--the kind of __game that sees you rolling in atop a towering pile of Mad Max detritus called “Treehouse,” and driving it through occupied buildings simply because they’re in your way.

Mechs, Brigador knows, are inherently absurd, ostentatious things, and any world in which people think it’s a prudent career move to invest in a giant personal killdozer is probably a nasty piece of work. Brigador takes that absurdity and channels it, naturally, into the darkly humorous. A typical briefing: “It is accurate to consider your participation in the present opportunity a heroic sacrifice, a tangible contribution to the restoration of rightful planetary self-governance.”

9. FIFA 17

Did I use “relegation” correctly, up there? I’m still learning the lingo. 2016 was the year I decided I’d get into fútbol. I put my fandom up to a twitter vote, I switched my Sunday TV viewing from the NFL to something called “Bundesliga,” and I bought a copy of FIFA 17.

FIFA sports a story mode this year, and I figured that was my inroad. These things always follow players on a trip from the bottom of the league to the top, so I expected “The Journey” to give me a nice tour of the sport. And that it does, pursuing its protagonist, Alex Hunter, across the customary narrative beats: battles for a roster spot, rivalries, cup games, and the like.

The Journey handles these moments competently (which is no small thing, as anyone who played NBA 2K16’s bizarre “Livin’ Da Dream” can tell you). But it didn’t truly grab me until it did something most sports games aren’t willing to do: ripping Hunter from my team of choice and sending him off on loan. The move, which is portrayed as a professional setback, puts Hunter on the same team as his former bully, Williams. But with a shared purpose and at the fringes of relevance, the antagonist becomes a friend, and a new, stronger kind of pride forms. The narrative footwork sets up what’s subtly one of my favorite moments in a game this year. Not ten seconds after that cutscene, my Hunter and Williams teamed up for a wild, fumbling goal that was more meaningful than any touchdown or dunk I’ve made elsewhere.

8. Spaceplan

Play it on a lark. Play it even if, like me, you tend to regard the whole genre of “clicker” games with a kind of bemused horror. Play it even if you don’t think it’s a game--you dreadful bore--and be sure to stay for the ending.

At the start of Spaceplan, you wake up trapped aboard a mysterious ship, in the orbit of a mysterious planet. As your A.I. assistant helpfully notes, you’re going to need to jerry-rig some equipment if you’re going to survive, let alone figure out what happened. But the only thing you have are potatoes. A lot of potatoes. God, so many potatoes. It’s like a lunatic version of The Martian--you’re going to have to pseudo-science the shit out of things.

Spaceplan takes the language NASA sometimes uses to author twee Twitter updates from the perspective of its satellites (“Ship status: lonely”), and augments it with a comic literalness. Your thing that makes things is called a “Thing Maker". The one that lists potential ideas is the “Idea Lister”, and words are output at…well, you get the idea. Don’t sweat the details, Spaceplan seems to say. Just keep clicking (or don’t, after you’ve launched a few energy-gathering potato probes), and things will eventually sort themselves out.

At some point, space being space, the scales you're working with start getting suitably mad. When you sink your first “Tater Tower” into the red crust of the planet, tell me the whole thing doesn’t instantly become a lollipop, dotted with the vanilla sprinkles of a few hundred crashed probes. On a plot measuring the game’s exponentially increasing nonsense over time, that part’s only the subtle beginning of the upturn.

7. Concrete Jungle

Concrete Jungle technically came out in 2015, but I didn’t cotton onto it until its mobile port released this year. (I know these Giant Bomb duders are nothing if not sticklers for the rules when it comes to these lists).

Deck-building games are usually a tough sell for me. I think something about the idea of a video game built around the use of cards strikes me as unpleasantly anachronistic, like how I used to have to use a cassette tape converter to play the songs off my iPod in my old Chevy Lumina. In Concrete Jungle, though, the cards correspond to buildings, farmland, and parks, and when played they contribute to a shifting topographical layer. The characters--mayors, architects, CEOs--all have their own proficiencies, and in versus mode, those neatly translate to competing visions for the city.

If an opponent stamps their mark on a given column with some mansions or luxury apartments, then it’s in your best interest to go ahead and tank the value of the land beneath the buildings (and by extension, their score) by plopping a bunch of factories and chemical plants around them. The grodier the better. It’s competitive NIMBY, and in 2016, a bit of wish fulfillment--give me a toxic landfill, please, and I’ll sit it right next to Trump National Golf Course.

6. Overwatch

It’s impeccably polished. Sure. Fine. But polish alone doesn’t get you Overwatch’s weird, beautiful, sometimes kind of creepy community following. I put a lot of weight on the kind of community a game engenders. Each informs the other, to the degree that I rarely find it valuable to consider either side separately. Overwatch’s fandom brings an earnest enthusiasm that’s perhaps only rivaled by Dark Souls.

Why are the characters so fun to riff on? For the same reason Overwatch is fun to play. It's the diversity, I think--and not just in the game’s portrayals, but as a complete design ethos. I’m reminded of a quote by the great philosopher Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg: “Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color.”

5. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

Adventurers wield powerful weapons, amass great hoards of stuff, and go on epic, world-saving quests at the far reaches of the galaxy. You do not do these things. You watch, you vainly window shop, you regularly go hungry. Also you collect trash.

There’s almost certainly a message here about life on the margins, particularly when you add in Diaries’ gender-remixing mechanic. But there's also this: most fantasy game towns are like Western movie sets with false fronts, staged solely for the player's benefit. Diaries’ city is infinitely more compelling than the lot of 'em, simply by virtue of being totally aloof. There are items you’ll never afford, conversations and customs you can't understand, and lofty views you'll never have access to. There's depth in that, and for my money that's more valuable than having dozen “favorite stores on the Citadel”.

4. Devil Daggers

It’s a nightmare in two ways. One, because okay, yeah, there are all these keening skulls and tentacle beasts homing in on you from the corners of your vision (or worse: just outside it). And two, because I’m kind of terrible at it. I’ve survived for a full minute like maybe once.

Not that every run at Devil Daggers isn’t ultimately doomed. You can’t beat the game. But I don’t imagine better players feel as acutely aware as I do that from the first second, they’re losing control of things. That’s a primal sort of horror: the stuff of those dreams where you can’t outrun a pursuing monster, or suddenly realize that you’re back in high school, and also whoops you’re naked.

3. Duskers

I’ve sort of fallen into the habit of talking about my Duskers drones like I’m an engineer in a Neal Stephenson book, which I’m very conflicted about. I named my first three Squib, Nerd, and Cheeto. Cheeto mans the generators. Nerd, ironically, does all the heavy lifting. Squib is my special little guy, and he gets to carry the Gather, Interface, and Motion tools.

Speaking of “interfaces,” actually. You could call Duskers “User Interface porn”--and there's definitely something kind of fetishistic about the way it imitates Alien--but that belies the Spartan economy of the thing. When UIs ring false in movies, it's often a matter of having too many bells and whistles. Duskers brings you into its setting by doing just the opposite. You're sitting at (what feels like) its terminal, working with (what feels like) a one-to-one version of the drone software, watching your best laid plans go (what feels like) a realistic sort of wrong.

2. Inside

There's a grisly death hiding somewhere in every artfully composed frame of Inside, like an anamorphic memento mori, there to reify the idea that your character's continued survival is improbable. Crazy improbable. Each time the boy is mauled by dogs, exploded, strangled, or shot, the pleasant fiction that he's managing to get through this gauntlet seems less and less canonical.

Somewhere in the black box of the game’s code, though, something is helping you through. It greases the wheels, adds just enough mechanical “tilt” to make navigating obstacles and manipulating objects preternaturally easy with just a single button.

But it's a devil's deal, because this is the rare game in which I don't actually really want to progress. There's this scene in Children of Men where the main characters enter an internment camp by prison bus. The camera looks out the window, so that the scene side-scrolls past, revealing a progressive sequence of horror in the background. Inside is a whole freaking game of that.

@manbearcar hole 64,465. 182,583 shots taken. We have reached... the end of desert golf. Ocean from here on out. Fin pic.twitter.com/uPFV3h1xYk

— Alden (@AldenLudwick) August 20, 2016

Note: This is not a screencap of the ending of Inside, but close enough.

1. VA-11 Hall-A: A Cyberpunk Bartender Action

This is the game for my moment. A cyberpunk dystopia wherein a whole lot of characters are drinking, as I myself recently replied to a doctor, “closer to ‘every day’ than to socially.” VA-11 Hall-A bar and its patrons are like an anime-kitsch version of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", itself a kitsch version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

In Rosie Schaap’s little savoir-faire, “How to Read a Bar,” she recommends that you “consider its inventory” when ordering. What do you do, then, when every single drink (even the beer!) is a combination of the same five space-age ingredients? At VA-11 Hall-A, you’ve got Adelhyde, Flanergide, Powdered Delta, Bronson Extract (I’m not sure I want to know where they get that one), and Karmotrine, the universal alcoholic component. And that's it, more or less, so clearly no one's coming here for the mixology. But they keep coming back, all the same.

It’s the same way for the game, if you try to read it. You consider its inventory: a simple little drag & drop interface, a bunch of affable drunks, a jukebox full of gurgling synth. As games go, maybe that’s the equivalent of a “beer and a shot” kind of dive, but I find myself unwinding there a lot--keeping its window open while I write, popping in every now again to throw a drink together. It’s all in the atmosphere, really. Comfortable, low pressure... somewhere you can have an actual conversation, you know? Without it always inevitably swinging back to how you need to go on a mission or slay a demon or something.

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VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action

Overwatch

Inside

Spaceplan

Duskers

FIFA 17

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

Brigador

Devil Daggers

Concrete Jungle

game of the Year 2016

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Cara Ellison's Top 10 Games of 2017

Cara Ellison is a freelance writer and narrative designer, who most recently contributed to Arkane Studios' Dishonored 2. Her book, Embed with Games: A Year on the Couch with __game Developers, released late last year.

I left the gruelling shitfuck of freelance games journalism for the joyous shitfuck of freelance games development. This has enabled me to get the Inside Scoop on what we can expect from next year's releases. As such, here’s my favourite 2017 games that are definitely going to come out, spoiling practically everyone’s PR reveals, because we are definitely all going to live to see the end of 2017, which unexpectedly will be a fantastic year for world peace, and will allow us to spend many hours playing games that reflect this brilliant and shining time.

1. The First of Us

The title Last of Us: Part II was a complete feint, and Naughty Dog comes out with a __game about patient zero, who, after being experimented on in a lab for years, is now in a later advanced stage evolution of Cordyceps. Armed with only your own arm, you escape the lab in inner Glasgow where you set about people and bite into numerous already quite radge dudes, creating a worse UK-wide disaster than the one it's already currently mired in (this also infects the USA, but this is covered in DLC called The First of Us On a Plane and all American voiceovers are done badly by Scottish actor Gerard Butler).

To survive the longest, you slowly figure out what the most fulfilling meal is: those who have led a very nutrient rich and hedonistic diet. Your mission becomes to literally eat the rich, and become a smarter Infected in a weird and non-deliberate echo of BioShock. Your senses become finely tuned to those people who have resources (and weirdly, champagne), while those who have very little are left alone. The big twist? You were a tool in a communist plot! But it’s too late anyway. The entire world has been levelled and the population of The Infected has grown too quickly. The remaining Infected, starved out of nutrient rich brains, lose Infected libido and die. The remaining human villages under the rubble emerge, constructing a beautiful sharing economy utopia, and there is a giraffe or something. Like maybe two giraffes. Game of the year, and the dev cycle was only eleven months long.

2. Murder Man

This episodic game, with interstitial cutscenes plotted like a Netflix series, has the most startlingly original game premise there has ever been. Dressed in an incredibly revealing pant, the lovingly named and invincible Murder Man is a third-person brawler that is totally and incredibly violent in a very Mortal Kombat sort of way. The Murder Man himself possesses the smooth, flowing martial arts grace of Sammo Hung mixed with Soul Calibur’s Kilik, and also the great abs of Captain America. His opponents, knotty grunts and stereotypical sexy ladies who have done the Slightest Thing Wrong can be brutalised in any number of ways. Unfortunately, because this is a video game, Murder Man cannot actually murder anyone to completion, and each episode, the same video game models keep healing up and coming back to thwart him, yelling things like, "What if we swapped around and I did a murder?" Eventually, Murder Man slowly comes to realise that he himself (horror) cannot be killed. It is horribly and disgustingly pleasurable to play on a mechanical level, but you get tired of looking at all the same goddamn people.

Basically a modern tragedy, and there are 5,300 episodes in production, and everyone will keep buying it forever. I’m sorry 2017. I’m so sorry.

3. The Professionals

A big shot AAA studio brings out an open world spy game in 2017 that defies all previous detractors: The Professionals is a game where you can switch between five--FIVE--women, who are all working undercover in various parts of Washington D.C., Homeland-style, as part of a black op shadowing a mole inside the CIA. Thanks to video game "magic", or merely a wilful misunderstanding of geography, Langley is situated about five minutes’ drive from the White House. The Potomac is always swimmable and available for boat chases. The White House has many climbable vents. The writing/characterisation is sometimes a little Elmore Leonard, at other times kind of Le Carre, but the trail of destruction in the main plot escalates as each character discovers parts of the conspiracy. Every time you fuck up the investigation with your shitty stealth skills in one part of the city, you have to switch agents to get a clean up operation in ASAP, meaning you are your own rescue team (and there is no player death as everyone knows CIA operatives know all the best off-books miracle doctors, if there’s a five agent pile up a competent A.I. will revive you).

By some miracle there are no missions where you have to trail a car for miles at a designated distance, but there is one where you have to do a realtime stakeout for 24 hours. THE FOURTH WALL IS BROKEN. People take days off work to complete it. Take that, Kojima. Maybe your delicate lady fingers will diffuse a bomb. Maybe you will seduce that Mulder-lookin’ motherfucker over at Edgar Hoover. The distinctly A Few Good Men ending is totally devastating to all players everywhere. It is wildly successful, and going forward, all AAA games begin to copy this model. The part where you play as a spy, specifically.

4. Cowboy Bebop: Tsuioku no Serenade

Comes out in the west on PlayStation Network with an optional Steve Blum dub. It’s immediately very popular, meaning that a third-person open world martial arts-based RPG Sleeping Dogs style follow-up is immediately put into production with a Yoko Kanno soundtrack. Trump resigns after the Japanese show of strength. 2017 is a rollercoaster.

5. SHRILL HARPY

2017 brings my most awaited fantasy of a game: SHRILL HARPY. This co-op game tries to approximate the pleasure of the imaginative put-down, whilst also simultaneously making consenting players hate each other, just like playing a boardgame at Christmas. Player one has a difficult to control, Bennett Foddy nightmare of a main character undertaking an everyday task in third person, Octodad style, and player two is the "narrator" and has three aspects of the task to comment on in response to the context of player one’s actions--it could be the attitude of the player that is insulted, it could be the speed of the player, it could be the control pad wrangling. When player two chooses one of three aspects of play, one of thousands of pre-recorded wincers narrated in sultry Sigourney Weaver-esque I-told-you-so tones waps player one’s ears, as if everyone’s IQ has sharply dropped whilst she was away. As player one bumbles into a pyramid of cardboard boxes, player two’s nightmare Bastion narrator will then announce that "a virus-ridden Siri dunked in a vat of boiling piss would have better navigation skills than you", and other sharp one-liners that are better than that (because they were written by Chris Morris). You will then be forced to swap roles next level, to see how the fuck the other person likes it. No good for anyone with mum issues, popular with those who usually pay a professional for this sort of thing, but really the point of it is that you will never have to play Dota 2, or play any online game really, ever ever again.

6. Max Payne: The Trip

This is just a full length expansion of the level in the first Max Payne where he is whacked out on V, only this time Max is still in South America and he's off-his-balls on ayahuasca. It is fuck-off amazing and all those haters from years ago have to eat their wretched little hats.

7. Secret Bunker Builder

A practical tool that luckily began development at the start of presidential campaign season (approximately 10 years ago it seems like?) and once you have finished construction of your virtual underpit you can calculate costing and suppliers for the veritable convoy of concrete and tools you will need to drill yourself into the earth and never be seen again. You can also share blueprints with friends via encrypted connections. Kind of like an apocalyptic version of Cities: Skylines, or SimCity without any of the surveillance.

8. XTREME FACE TRIUMPH PRO CLASSIC EXTREMELY FOR MEN

This is an extremely sophisticated Sephora-branded, stand alone character creator for the XBone: fully fledged, expensive video game engine tech, Uncharted 4 promotional-like detail on the face, but obviously given a very manly name so that Traditional Videogamesmen can feel good about buying it and fiddling around with every single slider on the menu without shame, whilst the name will not fool tumblr at all. This Uncanny Valley shit has one of the most extensive set of makeup sliders, shades, check boxes and customisers in the world, so that you can mix and try on makeup that you can then order to your house if it takes your fancy. You can scan your face in with a weird peripheral and experiment with a number of expressions and possibly even plastic surgery ideas.

There is no "gamey" part attached to it, only a number of preset animated cutscenes you can put your created characters into: a scene in which selected characters will recreate factor 5 ship shake on the USS Enterprise, one in which selected characters will have a gratuitous orgy resulting in make-up smudging (SMUDGE FX) so you can see How Cool Your Eyeliner Is The Next Morning, and one in which characters will recreate an entire episode of Friends (The One With The Morning After, of course. OF COURSE). After all, everyone lives for that one moment in the original Mass Effect where Shepard turns around and has a GIANT BANANA FACE. So why not recreate the moment that David Schwimmer wakes up next to his one night stand and… HAS THE FACE OF DAVID SCHWIMMER? BUT WITH AN URBAN DECAY LIPSTICK SHADE IN HEROINE COMFORT MATTE?

DLCs will include more animated cutscenes and extra clothes packs that are so absurdly priced that Steve Hogarty will have to come out of retirement.

Okay, but anyway I just want to be able to try on make-up from the comfort of my own home. And I never really have to fuck with a game after the McElroys have finished with the character creator anyway.

9. HBO’s VEEP

The excellent people at Telltale seem to have missed out on getting the rights to HBO’s incredible profanitytron Veep, the TV show that is the equivalent of The West Wing written by The Thick Of It’s star and storm of fuck-cab Malcolm Tucker. Instead, HBO are publishing this gem themselves, and the timed dialogue with complex branching of curse words and threats is an unrelenting series of tableaux-type olympic swimming pools of bullshit for players to backstroke through.

With Armando Iannucci, Chris Addison, and Will Smith (not that one) on board from the series to write, they took like grouchy pale British ducks to water to write a dialogue-heavy test of your ability to creatively weasel out of some of the worst political situations possible. China threatens war over Vice President Meyer accidentally calling the Chinese government a naughty word in earshot? It's your job to threaten, seduce, or intimidate the Chinese delegation into submission. Want to get your own political talking head show on late night TV so that you can surreptitiously insert your party’s talking points into it? Time to schmooze your way through the correspondents. Hate fuck Dan Egan? Sure. Lose Amy on the campaign trail? Hurry up! Jonah Ryan accidentally shot the Republican Majority Leader on a hunting trip? You, the Vice President, visit the hospital and try to make nice with a man who now has no nose because of the west wing’s Jolly Green Fuckwit.

In any case, one of the year’s most haunting pieces of informational video game dialogue will be The Chinese Will Remember That.

10. Luciente

Virginia’s developers Variable State brought a beguiling first person game to us in 2016. Brendon Chung’s real-time cinematic editing technique, utilised in the excellent 30 Flights Of Loving, has been screaming out to be ripped off shamefully for a very long time and hardly anyone hecking did it. Virginia not only did that but put together a great atmosphere, soundtrack, and moody, cryptic mystery that clearly showed roots from cult classics Twin Peaks and The X-Files.

Taking this idea further, 2017’s Luciente is a similarly structured '90s-feel first-person adventure game but set in three locations: the futuristic agrarian commune of Mattapoisett; an unnamed dystopia where plutocrats rule over space bases, all information has become the proprietary tool of highly funded and organised PR departments, and women are forced to be products and undertake extensive plastic surgery to be able to function in the world; and lastly the byproduct of our current dystopia, an underfunded, brutal mental institution. Based on the book Woman On The Edge Of Time by Marge Piercy, the game initially explores the life of a poor Dominican woman committed to a mental institution, and the player’s exploration is limited to the tiny space she is allowed to exist in until, in intense sessions of psychotherapy and drug treatment, she begins to receive messages from Luciente, a resident of future Mattapoisett.

Luciente as a guide is very persuasive: birthing machines have been invented in her time to remove the responsibility of pregnancy from women and remove "ownership" from birth parents and put it onto an entire village, parenting and teaching are considered the primary and most important jobs of most humans, and children are encouraged to explore any number of vocations in a world that is no longer arbitrated by capitalism or forced labour. In contrast, the small glimpses of the other parallel world that she sees, the plutocratic, patriarchal world, seem violent and terrifying. As the player explores each world, the small things that they see and do inform one choice which it becomes clear will end the game. Luciente suggests that she is messaging through time, and Mattapoisett will only exist if your character does one thing. But who is right about what choice that is? And are the visions real?

Spend as much time exploring as you like, but in the end, what you saw, who you spoke to, and what you did, will inform the world to come.

There is no joke at the end of this one. It’s just pure fantasy. Someone get me a drink. Barring any number of disasters, I’ll see you next year, and we can judge how well I did in my predictions.

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Cara Ellison

Game of the Year 2016

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