Game of the Year 2016 Top Ten List

Read at your own risk! There are SPOILERS BELOW for Firewatch, and very minor spoilers for Titanfall 2 and Pokemon Moon.

Hey, I'm manton, I'm a 23 year old line cook from minneapolis. You may know me from cooking food in minneapolis. The other thing that I do is play video games. 2016 was a super good year for games, and every game on this list was number one when I was playing it for the first time.

10. The Witness

The Witness, a puzzle game where you do mazes with more rules, is a lot more fun than it sounds. I moved back in with my parents in January, just in time for The Witness to come out on PS4 and PC. Way way back in time, my dad introduced me to video games with Myst. I didn't really know what was happening, but I was clicking on stuff, and moving around, and I remember a boat, it was a killer time. Back to 2016, me, 22 years old, moved back in with my parents to help out around the house when my mom was coming back from fighting cancer, and my dad's migraines were getting worse and worse. I enlist my dad's help with some of the harder puzzles, and we share a beautiful moment I will never forget, in the castle area, doing the puzzles in the hedge maze area. I am eternally grateful to Jon Blow for this opportunity. But the game itself, really does a good job of making me feel like an idiot in the late stages, and for that, it stays up here at 10.

9. Firewatch

Firewatch is one of those "Feelings Games", in that it makes me feel feelings. Firewatch, like The Witness is fucking beautiful, and Campo Santo's sense of humor shines through in the interactions you have with the world (holding a button to adopt a turtle immediately comes to mind). The story of the game, which is 80% of the reason you NEED to play this game if you havent, is so good. You play as a man who answered a newspaper ad to man a fire lookout tower in Wyoming in 1989, a year after the Yellowstone Fires in 1988. You wander around, pick up stuff, wear hats, and make choices about how the main character, Henry, does his job and lives his life out there in the woods. One moment, that particularly stuck with me was about 1/2 way through the game, after you had been talking to Delilah over your walkie-talkie, getting to know eachother better. Your conversations get more and more casual, and even a little flirty. Then one morning you start the day at your desk, and your wedding ring is sitting on the desk. To me, this was a massive choice. Do I put on the ring, and hold out hope for my wife, afflicted with early onset alzheimers, or do I move on with my life? What does the ring mean to me? My wife doesn't recognize me anymore, so what happens to our marriage? I never actually went back and played through the game a second time, because this game made me feel feelings, but to me, this was the climax of that story.

8. Enter the Gungeon

Enter the Gungeon is a roguelike bullet hell, with mounds and globs of style. Everything in this game is a gun. There are about a million guns, some of them clearly inspired by pop culture, but they're all fun to use. Like the Binding of Isaac, each run hinges on what pickups you get early on, but at the same time, your skill navigating wave after wave of bullets. Unlike the Binding of Isaac, your character has a dodge roll, hence the name of the studio, Dodge Roll. You're invincible for about a second when rolling, and you can reload while you're rolling too. There's really no end to the roll's usefulness. I'd put dodge rolling on this list if I could, it had a major place in games this year.

7. Watch Dogs 2

I had to wait to pick up Watch Dogs 2, cause I chose to play it on PC, and I had recently just replaced my outdated-when-I-built-it 5 year old rig. I really liked this game. I think it corrected the cardinal sin of Watch Dogs: totally deadly serious main character who never smiles who at the same time hacks memes all over the god damn place. In Watch Dogs 2, you play as Marcus Holloway, a young black hacker from Oakland, who is wrongly targeted by ctOS 2.0, the latest "internet of things", so he joins Dedsec, a hacker group targeting Blume, the company behind ctOS. Now Marcus and crew, smile. And have fun. And have pleasant conversations with eachother. Sure there's some meme-y stuff in there, but it doesn't give the conceptual whiplash of gritty Chicago hacker Aiden Pearce throwing "U MAD BRO" on a highway sign. And another thing, the hacking in this game is just fun. There are some massive in scale puzzles, where you have to channel energy across walls, sides of monuments, and at one point, all across the bottom of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's basically the pipe puzzle from Bioshock, but you get to fly around a drone while you do it, makes it a lil' more fun.

6. Dark Souls 3

Dark Souls 3 ate about 90 hours of my life. I could not tell you why the things in Dark Souls 3 are happening. Worlds are colliding, and I'm not sure why they are. You gotta kill 4 big bosses and return them to their thrones, because they won't sit at their thrones on their own. You gotta beat a big-bad to either rekindle the flame or let it die, cause you gotta. I don't need a lot of motivation, personally, I just like to explore the game world they've built, and wail on guys with a big axe. "Do This Thing Cause Ya Gotta" is a good enough reason for me. I don't have as much reverence for Dark Souls 1 as a lot of other people, so the big criticism of this game being that it's basically "Hey, remember this??? Here it is again!" didn't bug me all that much. I only played Dark Souls 1 after I beat 3, and shamefully, I used a trainer. Video games is hard, and I just wanna see all the stuff in the game, not get stuck fighting the Capra Demon and move on to a different game. It was kind of nice to get a lot of Dark Souls 1 stuff in Dark Souls 3, cause I barely saw it in Dark Souls 1.

5. Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley was made by mostly one dude, who saw the farming slice of life simulator genre as lacking, and then changed the whole fuckin game with this one. Stardew Valley is a game where you inherit a farm from your grandfather in the charming town of Stardew Valley, and it's up to you how you make your millions. The most obvious way, is farming. Every season but winter, you can buy a different assortment of seeds at the local general store, some seeds plant crops that repeatedly bear fruit, like hops, or grapes. At the same time, you could also focus on fishing, out of any of the towns generous waterin' holes, or rivers, or some underground lava pools, or a gross sewer. Or, you could focus on mining, and explore the 100+ levels of the local mines, and fight slimes all the way to the bottom. In addition to all these things you can do, the town is also full of hot singles in your area, looking to meet you! Every person has a list of likes, dislikes, loves, and hates, and you can give out gifts to all your favorites. With a PS4 release recently, and a Nintendo Switch version on the way, I wouldn't be surprised if Stardew Valley made my list next year too.

4. Hitman

Hitman surprised the hell outta me. I had never really given the Hitman series a chance, after a strained relationship with Hitman: Absolution on PS3. I thought the game took itself way too seriously, no clue how I had come to that conclusion, but it was there in my head, telling me to hold out on this new one too. I got a morbid sense of satisfaction from seeing it split into episodic content, and seeing all the internet video game complainers go nuts. If it hadn't gone episodic, I really don't think I would've played this. I bought the starter pack, at the recommendation of my best friend Leo, and was hit with NON STOP CONNECTION ERRORS that no one else had had on PS4. Man, I just paid 15 bucks for this, and this is the way it treats me. IO Interactive really hit it out of the park with Episode 2: Sapienza, because it convinced me fully, that this is one of the best games released this decade. The wide vastness of your opportunities, and how goofy Agent 47 looks with a hippie costume on, was specifically what got me. "Why is this in the game," I thought, before answering myself nearly immediately "I'm sure there's a way to kill a target with this". And that's what makes Hitman so interesting. Everything is pretty much put there for a reason. That power strip in that puddle over there, is in the path of a target. That chandelier right there, is above the path of a target. That coin operated French Revolutionary War diorama, is there so that it makes a fashion designer so angry that he has to take a drink of champagne you've poisoned. And that's just in Paris, one of seven different locations loaded with challenges and secret murder techniques.

3. Overwatch

Overwatch is a class-based shooter by Blizzard, champions of character design and destroying my life with time sinks. Like other class shooters, each class has different abilites. While some might seem overpowered at first, each character has at least a couple good counters. All these balancing things aside, Overwatch has a focus on one of my absolute favorite things about video games in general, an insane attention to detail, loaded with references to it's own world. There's a massive fiction behind the events of Overwatch, that the game doesn't give you outright. There's this massive Omnic Crisis, where robots are fighting humans, and that shit happened in the past. You only see the effects of that. You're not actively fighting that war. Each character has a backstory, all of them intersect, and interact with each other. Posters for movies in the game world are drawn with incredible attention to detail. Newspapers left in storefronts have headlines relating to the gameworld. All this detail you never see, in a regular match. I can't get enough of that stuff.

2. Pokemon Moon

Pokemon Moon is the latest game in the Pokemon series, and in my opinion, the best so far. I've played every main pokemon game in the series, and an embarrassing amount of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and was blown away by this game. I managed to keep most of the new Pokemon species a secret despite leaks, and all throughout the game that resulted in many "what the hell is this thing" moments. Gone are the pokemon gyms of old, here are the Island Trial Challenges. Each trial has a different theme, but aren't straight up trainer battles like gyms used to be. For example, there's a trial at the top of a volcano, where you watch firedancing Marowak dance and then point out the differences between the dances. Then you fight a thing, sure, but the preamble makes it feel like a whole different game. Plus, this game introduces a new pokemon, or Ultra Beast, if you're nasty, named Buzzwole. It's a buff bug. And he is perfect in every way.

1. Titanfall 2

Titanfall 2 is so deserving of this massive honor, being on this 23 year old loser line-cook's top ten list. This game makes my brain produce the good chemicals. The speed of play is just so... good. Unlike the first game in the series, Titanfall 2 has a single player campaign. They absolutely knock this out of the park, with interesting mechanics (I'm looking at you, time travel level), a likable robot character, and some of the most incredible art design I've ever seen. You play a whole level inside The Planet Foundry, a massive factory pumping out cookie-cutter houses and tile based cities, used in terraforming. That's so coooooooooooooooooooooool. There is a grappling hook. And once you really learn how to use it effectively, you can start doing some real Spiderman-2-On-Gamecube type shit that just feels amazing. The gun variety is a good mix of guns clearly rooted in reality (the Flatline has a sort of AK-47 looking reciever) to Future Guns (The LSTAR, shoots, uh, energy). The titans, are all big, and can punch. That should be enough. Just imagine for a minute, being in a giant Rock'em Sock'em Robot, but with moving legs. You punch a computer controlled grunt character. Your brain produces the good chemical. This, is why you need to buy Titanfall 2 immediately. Buy it on PC, join the (massive) Giant Bomb Community, and I'll see you online!