A decade from now, there’s a good chance we’ll look back at 2017 as one of the best years ever for new game releases. Just think about it: some of the medium’s most iconic names — like Zelda, Mario, and Resident Evil — came roaring back to prominence, while new names like Horizon Zero Dawn and Cuphead forced their way into the spotlight.

From blockbuster to indie games, console and PC to mobile, the wealth of experiences on offer has been incredible. And narrowing down our favorites has been a lengthy task. But after a series of votes — and maybe a few arguments — we’ve settled on a list of the 15 best games of the year.

Brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, who formed indie outfit Studio MDHR, captivated the industry when they first showed off Cuphead and its 1930’s cartoon-inspired art style in 2014. After an exhaustive development process lasting a total of seven years, the game came out to critical acclaim this fall, surpassing 1 million copies sold in its first two weeks. A run-and-gun platformer in the vein of classics like Gunstar Heroes, Cuphead earned a reputation not just for its Fleischer and Disney homages, but also its extreme, unforgiving difficulty. If you long for the punishing platforming mastery of Mega Man and Contra, this is the throwback for you. Just don’t expect it to be all fun and games. —Nick Statt

No shooter has been as polarizing this year as Bungie’s Destiny 2. The sequel to the 2014 online-only title launched in September and has been embroiled in controversy since, with die-hard fans constantly voicing their opinions on how to restore the magic of the original. Lost in all the heated debates is the game’s pure fun factor; Destiny remains one of the most aesthetically pleasing and gorgeously designed FPS games out there. In its attempts to make the game less of a slog, Bungie has created a more streamlined and accessible MMO-shooter hybrid. Destiny 2 still nails its specific niche with ease and offers fulfilling collaborative online play you rarely get outside the most demanding of PC games. —Nick Statt

It's easy to dismiss Hidden Folks as a Where's Waldo? for smartphones and tablets. But the puzzle game transcends its clear inspiration with almost impossibly detailed hand-drawn art and animations that make it a joy to keep playing. There’s a level of care that’s on display as you search the game’s sprawling levels, resulting in a relaxing and charming experience that, even hours later, is hard to put down. —Chaim Gartenberg

Guerrilla Games threw aside the gritty gray and orange of its Killzone series and surprised everyone with Horizon Zero Dawn, which has miles of lush, vibrant open-world terrain that offered up some of the most stunning visuals of any game in 2017. The map is packed with quests and collectibles to hunt down, but the best parts of Horizon are the stories you make yourself. Getting tangled up with the varied robot animals that roam across the land on your adventure is just plain fun, and the huge toolbox of toys at your disposal means that there’s a range of ways to approach each situation. Horizon Zero Dawn charms, though, in moment-to-moment experiences: the sunrise over a glittering field of snow, the subtle animation of a rippling river, or the joy of taking on a gigantic robot T. rex the size of a small house. —Chaim Gartenberg

It’s hard to talk about the newest Zelda adventure without being effusive. It’s a game that pushes the boundaries of what an open-world game can be, offering an unparalleled level of freedom for exploration, while completely reinventing genre conventions like the typically cluttered maps or linear quest structure. And it does all of this while retaining the charm and fantasy that has made the series so beloved over the last three decades. Breath of the Wild isn’t just one of the grandest Zelda games ever, or one of 2017’s best releases — it’s also a game that will likely shape the open-world genre for years to come. —Andrew Webster

How do you follow up one of the most beloved mobile games of all time? You double the characters, expand gameplay in new and interesting ways, and focus on a subtly told but moving story of a mother and her daughter. Monument Valley 2 does all that, while maintaining the series's distinctive, MC Escher-esque puzzles and impossible architecture. It’s a game that literally forces you to look at the world from a different perspective. —Chaim Gartenberg

The sequel to cult classic Nier is a rarity among big-budget games: it doesn’t really care what you think of it. Sure, it offers pitch-perfect action and a beautifully realized post-apocalyptic world, but it does so while constantly messing with your expectations. It’s a game where the true story doesn’t begin until after your first playthrough, and where important bits of the narrative are buried in weapon descriptions. It’s strange and at times difficult to grasp, but that’s also what makes it so memorable. —Andrew Webster

Persona 5 isn’t the kind of sequel that reinvents the wheel. It maintains the same basic structure as past entries in the series — you’re a high school student in Tokyo, balancing day-to-day life with saving the world — but it polishes the concept into perhaps its ideal form. The story is engrossing, with a cast of characters that you’ll grow exceedingly close to over the game’s daunting 100-hour run time. At the same time, it offers deep role-playing elements, turning battles into high-stakes strategic bouts. Plus, Persona 5 might be the only game that can make doing homework feel cool. —Andrew Webster

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds arrived in March, and it didn’t take long for it to blow up. Better known as PUBG, the game is an evolution of the survival shooter mod scene on PC, combining the strongest elements of games like ARMA, DayZ, and H1Z1 into what might be the most exhilarating competitive multiplayer experience gaming has to offer. It’s just 100 players parachuting into an ever-shrinking battlefield, and the last person (or team) standing wins. The formula has spawned an entire industry of copycats, including the massively successful Fortnite, and it’s turned Twitch streamers into overnight celebrities. In the process, the game has catapulted Korean developer Bluehole and creator Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene to the forefront of the e-sports scene. —Nick Statt

The latest Resident Evil abandoned the series’s recent trigger-happy, action-movie tone for a more back-to-basics spin on survival horror. Set in a decrepit mansion in backwoods Louisiana, you maneuver a walking nightmare in the confined, anxiety-inducing rooms and hallways of the house while stalked by a murderous family infected by an alien-like bacteria. Over time, the game expands beyond the house as players unravel a corporate conspiracy interwoven with traditional RE elements. It never lets up. A new first-person perspective combined with maddeningly tense pacing result in an experience scary enough to make you want to put the controller down — or turn the game off entirely. —Nick Statt

Sega handed over the keys to the kingdom for Sonic over to a bunch of modders and fans, and the end result was Sonic Mania. It was a breath of fresh air for a series that desperately needed it. Featuring a mix of remixed levels from the original Sonic games alongside brilliant new stages, Sonic Mania looks and plays like your rose-tinted memories of the Genesis games, complete with silky-smooth platforming, branching paths, and breakneck speeds. It’ll help you remember why we all liked playing Sonic games in the first place. —Chaim Gartenberg

2015’s Splatoon was one of Nintendo’s most daring releases, a family-friendly take on multiplayer shooters that eschewed blood and gore for colorful globs of ink. Think of it like Call of Duty crossed with a paintball match, starring teenage squid-human hybrids. Unfortunately, since it was on the ill-fated Wii U, few actually got to experience the game — something that finally changed with the a sequel on the Switch. The follow-up builds on what made the original so great, with new modes and weapons, and the flexibility offered by the tablet-like Switch. —Andrew Webster

Nintendo’s latest 3D Mario adventure delivers all the tight, time-tested platforming the company does best, combined with a downright maniacal level of creativity and quirkiness. But what makes Odyssey truly special is how massive it is. The game contains 999 collectible “power moons” spread out across more than a dozen worlds, with nearly half of the collection unobtainable until after you beat the main story. Odyssey is as deep and rewarding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and any Switch owner is doing themselves a disservice by not playing it. —Nick Statt

Universal Paperclips starts out simple: you click a button; you make a paperclip. On the surface, it’s just another clicker game like Cookie Clicker or Spaceplan. But Universal Paperclips — designed to illustrate the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's "decision problem" for developing artificial intelligences — escalates quickly. And it keeps on doing that, adding new ideas, gameplay functions, and eventually, opening up to a breathtaking scale that dwarfs even the biggest games of 2017. And it somehow manages all of this in a web browser. —Chaim Gartenberg

Yakuza 0 achieves something pretty remarkable: it’s simultaneously the best game in its long-running series, and also the perfect starting point for new players. It transports the series to glitzy 1980s Tokyo, and splits the story into two halves, letting you play as the grim series icon Kiryu, as well as the wild former yakuza Majima. Where the game really shines, though, is with its tone, seamlessly jumping back and forth between tense, dramatic moments, and silly side stories. Yakuza 0 is a game where a quest to prove your innocence can be derailed by a night out for karaoke. —Andrew Webster