If there has been a common refrain for 2017, it was "Fuck this year_."_ Which, to be fair, was also the common refrain for last year—and for many before it, too. But what set 2017 apart from past disaster years was the cadenc__e. On some scale, every year brings political losses, environmental disaster, mass violence, economic precarity, and, yes, beloved celebrity death. But no year in my life has offered up fresh crisis with such speed and regularity.

It was exhausting, and with so much to worry about, the organic down time that we normally find to recharge our batteries was also put under threat. In 2017, it was harder than ever to work up the strength to confront problems directly.

Scandals that would once dominate an entire week's news cycle were barely fodder for an afternoon. Terrible natural disasters were immediately followed by different terrible natural disasters. We woke up to—or stayed up watching—social media feeds and news reports about violence, sometimes political, sometimes personal, sometimes seemingly random.

Somehow, though, the world of gaming was determined to maintain its own whirlwind pace in 2017. By the end of February, we were even complaining (as is our wont) that there were too many games worth playing. To be fair, by the end of February, we'd already played (or were in the middle of playing) Gravity Rush 2, Let It Die, Resident Evil 7, Horizon Zero Dawn, Nioh, Fire Emblem Heroes, Night in the Woods, Yakuza 0, Super Mario Run, and two different Telltale series. I was even a few hours into Breath of the Wild__.

As the year went on, events in the world only got more frustrating and the games continued to impress.

It was hard to keep up, and the deluge of great games has led to a lot of chatter this year about the crowding of platforms, the increase in microtransactions, the possibility of (yet another?) "indie apocalypse," and the seemingly inescapable gravity of the marketplace. Game developers, of course, didn't pause and wait for us to have these debates. They just kept shipping incredible games.

As the year went on, events in the world only got more frustrating and the games continued to impress. And as good as the games were, the dissonance was hard to swallow.

On the day Trump's first immigration ban order was announced, Patrick and I were busy writing about class struggle in Gravity Rush 2. On the weekend that Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, I was trying to figure out what I thought about Agents of Mayhem. Sometimes, the discrepancy was too great for us: In the wake of the country's worst mass shooting this past October, we stepped away from streaming PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

In 2017, games needed to be more than distractions. They had heavy lifting to do.

But games were also the way we got through the hardest weeks. In March I wrote that "Breath of the Wild Is the Zelda Adventure I Always Wanted," but it was also the game I needed to make it through the year. Collecting korok seeds and solving shrine puzzles could not be more trivial an activity, but when I needed something to lift me out of the deepest slumps, or something to pull me away from Twitter and into bed at 3AM, there they were. By March, I was trying to work through how those two things fit together, causing me to write a little about the intersection of video games and self-care. It wasn't the first time, either. Back in my 2014 (2014!) Game of the Year list for Giant Bomb, I wrote about the tension between needing to recover during hard times and needing to remain engaged:

This year we’ve been forced to face hard truths about our community and our country, and this has put the need for self-care and the need for social improvement in conflict over and over, again and again. Do you spend the night engaging with the rando on Twitter who seems to be coming from an honest place, or do you take the night off and just watch some shit? Do you correct your racist uncle at the holiday dinner, or just roll your eyes and rub your temples? Do you put on your heavy coat and walk down to the protest, or just hit RT from the comfort of your bed?

My takeaway then was that it was a hard line to walk, but it was one we had to do, and one that games could help us with. In 2017, I understand that better than I ever could've then.