I'll be honest. I thought I was going to have some keen insight into what this year has been, or an identification of some throughline I've noticed between people's top ten lists, or some thesis about Gaming Under Trump or whatever but... man, I'm just tired.

Welcome to Waypoint's End of Year celebration! This year, we're digging deep into our favorite games with dedicated podcasts, interviewing each other about our personal top 10 lists, and reflecting on the year with essays from the staff and some of our favorite freelance contributors. Check out the entire package right here!

Maybe because games have been so personal this year, I've also been thrilled to see so much variation among people's individual best of lists. There are, as Jackson Tyler wrote over in Deorbital , some games that will control conversations and win awards through sheer "polish." But I've been thrilled to see a lot of mentioned around the internet this week that I've never played or never heard of. (I'm looking at you The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa .) And appropriately, my list may be no different.

2018 has been so long, y'all. And I think maybe that, more than anything else, is what I've come back to when writing this list. I've seen so many people this week talk about games as self care, or games as foci for thinking about tough personal and social issues, or game-making as therapeutic practice.

Sailors moved from ship to ship to share supplies and repair leaking hulls. The endless cannonade grew more and more rhythmic. We took risks. They paid off. The shark’s movement’s became predictable. We’d won.

On yesterday’s Sea of Thieves retrospective podcast , I said that one incredible session is why the game would make it onto my top 10 list. And it’s true, the time that Danika, Rob, Natalie and I set out to confront the then-newly-added Megaladon, a prehistoric megashark, was a blast. The war drums drove us forward as we prowled the waves, recruiting other players into our ad hoc armada. Finally, we confronted the beast.

Honestly, that would be enough for it to secure this spot. But as we talked through the game, I realized that there is so much more about it that I love, and each new update brings more to be curious about. And in a year where I was unable to keep up with Destiny 2’s expansions, there is something really appealing about a game like Sea of Thieves, which allows me to jump in with my friends without missing a beat. That alone is worth a spot.

Tetris Effect is the first pure puzzle game to make me overcome that feeling. Don’t get me wrong, I still feel terrible when I do stumble towards a game over screen. But the game’s rhythmic challenges make the repetition, defeat, and (yes) practice worth it.

But puzzle games? They get me heated; make me feel small and stupid. And because of that, with rare exception, I’ve never gotten good at them. Getting better requires pushing through failure, practicing your fundamentals over and over. But whatever joy comes from clearing lines or creating combos has always been undercut by the acute feeling of inadequacy when I inevitably fail.

I am not often a sore loser when I play video games. Die to a boss in Dark Souls? That’s the point, let’s go again. Permanently lose an XCOM soldier in an ironman run? Sad, but so it goes. Getting whooped by a better player in Soul Calibur? By the end of the match, I’m damned near cheering for them.

In both today’s top 10 podcast and in another piece running this week, I dig deep into what I love about Frozen Synapse 2 as a tactics game. So instead of repeating that, let me instead tell you about this bastard, Eht Par:

But somehow, it never feels Tetris Effect is trying to get one over on you. Its positivity is not the bland and conflict-free marketplace jubiliance of a Coca-Cola. It can’t be, because Tetris Effect is hard. But it wants you to succeed. It believes in you.

And yes, like many “humanist” projects, its attempts to universalize a feeling of positivity do wind up reducing parts of the world into a sort of exotic, aesthetic flavor packet. Aha, this is the level with camels. Ooh, tribal drums!

On first blush, the game’s strength is the visual theming of its levels and their accompanying collection of absolute ear-worms. But by the fifth or sixth level, it becomes clear that the game’s stand out feature is the way those songs actually blend with the gameplay, pieces arriving with rising tempos as the tracks move towards climax. In its best moments it feels like playing an instrument, chasing the next note just as the present one arrives.

Every intersection, every park, and every building in Frozen Synapse 2’s procgen city is a potential battleground. Which is something I learned when he blocked in my own, Syndicate_-style squad of bio-enhanced killer clones was heading home from the airport to patch up their wounds, and gunned them down. And he didn’t stop there. Soon, his troops were circling my own home base. They waltzed in the front door, blew through a pair of armed guards I’d kept in reserve, and found me— _me—cowering in a back office in my agency’s compound. It was over quickly.

For me, it was when I accepted a mission from the city’s industrial district to drive away a Safehouse squad occupying the city’s only airport. Turns out, he didn’t like that. And he made it known.

Along the way, you have to deal with the dozen-or-so other factions vying for power in the city, including Safehouse. Which potentially makes you one of the “pernicious interests” that Par is aiming for. In fact, “potentially” is probably giving it too soft a sell, because Frozen Synapse 2 is all about factional entanglement. Which is to say that at some point, maybe because you were hired to blockade a major avenue that one of his hit squads needed to get through, or maybe because you recovered a powerful cyber relic before his crew did, you’ll run afoul of Eht Par.

Eht Par runs Safehouse, “a paramilitary organization dedicated to security and defending the city from pernicious interests.” Which city? Which pernicious interests? Well, in Frozen Synapse 2, your role is to lead an agency in identifying who or what is behind the mysterious Sonata, a violent organization that is randomly attacking innocents in the cyberpunk city of Markov Geist.

It was the best game over I’ve ever had. And what makes Frozen Synapse 2 so great is that fifteen hours later, in my second attempt at the campaign, it was Eht Par who wound up cornered and scared.

It’s a reminder that there isn’t only one lesson to learn from a game as influential as Dark Souls, and that the world of games is bolder and broader when we diverge .

The greatest indicator of Ashen’s strength is that, while it constantly drew on the same lineage of games, it never made me ask those sorts of questions. Instead, I was taken by its divergences: the openness of many of its areas, its optimistic attitude, the ease and joy of its… platforming?

When I’ve played games like Nioh, I find myself running weird purity tests. Is its expanded take on loot a betrayal of the focused core of the Souls gear system? How does its “ki pulse” fit into the tried-and-true, stamina-driven combat model? What the hell are these cutscenes?

That surprised me, because as a fan of the Dark Souls series, I find myself making a major mistake pretty often when speaking about the game’s legacy, and that is: speaking about the game’s “legacy.” As if there’s only one.

I spent 45 or so hours with Ashen, about the same that I’d spent with Dark Souls. But instead of focusing on boss strategies or character builds, I spent much of my time re-exploring old areas, lining up screenshots , and just sort of floating from one part of the world to the next.

In a genre filled with procgen soldiers and empty canvas mercenaries who are little more than a collection of gear, stats, and abilities, Valkyria Chronicles gives you a collection of characters. And yeah, they also do have gear, stats, and abilities, but somehow each of those feels flavorful and appropriate to who the characters in question are.

Between an essay that will run on the site later this week and this nearly two hour episode of Three Moves Ahead from earlier this year, I feel like my love of Valkyria Chronicles 4 is well documented. But let me give you the high level pitch.

There are plenty of things that VC4 could’ve done better—especially when it came to one of its major characters and its depiction of sexual harassment —but in 2018, it was great to play a tactics game that cared about people more than it did maneuvers.

None of that stuff is new to Valkyria Chronicles as a series, but VC4’s cast is my favorite in the series (at least as far as the localized entries go). Plus, unlike past games which resigned side characters to the occasional cutscene appearance, VC4 offers special side-story content that gives nearly everyone a moment in the spotlight for unique characterization.

Take a second to scroll through this fan-made personnel guide . Look at how characters who share the same basic class and gear are given life through their “potentials.” Fleuret Valois and Emmy Mistral are both shocktroopers--close range combatants who spray fire with high-damage submachine guns. But that's where similarities end. Emmy is built for surprise attacks: "Foul Play" gives her bonus attacks when she attacks from an undiscovered position, and charging in dead on makes her "Panicky," reducing her evasion. Fleuret, meanwhile, is a "Daredevil" whose defense increases the more surrounded she is. Which is useful, since her "Code of Honor" can straight up prevent her from pulling the trigger if she isn't yet discovered.

Will No Man’s Sky ever fall off my list? No, seriously. As the game that gave me a much needed emotional vacation during the hectic launch of Waypoint, it earned the number four spot on my 2016 list . A year later, buoyed but the intriguing sci-fi storytelling of its Atlas Rises expansion, it placed at number six . This year it *checks notes* gained a spot???

This year’s Next expansion (along with “Abyss” and “Visions,” the game’s subsequent updates this fall) delivered a number of things that players had been hoping for since the game’s initial release: Multiplayer, more mission types, unique crashed ships to explore, buried treasures to find, a sharper upgrade loop, fleet ownership. What those updates didn’t do, though, is change what the game fundamentally is. Which, for me, is perfect

Let me be, like, fully honest with y’all. My mental health is a disaster right now. 2018 has been a lot for a lot of reasons. No Man’s Sky isn’t a cure, or an adequate stand in for therapy or medical support. But it has been a key tool of self care, not least of which because of its flexibility. If I need a “make-work” game , No Man’s Sky’s base-building and farming can give me that. If I want to wander around scanning animals and taking photos, there’s a new types of gear and new sorts of missions that will reward me for doing that. And if I just wanna flow through a collection of pretty planets, going into Creative mode with all of the new updates means that those planets are prettier than ever.

There used to be an old rule-of-thumb phrase that was passed around gaming sites, message boards, and comment threads: Every time you mention Deus Ex, someone will re-install it. For me, that game has become No Man’s Sky. A quick mention, a good screenshot, even the hint of space, and within the next 24 hours I’ll be climbing back into one of my ships and lifting off for a new adventure.

4. Monster Hunter: World

Between my initial review and last week’s podcast, I don’t know what else I can say about Monster Hunter: World. So, instead of some belabored summary of points I’ve made elsewhere, I’m going to do what I almost did for my initial review and just say that everything you need to know about this game is contained in these gifs:

3. Into the Breach

If Into the Breach’s greatest success was bringing the joy of tactics games to the curious but under-initiated, like Danielle, then its second greatest success was challenging what we mean when we say “tactics games.”

2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown was such a dominant success that it reconfigured the tactics genre for both casual and die hard players. So many of its features—from cover mechanics to character progression to base-building—became must-haves for new games in the genre. When I look at something like Phantom Doctrine, a Cold War tactics game that released this year, I see a game playing with the design language of XCOM not because it fits the themes and goals of the game, but because it knows that players already know how to “speak XCOM.”

Into the Breach doesn’t even try to play in that box. Instead, it’s a game about proactive defense, crisis management, clever ability combinations, and the precision available when you have (and study) near-perfect information. In many ways, Into the Breach felt like more fully featured Hoplite, one of my favorite tactical roguelikes ever. But unlike Hoplite, it had the reach necessary to actually make an impact on the expectations people have about the genre.