It’s easy to say this about every year and not get called out, given the rapid, exponential growth of the video games market in the past decade, but 2013 has really been a golden year for the medium. If Telltale’s Walking Dead proved one thing to us in 2012, it’s that gamers are ready for complex, affecting stories as well as high-action, triple-A shooters.



We'll give you a clue: one of these games is our number one

And this year, studios recognised that, combining the two with often-fantastic results. It’s also been a hugely exciting period for mobile gaming, with technological advances in tablets and smartphones allowing developers to inject gaming experiences into your daily commute as well as on your sofa. Gone are the slow, repetitive puzzle games downloaded via an MMS; ushered in are the graphical powerhouses and franchise games that make your device physically heat up.

This top 10 list isn’t based on the best-selling, the best-reviewed or the prettiest. Neither is it fully (it is a bit) based on the writer’s feelings towards some of the titles; rather, it’s an assembly of the year’s most important games: the innovators, the game-changers, the ones that were most fun to play. So without further ado – absolutely in a particular order – it’s the top 10 games of 2013.