System: Nintendo Switch

3. PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds

[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/fsVPtZGisuY

I have spent roughly half my time with PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds hiding in a shed. Surprisingly, that's not a complaint. PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds has a simple premise, one with surprising power. Take a large map, a derelict Eastern European city, perhaps. Fill it with a hundred players. Litter weapons around, some vehicles, some traps for funsies. Last player alive wins. This straightforward idea, literally cribbed from a movie, imbues every single moment of Battlegrounds with tension. Every movement in the grass, every shadow out of the corner of your eye, could be one of 99 other players with you in the crosshairs. Under that kind of scrutiny, every single microdecision becomes terrifying. Which is how I find myself hiding in a shed, over and over and over again, aiming a shotgun at a door that may never open. But let me tell you: hiding has never been so riveting.

System: Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/zw47_q9wbBE

The commanding image of Breath of the Wild is a sweeping vista. Encountered roughly five minutes into the game, this vista--a wide shot of a whole continent's worth of wilderness, open and ready to be explored--is a promise. Lots of videogames offer this promise, of freedom, of unfettered and truly organic exploration, but most fail. So many game worlds feel empty, and dead, and basically constructed. Which, in a very real sense, they all inevitably are. But some special games have enough of their creators in them that their worlds feel real, and beautiful, and are able to pass off the illusion that you're not just running through handcrafted levels but through a full, living place. Breath of the Wild is one of those games, and it uses such a place to deconstruct and resurrect the mythology and ideas of The Legend of Zelda, a game that was originally very simple: a story of a boy, and a big, scary place, and the promise of someone he loves at the end of the journey. No sequel in this series' thirty years has so captured the elegance and joy of that story. And now it's hard to imagine how any other game after it could.

System: Nintendo Switch

1. Nier: Automata

[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/wJxNhJ8fjFk

WIRED made one significant mistake with its gaming coverage in 2017: we never reviewed Nier: Automata. This is my fault. I came to the game a month or two late, and there was no room for coverage in our calendar. And yet Nier: Automata is so excellent, such a significant contribution to the medium of gaming and to my own life that I cannot in good conscience place any other game in the #1 spot. It's the story of two androids caught in an ancient, horrible war, but that explanation doesn't do Nier: Automata justice. It is a genre-hopping, brilliantly written, intricately crafted magnum opus about persistence, and love, and hope in the face of absolute loss. Game director Yoko Taro has famously said he makes "weird games for weird people," but Nier: Automata might be for everyone.

System: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows