It’s not like we’re there yet, or anything close—queer men, and especially queer men of color, are still ridiculously underrepresented in games. But I found a great deal of meaning in the queer characters who showed up this year. That includes the first big-budget queer women of color protagonists, the sexy Dream Daddies of Maple Bay, a Life is Strange game that finally embraces its queer themes all the way, and every single person in Butterfly Soup.

By now, you’ve probably read a bunch of pieces about how fantastic 2017 has been for games. I’m here to tell you that not only were so many games very good, a non-zero number of them were also very queer.

Welcome to Waypoint's Pantheon of Games , a celebration of our favorite games, a re-imagining of the year's best characters, and an exploration of the 2017's most significant trends.

Tacoma (disclaimer: I'm friendly with the game's Creative Director) also featured some rad space lesbians, in power couple Natali and Roberta, who shared one of the cutest queer spaceship moments that I may or may not have replayed a few times. It also featured Andrew Dagyab, a queer dude stuck in a job at one megacorp, looking for the best way to support his husband and child back home.

Death of the Outsider, meanwhile, is a distilled, shorter Dishonored game with all of the things that make that series great—incredible level design, interesting powers to use and test against that design—and this time, a fascinating, complex, and queer protagonist in Billie Lurk. You can read more about Billie this week in an upcoming story about her role as an arbiter of justice.

To my memory, Prey is actually the very first game with the murky-but-still-somewhat-useful AAA label that explicitly has a queer woman of color protagonist. (That is, if you play as a woman.) And _it_was directly inspired by Gone Home in several aspects of its story , with a very cute romance subplot between NPCs, and lady Morgan has a satisfying plot regarding ex-girlfriend Mikhaila.

Arkane gave us not one, but two games with queer women of color protagonists, in Prey and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. These are both fantastic games beyond that fact (both in my personal top three), both immersive sims with excellent ideas how to evolve the genre.

I’m not going to give Life is Strange: Before the Storm a pass for its use of scab labor. But, it did finally give fans of the first game the full gay treatment (should you choose to play that way), with a believably awkward, exciting, terrifying relationship between its main characters. It really captures teenage romance and the weird-as-hell feelings that accompany it beautifully,

I cannot forget the daddies. The sexy daddies of dating game Dream Daddy came from all walks of life, but all of the characters were dudes who cared deeply about their kids (dads), and handsome devils (daddies) looking for something a little more exciting to do in the sleepy town of Maple Bay. Visual novels with queer characters are nothing new—but the daddies enjoyed some crossover buzz this year.

Frequent contributor Kate Gray enjoyed Dream Daddy for its wholesomeness, and Patrick (Waypoint’s official and only dad) played the game and praised its writing, enjoying the humor and inclusive nature of Game Grump’s dating sim: