In the ninth episode of “Westworld,” the HBO television series that imagines an escapist theme park populated by human players and fantasy-fulfulling androids, a character named Dolores questions the appeal of the world outside. If humans are so eager to flee into her reality, she asks, as sentience flickers into her circuitry, why would she ever want to visit theirs? It must be awful.

In 2016, the year that facts, political decency, and a handful of our most cherished celebrities joined the choir invisible, who could argue with her? Now more than ever, fiction seems a place of retreat, and the interactive fictions of video games have an especially keen appeal. In times that feel out of control, the controller is a refuge. No matter how dark the world we enter, we are, like Westworld’s clientele, made to feel invincible. So, as I compiled my list of 2016’s best video games, I did it with an eye toward the cathartic, the purifying, and even, at times, the edifying.

1. The Last Guardian (PlayStation 4)

It seemed too much to hope, this year, that The Last Guardian, long lost in developmental purgatory, would finally be released, and that it would meet fans’ expectations. Yet Fumito Ueda’s third game is his best yet. It tells the affecting tale of a boy and his colossal beast, a pair lost in a lost city, who must work together to heal their wounds and escape the craggy wasteland in which they’re imprisoned. As the beast, named Trico, protects your character from ghoulish kidnappers and deadly falls (how often are we cast as the disempowered in video-game fantasies?), an earnest bond forms, not only between animal and boy but also between animal and player. While most games limp into their final credits, The Last Guardian crescendos gloriously, with an affecting ending that reveals, better than any other, the idiosyncratic power of the medium.

2. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)

The Polish-made game, based on the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels, came out last year, but it was in 2016 that, through thoughtful tinkering and refinement, it became the best version of itself. In May, the game’s developers released a new chapter, Blood and Wine. You still play as Geralt, a kind of freelance medieval detective-slash-pest-controller, employed to deal with everything from local territorial disputes to troll infestations. The money you earn may be spent on new weapons, armor, potions, or even collectible cards, which can be used in a bar game called Gwent that’s ubiquitously popular in the game’s Northern Kingdoms. But in Blood and Wine, which takes Geralt to the pastoral splendor of the Toussaint region, you’re likely to make a more Gallic sort of investment: renovating your new vineyard estate, repairing beams and tastefully refurnishing the dusty rooms.

3. Clash Royale (Android, iOS)

The follow-up to Clash of Clans, a game so uproariously popular that the Finns who created it have boosted their country’s capital-gains-tax income by a fifth, is a brisker, more tactical affair than the original. The object of the game is to storm your opponent’s castle. The contests, played against semi-anonymous players with whom you are instantaneously matched whenever you start the game, are short and frantic. You have no direct control over your units, which range from bobbing foot-solders to Tolkien-esque trolls, so the strategy derives from choice, timing, and placement. This is a so-called freemium game, meaning that you can pay to accelerate the rate at which your troops develop, but even for freeloaders there is plenty to enjoy.

4. Titanfall 2 (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)

Titanfall 2 is as brawny and brash as video games come: you play as a futuristic Marine accompanied by a bipedal robot tank, the sort found clanking through so much Japanese anime. The sentient machine will fight alongside you, or you can leap into the driver’s seat and take the controls. Like the Call of Duty franchise, which was established by some of the same people, Titanfall 2 is a militaristic fantasy designed to flatter its player; you prevail, single-handedly, against laughable odds. But beneath the muscular grandstanding is a game conceived with masterly attention to design. The single-player campaign is mindless but exquisite, cinematic in feel, and the multiplayer modes have the excitement of sport.

5. Rez Infinite (PlayStation 4)

Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s revival of his fifteen-year-old synesthetic music game, Rez, in virtual reality may seem, to rival V.R. game makers, like cheating. The original was already a masterpiece of art and engineering, melding a trance soundtrack with psychedelic explosions of light and color. The move to V.R.’s all-encompassing dimension is not tokenistic, however. It feels like the true expression of a game that we had previously seen only in glimpses. Rez Infinite’s final stage, Area X, breaks your avatar free of its tracks, allowing you to float through space, surging forward in whatever direction you look. You become the conductor of a lavish, esoteric fireworks display, warm and unforgettable.

6. Hitman (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)

While prestige television series are increasingly distributed in the manner of video games, all at once, Hitman is a video game released in episodic dollops, in the manner of a traditional TV season. Each episode takes the eponymous assassin to a different, vibrant location—Paris, Marrakech, Bangkok, and Sapienza, a fictional town modelled on Vernazza, Italy—intricately rendered and filled with hundreds of background characters going about their routines. There’s a target to dispose of in each location, but the game invites you to replay each mission in scores of different ways, picking out new routes, tools, and ever more inventive ways of meeting your goals. Hitman rewards the imaginative, and the imaginatively murderous.

7. Overwatch (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)

Blizzard, the well-moneyed creator of World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Hearthstone, is known for the finesse of its games, and Overwatch maintains the standard. It translates the fundamentals of League of Legends, in which players square off in a scramble for territory, to the first-person-shooter genre. There’s a role (and an avatar, each with its own backstory and wardrobe) for every personality, whether you prefer to charge into the throng, hang back to snipe from the sidelines, or tend to the wounded. For the well-organized team, an Overwatch victory could be one of 2016’s most thrilling.

8. Firewatch (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)

“We made a strange thing,” the graphic designer Olly Moss, one of Firewatch’s artists, told me earlier this year. Certainly, when compared with most modern video games, this laconic, slow-burning story of a man named Henry and the summer he spends as a National Park fire lookout is unusual. But it fits comfortably within the broader context of fiction about heartbreak, retreat, and solitude among rudderless fortysomethings. The game’s standout trick is the manner in which the story is told—largely through a battery-powered walkie-talkie, so that Henry’s few moments of human connection are interspersed with long stretches of lonely silence. Firewatch’s ending doesn’t quite deliver a payoff equal to its elegant setup, but, nevertheless, this summer trip to Wyoming becomes as memorable for you as it is for Henry, who emerges transformed.