PHOTO BY DANNY WICENTOWSKI

Sam and Seth Coster of Butterscotch Shenanigans.

“Killer aliens meets goofball storytelling and characters meets a weighty crafting system brimming with hundreds of recipes, Crashlands is everything predictable RPGs aren’t.”

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Somebody atreally, loves St. Louis video game studio Butterscotch Shenanigans . No,loves it.The venerable magazine named Butterscotch’s surprise hit Crashlands to two of its major lists last month. On November 4, the publication included the mobile version of the galactic RPG adventure in its “50 Best Apps of the Year” collection , citing the old-meets-new vibe as a vital component to gaming today. Wrote the magazine,Pretty good, right? And on November 22,piled on even more praise when it listed Crashlands as No. 7 of “The Top 10 Video Games,” part of the media outlet's “Top 10 Everything of 2016” series. Crashlands was in good company, sharing space with big-name games like Dragon Quest Builders and Uncharted 4.’s hype continues an outstanding year for Crashlands, which Butterscotch Shenanigans developed as a creative way for Sam Coster and his brothers Seth and Adam to deal with Sam’s non-Hodgkin's lymphoma . The young studio — founded in 2012 — had some previous success with games Quadropus Rampage and Flop Rocket, but it also fielded some duds and needed a big hit to keep the lights on.After a few years of development, Butterscotch launched Crashlands for both mobile and PC, and the rest is history. With outstanding reviews from IGN, Android Central and Game Informer (and, ahem, us ), Crashlands found no shortage of fans, allowing Butterscotch to expand its studio and pursue its next adventure.And Coster’s cancer? After intense treatment and some big scares, it appears to be gone, cementing 2016 as a triumph in more ways than one.