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.

But there is something especially awful and harrowing about the game where you can fight back, you can save yourself, but you can’t afford any mistakes and death is always bearing down on you, and there is always the thought, as it approaches, that maybe you should have run after all.

Fear is not an easy thing for a survival horror-action game to sustain. The “action” part of the equation usually breaks the suspense. We tend to want our action games to feel satisfying and empowering, but that’s 180 degrees from what a great horror experience wants to evoke. Which is probably why so few horror games even want to fight that battle anymore, or fight any battle of any kind. Games like Amnesia and Alien: Isolation or—more illustratively but less elegantly— Outlast resolve the tension by removing action entirely. They are games of flight without fight, and this can make them terrifying vessels for horror.

It’s okay to be afraid, you’re meant to be afraid. But Resident Evil reminds you that if you want to survive, you’re going to have to be brave.

Some enemies are not meant to be fought, some can’t be, but there are also a lot of places where the only way out is through. You have to fight, and in order to survive the fight you have to master your terror and locate your presence of mind. Stop running, turn around. Stop shaking, aim.

Resident Evil 7 is dreadful. Every scene, every space, practically every object feels like something to be rejected. Even at the start of the game in the light of day, the sky itself seems toxic. The rambling Southern estate grounds where it takes place are not just decayed but diseased, ravaged by far more than time and the elements. Nature, science, even the human form itself has all be made twisted and repugnant, and at every turn you are made to wade deeper into the mire.

It does a terrific job unpacking the strategy and politics of auto-racing, about all the important choices that are made before a driver first sits down inside a car on race day. What parts does your R&D team create for the car, and should they focus on risky, high-performance equipment or tune for durability and reliability? Do you gamble that a your best driver can stretch a worn-out set of tires to the end of a race, at the very real risk of watching them smash into a corner wall or simply start crawling around the track?

This is a 2016 game that ended up really capturing my imagination in 2017, which is ironic in a year that saw new editions of Gran Turismo, Forza, Project CARS, and F1 2017. Confronted with an almost unprecedented banquet of racing sims, it’s suitably ironic that I would end up investing most of my racing time into this delightful little sports management game from last year.

While racing is most vividly depicted from the perspective of the driver, Motorsport Manager reminds us that racing is, after all, a strategy game.

8. Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock

This is such a flawed game that misses so much of what I loved about the TV series… and yet it’s also one of the most enjoyable tactical games of the year. It could and should perhaps have been much more ambitious in the kind of story it tells, since the narrative and tragic worldview of the 2000s Battlestar Galactica TV series was what made it more than a run-of-the-mill military sci-fi show. But damn if Deadlock doesn’t end up delivering a lot of great military sci-fi flavor.

I feel a bit sheepish putting this on my list when I have such reservations about it, but it was one of the games I kept returning to throughout this fall. Maneuvering its warships in battle, plotting out delicate maneuvers in its simultaneous-turn interface, and watching massive fleets just unload on each other with walls of artillery, missiles, and flak is a lot of what what I want from a game like this. Not everything, but enough to make it one of my games of the year.

7. MLB: The Show 17

This was the year I got into The Show, and frankly into baseball. It’s impossible for me to separate my affection for The Show 17 from my experience watching the Cubs win the World Series last fall, and from its opening cinematic The Show 17 is openly pandering to me by presenting Kris Bryant’s play on the final out of the Cubs-Indians series as the apotheosis of baseball history.