The 10 Best Games of 2016

From an abandoned island to the infinite cosmos, from the lush Wyoming wilderness to the mysteries locked Inside, 2016 was a brilliant year for boundary-bursting interactive experiences. Ahead, EW's picks for the 10 best games of the year.

Creator Sean Murray promised the cosmos — 18 quintillion planets! —  but for many, the big swing was a big whiff, a half-finished boondoggle about the joys of inventory management. But beneath the hype is one of our era’s curiosities: an artisanally handmade art game trying to be a AAA shooter RPG, a math-rock space opera about the infinite possibilities of outer-space flora and fauna. A new expansion beckons; we haven’t seen Sky’s ceiling yet. —Darren Franich

This reboot of the 1993 shooter has no right to be as good as it is, but Doom recaptures everything that was great about that classic and brings it screaming into the present. The story is inconsequential, as Doom is all about murdering hell demons in the most graphic way possible, and it’s positively exhilarating. Developer id Software satisfied the most basic urges, needs, and desires of our id, and delivered the most visceral experience of the year. —Aaron Morales 

Eight years after Jonathan Blow mainstreamed the indie-game movement with Braid, he returned with this devotional homage to the CD-ROM point-and-click-andponder adventure. Mysterious island, check. Frustratingly difficult puzzles, check. Radical combination of cerebral ennui and sensual delight, check. In 2016, no game was harder, nor more rewarding. —DF

Who would have thought that a 15-year-old Sega Dreamcast game would be the PSVR killer app? Infinite is more than an HD remake — it’s everything the rhythm-action game always aspired to be, finally fully realized in virtual reality. Rez has always been a transportive experience. In VR, it’s a transcendent one. —AM 

Nathan Drake has been running, jumping, and quipping his way through collapsing buildings and ancient ruins since 2007, and Uncharted 4 continues the swashbuckling action with some of the series’ most memorable set pieces. The story packs an emotional wallop because we’ve spent 10 years with these characters. If this truly is this thief’s end, then it’s one hell of a send-off. —AM 

Rich Sommer gives the videogame performance of the year as Henry, a melancholy loner fleeing personal tragedy in the remote Wyoming wilderness. There’s the woman on the radio, that curious fence, those missing campers, a backpack someone lost, a forest fire on the horizon. It’s never clear whether you’re living through a dark romance or a sundappled noir — and whether Henry is a hero or a patsy. —DF

The sequel to the multiplayer-only shooter expands on the wonderful tension between hyper-agile Pilots and powerful Titans by adding a wildly inventive single-player story mode that pushes each play style to its limit. Respawn Entertainment takes more cues from Half-Life and Portal than Call of Duty to deliver one of the most memorable campaigns of the year. Surprisingly for a first-person shooter, Titanfall 2 might be at its best when it’s a platformer, but the shooting hits its mark, too. —AM 

The Last Guardian was supposed to be a contender for game of the year, 2011. For a while, it looked as if it might never see the light of day. Thankfully, Fumito Ueda’s spiritual successor to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, about a young boy who befriends a strange beast, lives up to its pedigree. Trico truly feels like a living creature, and bonding with him to traverse the game’s crumbling world is one of the year’s most fantastic, fantastical journeys. —AM 

From its tense opening moments, Dishonored 2 is all about player choice. Do I choose returning hero Corvo or grown-up daughter Emily? Am I a nonlethal ghost who lurks in the shadows or a blade-wielding whirling dervish of destruction? Your choices reverberate throughout the story — with rats, bloodflies, and disease increasing with the chaos you create. Fortunately, both play styles are equally enthralling, making the choice of playing it through twice the easiest one of all. —AM

I will never get over the ending of Inside. In the best game of the year, you control a little boy in a red shirt. He wanders through a forest, a farm, a city. Men chase him, if they’re men. The scenes veer fantastical — with floating graveyards and a World’s Fair aquatica lit up green space-age neon — suggesting an ancient myth from millennia, hence about our modern world. Developer Playdead is based in Copenhagen, so there’s an easy moody-Danes joke here: What if Ingmar Bergman invented Super Mario? But nothing’s easy about Inside — not the brain-tickling puzzles, not the paranoid imagery. My theory: Inside is about 2016, a year so haunted by death and politics that these past 12 months felt like individual iron bars in a cell made of history. It became a common refrain: Can this year just end already? There is a moment, very late in Inside, where you break through a final barrier. Call it a wall, or call it Dec. 31. But by then, you no longer have any clear sense where you have been going; you don’t even know what you are anymore. The final image of Inside is a tantalizing mystery. At long last, you’re outside, wherever that is. —DF