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The Dishonored games are often described as being about choice, but it might be more fitting to say they are about judgement. After all, when you make decisions in Dishonored, you aren’t simply selecting from a list of potential actions, as you would order a dish from a takeaway menu. Instead, those decisions are always made with a view to their potential consequences. What’s the best way to clear out this room? Or what’s the best way to sneak through it? How should I kill this person? Actually, should I kill them at all?

This notion of judgement is most evident in the assassination targets Corvo and Emily pursue in each mission, who can be dispatched via lethal or nonlethal methods. Dishonored 2 never guides players toward one option or the other, yet throughout each level are documents, recordings and other environmental details that provide insight into that character’s life and personality, helping players judge for themselves the best way to deal with their target.

Yet beyond these key imperial conspirators is an Empire bustling with criminals and rogues. The cities of Dunwall and Karnaca are prowled by corrupt guards and thuggish gangsters, while all manner of thieves and killers hide in plain sight among the Empire’s citizenry. 

Hence, what if we extrapolated Dishonored’s core mechanic across every citizen in Dishonored 2, dispensing justice like a whalepunk Judge Dredd? That’s my plan for this run of Dishonored 2. I will be the judge, jury and executioner for all of Karnaca, safeguarding the innocent and killing the guilty. 

My first judgement is simple, who to play as. For this run, I’m going to play as Corvo. While I think Emily’s powers are more interesting, particularly the wonderful Domino, a couple of Corvo’s abilities, namely Possession and Slow Time, are more useful for manipulating and eliminating individual targets in crowded environments.

"Forgiveness isn't my speciality"

For the first mission, however, I’ll have to exact my judgements sans powers, or much of anything really. Emily has been overthrown by the witch Delilah and her lapdog the Duke of Serkonos, while I’ve been locked inside Emily’s private chambers by the traitorous captain of the guard, Mortimer Ramsey. In addition to treason, I’ve just watched Ramsey cold-bloodedly murder one of the Watch’s lieutenants, so I’m feeling unambiguous about what his fate is going to be. 

The same goes for the four of Ramsey’s guards lurking inside the palace. As I start prowling the halls, I see that there are bodies everywhere, far more than Ramsey could have killed on his own. These “traitorous dogs” as Corvo himself puts it, are clearly Ramsey’s most trusted aides, so I feel little regret as I sneakily cut them down. Ramsey isn’t long for the world, either. I hide behind a stack of shelves as he heads to unlock Emily’s vault, and shish kebab him through the shoulder as he passes. 

With everyone inside dead, I head to the streets. Out here, I’m less certain about how to deal with the guards. The streets are littered with dead civilians and watchmen loyal to Emily. Clearly Dunwall is ripe with murderers, but I’ve no idea who’s done what. 

As I cross the rooftops to the palace gate, a sergeant declares to his men that, “We’re in this with the Duke, sink or swim.” I decide to help them all sink with the addition of several new orifices. For the remainder of the level, I resolve that my priority needs to be to get out of Dunwall with my skin intact. If I can sneak past the guards, fine, but if they attack me, all bets are off. Without my powers, skulking around is tricky, and I get into several messy fights. The only considered judgement I make is to put a bullet in a sergeant about to murder a local journalist. “Forgiveness isn’t my speciality,” Corvo tells the journalist afterward, a fitting motto given what I have planned.

Home is where the heart is

In the end, I escape Dunwall leaving 13 guards dead. Considering the situation, I’m okay with this, but I would have preferred a less chaotic start. Thankfully, after a visit from the Outsider, I get my powers back. More importantly still, I get the Heart. 

The Heart of a Living Thing is the most important tool in this approach to playing Dishonored 2. Its purpose is to guide you toward upgrades, but if you right-click on an NPC with the Heart equipped, it will tell you that person’s innermost secrets. With the Heart, I’m no longer reliant on appearances. I can see right into people’s souls; quite useful for a self-appointed judge of humankind. 

Newly empowered, I step onto Karnaca docks for the first time. Officially I’m on the trail of the Crown Killer, which leads toward an old Solarium known as the Addermire Institute. But I have plenty of other work to do en-route, starting right here, on the jetty.

I set the Heart to work, and instantly I’ve got a raft of judgements to make. “At the gaming table, he keeps cheating cards in his boot,” the Heart tells me of one dockworker. I’m not killing someone for that. At the end of the jetty, a woman is taking photographs of the ocean. “She tells them it’s whale meat, but it’s not,” the Heart whispers. I’m ready to spring upon this cannibal-by-proxy, when I realise the Heart was not specific about what meat was being served. Now that I’m out of the treasonous mire of Dunwall, I don’t want to kill someone unless I’m sure they deserve it. If the Heart says something ambiguous like that, I’m going to ignore it. 

With this rule in place, I move further into the docks. Interestingly, my next couple of targets don’t come from the Heart at all. At a jetty farther down the dockside, an altercation over money ends in a man openly bludgeoning two people to death with a length of pipe. We have a winner! I slit his throat and drop the body in the ocean. I then turn the corner and head up the street, where I catch a guard pushing a man into an electrified wall of light. I’m too slow to save the poor fellow, but I can at least give him justice. I swoop down, choke out the guard, and throw his unconscious body into the wall of light. Zap! 

I return up the same street when the Heart delivers its first proper target. A woman is leaning on a balcony on the floor above. “She tells the children it’s just tea, and when they’re asleep, she puts them on boats bound for Morley.” Crikey, that’s nasty. Frankly I can’t think of a punishment harsh enough, so I plant a springrazor on her back, and blink away before it triggers.

It’s interesting how the Heart’s stories tug and pull at my own sense of ethics. I quickly decide that I’m not killing anyone for stealing. Partly because it’s excessive, and partly because I’m practically hoovering up stuff that doesn’t belong to me as I explore, and I’m not comfortable with that level of hypocrisy. At one point, the Heart whispers a story to me that I really struggle with. It relates to a man tending a ramshackle dockside tavern. “He took her books, and made her watch as he burned them.” The thought of it makes me genuinely angry, but cruel and nasty as such an action is, in the end I stay my blade. If I’m giving thieves a pass, it would be wrong to kill for destruction of property, however vindictive.

I continue up the hill, judging as I go. The Overseer’s Headquarters proves particularly fruitful. From a rooftop, I drop blade-first onto the shoulders of someone who had a woman dragged to her death for witchcraft. Inside, the Heart hisses of another, “He’s not a believer, but he tortures them anyway.” Wow, champion of the world here. I use a flame dart for this one.

By the time I jump into a carriage bound for Addermire, I’ve relieved another 16 people of their vicious lives, and those were just the really bad ones. All-told, I’m feeling pretty bleak about Dishonored’s world as the Art Deco bulk of Addermire looms into view.

Cat person

Mercifully, Addermire appears to have sensed my ailing mood and prescribes a remedial sprinkling of decency. As I arrive and explore the area surrounding the carriage station, I find guards who for once are more kind than cruel. “He’ll never be a rich man, but he is honest,” it says of one watchman. Of another, the Heart whispers “He gives part of his rations to two street urchins.” I love the colour the Heart’s oral vignettes add to the world, but it’s a relief to use a paint that isn’t black. 

I sneak by this little cluster of wholesomeness. Upon entering Addermire proper, Karnaca’s ugliness rises to the surface again. “He crushed her fingers and told her she needed a permit to fiddle on street corners.” Grim, but I grit my teeth and move on. “She dumped them in the bay.” I draw my sword, but for all I know the Heart could be talking about fl y-tipping, so I settle for a sleep dart and head to an outdoor terrace.

“He threw her cat out of the window.” Okay, murder time. I rush across the terrace and gut Addermire’s resident cat-launcher. But in my haste I neglect to check my surroundings and alert a cluster of guards to my presence, including a pistol-toting officer. Once I escaped Dunwall, I resolved that bets were no longer off, so I don’t want to kill any of these guards unless I’m sure they deserve it. 

What ensues is a semi-farcical battle across the terrace as I deflect blades and bullets with my sword, while juggling the Heart to see into the souls of my opponents. The grunts have done nothing particularly egregious, so I knock them out with a combination of sleep darts and stun mines. The officer, however, is a rum one. “He put the poison in the wine and replaced the cork. He plans to give it to his father as a gift.” Oh aye? Well, I’ve got a gift for you pal. Plot twist, the gift opens you.

With the officer dead, I focus on completing my objectives. In the end, I leave Addermire with seven more souls weighed upon my imaginary scales. I spared the Crown Killer, however, for story reasons that I won’t spoil.

As I leave Addermire, I reflect on my actions so far. I feel like I’ve been sufficiently strict with my judgements. Okay, maybe the cat thing was an overreaction, but nearly all the others have been traitors, murderers, or worse. Nonetheless, up to this point I’ve killed 36 people, leaving me with a High Chaos rating. If I carry on like this, my overall effect on Karnaca and the Empire will be negative.

If I’m going to continue, I’ll have to start thinking longer term, and focus on eliminating the apples that aren’t just bad but seething with maggots. Otherwise, I’m liable to doom the Empire to a fate worse than if I’d stayed a prisoner in Dunwall.

Part 2: The judgemental playthrough of Arkane Studios’ revenge fantasy continues.

We’re off to the Clockwork Mansion today to put a spanner in the works of inventor and philosopher Kirin Jindosh, as well as rescuing Anton Sokolov, currently in Jindosh’s clutches. The good doctor Hypatia, who I spared in my visit to Addermire, describes Jindosh as having “the empathy of a Mantis”, so I’m already leaning toward a permanent solution to this particularly human enigma. 

I’m less certain about how to approach the dozens of other guards, gangsters and civilians I’ll encounter en-route. I left Addermire having killed a total of 36 people. Thanks to the Heart telling me their innermost secrets, I’m confident they thoroughly deserved it, but it’s also left me with a High Chaos rating. This basically points you towards the bad ending, although the game doesn’t explicitly say this. I’m supposed to be cleaning up Karnaca, not smearing the blood around to make a bigger mess, so ideally I need to rein my murder in a little to avoid dooming the city. 

Naturally, the moment I arrive at Karnaca’s Aventa District, the Heart provides me with a nightmare judgement. I point it at a civilian hanging around outside a wine shop, and it says, “He knew hagfish was not a fit food for the child. All those little bones. But he didn’t care.” 

Jeeeeebus Eight Cripes, everything about this is horrible. The story is horrible. The phrasing is horrible, disturbingly vivid but also just vague enough to put doubt in my mind. The man is clearly horrible, but is he horrible enough? Remember, I need to try to minimise my footprint. In the end, it’s the specificity of the words “All those little bones” that forces my hand. I possess him, walk him toward a secluded area and put a dart in his ear. All those little bones. 

I think this encounter must have thrown my concentration, because almost immediately afterwards I stumble into a fight with two of the grand guard. I race into a nearby tenement to escape, but they follow me in.

I deflect blades and bullets with my sword as I backpedal up the stairs, trying to focus the Heart on the officer at the front. “They place bets, he and the other guards, on which prisoner will cry first.” Hardly person of the year material, but not one who deserves to die by my hand. I counter his attack and grapple him, trying to choke him out as the second guard closes in. The officer is between us, but the guard raises his sword anyway.

Don’t do it.

He swipes, cutting clean through the officer’s leg, who crumples and dies. Aghast at what he’s done, the other guard flees the scene, while I’m left standing on the stairs with the corpse of a man I didn’t want dead.

Great. Just perfect. This is exactly the kind of scenario I’m trying to avoid. I leave the tenement, trying to get my head straight. But the guard who fled has apparently had time to think about how he just ran through his own superior, and has evidently decided that it was all my fault, and comes after me again.

After what just happened, I don’t want to mess about, so I Blink onto a first-floor balcony. Taking very careful aim, I shoot the guard with a sleep dart. But he’s still running as the toxin takes hold, and he topples over a railing, landing hard on the cobbles running along the canal. Oh no.

I blink down to street level and rush over to where he lies sprawled, dead as a doornail.

Civilians are screaming now, so I don’t have time to process this monumental fuck up. I cut down an alley and make haste to the carriage station. I decide to head straight there and resume my judgements in the next area, but I at least focus the Heart on the people I pass, and mercifully it comes up with nothing too egregious.

As I turn into the square behind the carriage station, however, I’m immediately set upon by a group of Howlers—Karnaca’s meanest gang. Simply being Howlers puts them in the frame for a death sentence, as does the fact that they’ve attacked me unprovoked. But after what’s just happened, I really don’t want to kill more people than necessary, so I do the best I can to avoid lethal force. At the end, two Howlers are dead, and three are unconscious. I’ll take it.

I hop in the carriage to Upper Aventa, which I need to navigate before heading to the mansion. I also use the Heart to scan for any murky souls lurking around. One guard stood by a wall of light, “Killed his neighbour’s dog [and] sold the meat to a cook on a merchant ship.” So I pop his head from a distance with a dart.

Another, “Locked a squadmate in a blood-fly infested apartment out of jealousy.” The Heart even specifies this poor squaddie, “Died a horrible death,” so I walk this guard to a quiet spot using possession, then plant a spring razor on his back.

Feeling a little more reassured, I cross the gorge that separates Upper Aventa from the Clockwork Mansion, and enter Jindosh’s whirring labyrinth. I stick to, as Corvo puts it “the space between the walls” as much as possible, trying to avoid the bladed hulk of the prowling Clockwork Soldiers. Inevitably though, I have to creep out to deal with a particularly unpleasant guard. “They won’t let him back into the bathhouse,” the heart says. “Not after what he did to a boy there.” Barf.

I sneak out to shank the guard, but I’ve failed to notice a sleeping Clockwork nestled in the wall, which promptly stirs. I have enough time to do the deed, but then the Clockwork is on me. I blink away, spin around, and shoot the Clockwork’s head off with my pistol, which stops it from being able to hunt me.

It’s the slickest move I’ve made all day, but unfortunately it sends the Clockwork haywire, while the gunshot attracts the attention of several other guards.

I watch in horror at the storm of blades and blood that unfolds. I can’t get close without being attacked from half a dozen angles, so I try to take out the Clockwork with bolts and bullets. It’s like shooting peas at a tank, and it’s only when the Clockwork has minced all three guards that I finally manage to destroy it.

How many of them deserved to die? How many didn’t? I’ll never know. What a mess. The only good thing about this calamity is it’s given me an idea of a way to deal with Jindosh. I find my way to his laboratory, where the inventor is protected by two Clockworks.

There’s no way for guards to get in here, so I deliberately attract the attention of one, and swiftly decapitate it. I then draw the second one away while the headless Clockwork makes short work of its master.

Job done, I quickly locate Sokolov, and grab him from his prison. As I’m leaving, a cluster of guards appear from the elevator and spot me.

I’m not trying to fight them with a pensioner on my shoulder, so I dash back to Jindosh’s lab, and use the walkway across the gorge to escape the mansion.

Suffering witches

I leave Aventa with 13 people dead, almost half of them accidental. This is a disaster, about as far away from clockwork as you can get. As night falls, and I depart for my next target, my overriding feeling is “must try harder”. 

Tonight I have an appointment with the curator of the Royal Conservatory, Breanna Ashworth. We’re going to have a sharp discussion about preserving items of questionable value, namely her life. I’m also going to keep my eyes peeled for more general rotten apples, but I need to be strict now more than ever. 

Problem is, this is very difficult when the whole damn orchard seems to be festering. Once again, my first targets sets the tone. “He pushed her hard against the machinery. She lost the child,” the heart says. Grim, grim, grim. I possess the guilty dockworker and walk him up the street a little, then snuff him out with a bolt. Further up the street, a female guard killed a woman wearing “a blue dress with butter roses”, while her male squadmate killed two people and made it look like “a lover’s quarrel”. A well placed spring razor deals with them both. 

I try to be careful, precise, thinking every movement through, but it never seems to be enough. I’m too slow to stop a grand guard officer pushing a servant girl off a roof. I give the poor wretch the best justice I can, but it feels hollow. In an alley near the district’s black market, I bump into another group of Howlers. I manage to take them out non-lethally, yet as I walk away I hear a crunching sound. I turn to find a swarm of rats devouring one of the unconscious Howlers. I kill the rats before they can move on to the main course, but the starter is well and truly consumed. 

By the time I enter the conservatory, my mood has turned black, and unlike when I arrived at Addermire, Dishonored II provides no ray of hope. 

Quite the opposite really, as the conservatory is overrun by Empress Delilah’s coven of witches.

In a world that is filled with nasty people, the witches still manage to stand out. They kill for fun and use magic to torture their victims in truly horrific ways. This isn’t abstract lore, either, evidence of their depravity litters the conservatory. There are bodies everywhere, sprawled on the floor and dangling from the ceiling.

In one room, I find a corpse pin-cushioned by sleep darts. In another, a literal pile of dead half-charred from a clear attempt to burn them.

It’s at this point I decide to break my own rules. There’s no point looking for guilt here. I’m surrounded by it.

It literally paints the walls. Instead, I’m going to look for innocence, and if I don’t find it, then to hell with them all.

I set the heart to work, only now with a different objective. As I suspected, it comes up with little in the way of redemptive insight. I let one witch go because she “struggles to hold on to who she was” while another “misses the younger brothers she left behind”. Small hope for change, but at least it’s some hope.

The rest, though? Ugh. I stalk through the halls, no longer even trying to sneak, fi ghting and killing almost every witch I come across. I run out of spring razors halfway through the level. At one point I spot a witch stood on the statue of a turtle, performing a mock scene of Delilah’s usurpation of Emily. The Heart whispers, “Her spirit is as black and distorted as the void. She takes delight in slaughter.” She burns.

In the end, I leave the conservatory with 22 more souls on my list, most of them witches. Ashworth is somewhere amongst them, shot in the head as I carved my way through her underlings. It’s going to take a miracle to avoid High Chaos now, but at this point, with everything I’ve seen, I’m struggling to believe Karnaca is even worth saving.

Part 3: Reserving judgement in an attempt to save Karnaca from Chaos.

Today we’re visiting mining mogul Aramis Stilton, who resides in his manor on the outskirts of the Dust District. Stilton knows the secret to the usurper Delilah’s invulnerability, and I need to retrieve it from him one way or another. To get there, I must also crack the riddle of the Jindosh lock, a huge mechanical door commissioned by Duke of Serkonos that separates Stilton’s manor from the rest of the district. 

Yet as I prepare for the mission, my concern rests entirely with the mess I made while judging the citizens of Karnaca last time. I’m only supposed to kill people who the Heart tells me are guilty of wrongdoing, but a series of calamities en-route to the Clockwork Mansion resulted in multiple accidental deaths. I then stupidly took my frustration out on the Witches who brought merciless slaughter to the Royal Conservatory. There’s little doubt they deserved this, but my gratuitous actions have also sent my Chaos rating skyrocketing. 

I left the Conservatory ready to let Karnaca burn, as finding a good person in Serkonos is harder than finding a Malteaser in a cow pat. But I’ve since had a change of heart. If I end the game on High Chaos, then all my efforts to rid Karnaca of its most evil inhabitants will be rendered pointless. I need to start reducing my Chaos level, and fast. Trouble is, I said this last time and ended up killing more people than I did previously. So as Anton Sokolov ferries me to the Dust District, I make a decision. I’m not killing anyone today. I’ll still use the Heart to judge those I come across, but my blade is staying sheathed, no matter what they’ve done.

A different way

Instead, I’m going to focus on cleaning up the streets a different way. The Dust District is ground zero for a war between the Overseers and the Howlers. The Howlers are led by a man called Paolo, while the boss of the Overseers in this area is Vice Overseer Byrne. Either man will help me crack the Jindosh lock provided I eliminate the other and show them the corpse. But there’s a third way to get the code, one that also lets me neutralise both men without killing them. 

Pulling this off is tricky. First I must retrieve a key to the nearby Silvergraph studio from the office of a Howler named Durante. The Howlers are based out of a pub called the Crone’s Hand Saloon, so that’s my first stop. As I make my way there, the Heart decides to test my murder-abstinence by offering a few choice chumps. “He was afraid she’d tell the Overseers about his hobbies” the Heart whispers of one civilian sat on a bench. “He dragged her to a bloodfl y nest.” A little further on, I discover a man who blinded a cobbler with her own hobnails. Delightful. 

It’s tempting, very tempting. But I stick to my guns and move on. As if sensing my reluctance to get stabby, the Heart tries a different tactic. I sneak into the Crone’s Hand via an adjacent apartment condemned due to Bloodfly infestation. Inside, I discover a couple of Nest-Keepers, humans turned into thralls by the Bloodflies. I don’t know how human they still are, but I focus the Heart on them anyway. “They’ve taken over his body, his mind,” the Heart says. “Until he draws his last breath, they will control him.” 

Oh God. Must I ponder a mercy-killing now? Dishonored excels at making me feel bad about not- murdering people. No, I have to think about the bigger picture. I put both Keepers down with a sleep-dart, and enter the Crone’s Hand.

I’m beginning to think this is going to end in another rampage. I’m already fi nding it hard to stay my blade, and to make matters worse I’m now inside the den of the Howlers, one of the most depraved factions in the game. Yet as it turns out, things aren’t so simple amongst the locals of the Crone’s Hand.

“He brings flowers to her grave every day.”

Oh, that’s nice.

“No wine for this one, his coin goes to bread and cloth for that mother and her babe.”

That’s very nice.

“His mother taught him to hide trumps in his sleeves and other card cheats.”

Right, here we go.

“Yet he plays an honest game.”

Oh Heart, you tease!

Finding decent souls amongst the Howlers boosts my spirits, although sadly it doesn’t last long. I manage to sneak to Durante’s office, only to discover the door is locked. Turns out Durante got captured by the Overseers, and his key went with him. Great, so now I have to cross town, steal the key from the Overseers’ HQ, and then come back. This not-killing people lark is a right faff.

People in narrow alleys...

The Overseer HQ is a crumbling multi-storey tenement shored up with elaborate wooden-scaffolding. The key I need is in the Vice-Overseer’s office, right at the top. As I carefully sneak through the building, I set the Heart on any Overseers I pass. Nothing too egregious comes up, not that it would have mattered much.

In the end, I swipe the key unseen from Byrne’s office with four other Overseers in the room. I’d forgotten how satisfying Dishonored’s stealth play is, and I’m enjoying sneaking over rooftops and slipping through cracks once again. I return to the Crone’s Hand and grab the Silvergraph studio key. I also nab the code for the Jindosh lock, scrawled on a piece of paper on another desk. I then scoot across the rooftops to the studio. Inside are two coffin-like transport cases that a pair of now-dead miners planned to use to escape Serkonos. I’m going to put Paolo and Byrne in them instead. 

Paolo first, as he’s directly below me in the Crone’s Hand courtyard. I possess him, sneak him into a quiet corner, and choke him out. Instead of flopping to the ground however, he transforms into a swarm of rats. 

Damn it, I’d forgotten Paolo is protected by black magic. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the swarm scurries through the courtyard, alerting all the other Howlers. The result is a massive, multi-staged fight, as I gradually make my way up through the floors of the Crooked Hand, trying to fight off around a dozen Howlers without killing any of them. I achieve this with a combination of slow time, sleep-darts, and a whole lot of chokeholds, before finally knocking out Paolo a second time on the top floor of the building. 

This time he remains un-rat-ified, and I transport the body to the Silvergraph studio. 

Sorted. Byrne next. I head to the Overseer’s office, but this time by a different route. Earlier I noticed a gap in the brickwork near the Overseer’s HQ. Beyond it is an alley that leads to a back-entrance. I figure this will make for a slightly easier infiltration. 

I figure wrong. Turns out a couple of Overseer’s have booby-trapped the passage, and as I sneak up the path, I trigger one of said traps. The bolt misses, but the noise alerts the two Overseers at the top, and they spot me. I don’t want to get into another fight, so I race back down the path and slide through the gap in the brickwork. I figure they won’t follow me this way.

This time I figure right, although I wish I hadn’t. As I walk away from the Black Market, a massive explosion detonates behind me. I return through the gap in the brickworks to discover bits of Overseer everywhere. Seems there was a miscommunication in tactics between the Overseers. Only one chased me down the path, while the other decided to throw a grenade at me, which rolled down the hill and exploded at the feet of the first Overseer, blowing him to smithereens.

I mean come on! If I go to all this trouble to avoid killing you, the least you could do is avoid killing each other! You know what? I’m not taking the blame for this one. People in narrow alleys shouldn’t throw grenades. Simple as that.

In the end the shortcut proves little more helpful than going in the front, which given someone just died for it is intensely annoying.

Nonetheless I manage to slip past the Overseer security and quietly choke out Byrne. I exit through the window in Byrne’s office, and drop down onto the street below to deliver him to the Silvergraph studio.

Job done. Hopefully the Dust District will be a little better off without those two squabbling over territory. I make my way to the Jindosh Lock and enter the code, completing the level. My chaos level is still high, which is frustrating but unsurprising.

Fortunately, we’re not finished yet, and I have a plan that, with luck, will tip the balance.

Sealing the crack

Aramis Stilton’s manor is unlike any other location in Dishonored II. A strange ritual performed there has left a leak between the void and the real world, hence the mission’s official title A Crack in the Slab. This leak means my Outsider powers won’t work here. Fortunately in their place the Outsider has provided me with a Timepiece that lets me travel between the manor’s past and present. More importantly, actions performed in the past will have consequences for the manor’s present. 

I’m going to use this to save Aramis Stilton’s life. 

The mechanics of this are pretty straightforward, I just need to reach the manor’s back-garden in the past, and choke Stilton out in his gazebo, preventing him from attending the ritual and witnessing the horror that took place there—a horror which drove him mad. The process, however, is tricky. The house is a gigantic maze stretched across two timelines. Doorways blocked in the present are clear in the past, and vice-versa. The absence of my powers makes movement trickier, although I can avoid guards easily enough by escaping into the other timeline. 

Alongside the fact that I’m currently murder-averse, my journey through the manor is relatively low-key. The only truly notable event happens when I arrive in the back-garden and almost completely screw up saving Stilton. As I drop into the gazebo to choke him out, a pair of guards spot me, rushing over while I grab Stilton around the neck. One of them raises his sword to attack right through Stilton. I desperately back away as he swipes, and his blade misses Stilton’s stomach by a hair’s breadth. I put a sleep-dart in the guard, then hide Stilton amid the foliage before absconding to the present. 

It works. Years of grime and decay are instantly swept away from Stilton’s manor, replaced by gleaming marble polished by newly appeared servants. It isn’t merely Stilton’s home that has changed, either. As I complete my remaining tasks and head out into the Dust District, it too is revived. The buildings are no longer crumbling, and the miners are no longer hungry. “Maybe no one will even notice,” Corvo mutters. “But things have changed here for the better.” Seems all that not-killing people has paid off. But has it paid off for me? As I return to Sokolov in the skiff, I get my answer. Highlighted in bright green lettering, my Overall Chaos level now reads “LOW.” 

A big relief. But the job isn’t done yet. 

I’ve only just tipped the balance of Chaos in my favour, and there are still two missions to go. I’m going to be walking a tightrope for the final stretch of the game, but the Judge is back in action.

Part 4: The Judge returns to Dunwall, and makes his final ruling.

We’re approaching the endgame now. Two targets remain, Duke Luca Abele of Serkonos, and the Usurper herself, Delilah Copperspoon. Thanks to largely staying my blade last time, I managed to nudge my overall Chaos rating down to Low. This means I’m free to judge and, if needed, execute the citizens of Karnaca once again. I’m only just under the threshold, however, so I’ll need to be exacting in my final judgements, or else it might spell disaster for the whole Empire. 

Tonight, however, we bring down a duke. Abele is holed up in his Grand Palace, a sprawling modernist structure made of shards of white marble which vaguely resembles a dropped pavlova. Meagan drops me off in the nearby district, letting me visit the Black Market, and providing the opportunity for a little judgement along the way.

The safe house

I cross the main boulevard and head to a narrower street further up the hill. There’s a gaggle of guards patrolling down the far end, so I use my optical zoom to focus the Heart on them. The officer grew up as a street urchin and now wears his uniform proudly, which is nice for him, I guess. One of his subordinates is less pleasant, however. “He stole an entire case of potted whale meat on the way to the children’s home, a gift from the Empress.” 

What a prize git. I’m tempted, but this is only a middling moral outrage in Karnaca. I leave him be and instead decide to explore the nearby safe shop. This, incidentally, is a shop that sells safes, rather than a shop that is safe. Indeed it’s rather the opposite for the owner, as he’s currently being threatened by a guard. 

I’m deliberating how I feel about extortion when the guard makes the decision for me. “No one knows who started that fire,” he says, referring to another outlet of the store chain, with the unsubtle inference that he started it. 

“Our brother died in that fire,” the owner responds. 

Ding ding ding! We have a winner folks! 

I sneak up behind the guard and slit his throat. You’d think the owner would be thankful for me solving this problem for him. But for some reason the sight of a masked killer throws him into a panic, and he rushes out of the shop screaming for help. The two guards I spotted before rush in. I knock out the whale-meat thief, and use my new wind-blast power to knock the officer off his feet, giving him a kick to the temple as he attempts to stand.

As I depart, I notice that the meat thief is apparently also dead. My wind-blast must have slammed him into a wall, breaking something vital. Oh well, no point crying over spilled whale-meat. I move on.

I head to an apartment-block up the street. On the roof is a wind-turbine powering a wall-of-light which blocks the entrance to the Grand Palace. I disable this without the guards noticing, and then drop into a bloodfly-infested apartment below to grab a rune. As I burn the bloodfly- nests, a nest-keeper shambles into the room. I don’t have any sleep darts, so I use a howling bolt to temporarily blind him, and then grab him around the neck to knock him out. As I do this, however, the bloodflies descend, and sting their own nest-keeper to death.

Two things: 1) including previous runs, I’ve played this game for over 40 hours and it’s still finding ways to surprise me, and 2) fucking hell Dishonored! Is there no limit to how grim you can get? Given the guy was basically a zombie, technically it’s a mercy, although that doesn’t stop me from feeling more than a little sick.

Double jeopardy

I press on to the Grand Palace. Here the duke and his cronies live in a perpetual state of debauchery and depravity. I experience this first-hand when I find a group of aristocrats throwing knives at two servants strapped to giant targets. Both servants are quite clearly dead, while one of the nobles remarks, “What was it you said? That you could hit him in the head, or avoid hitting him in the head?” 

Absolute monsters. I slow time, rush in, and drop a springrazor in between them. I watch with a deep sense of satisfaction as they’re torn apart in slow motion. Good riddance. The aristos aren’t the only deeply repugnant individuals I discover lurking in the palace. In what appears to be the palace bar, a group of guards are playing cards, while another is asleep behind the bar. According to the Heart, the sleeping guard covered a baker in syrup and “let the rats do the rest”, (WTAF?!) while one of the players pushed a man from a roof and made it look like an accident. A crossbow bolt to the head silently deals with the sleeper. As for the card-player, I possess him, walk him out into a nearby bedroom, and shank him in the back. This alerts two noblewomen also in the room, but they’re quickly neutralised with a pair of sleep-darts. 

At this point, I move on to the duke himself. My instinct is just to kill him, only I’m mindful of my Chaos rating. Fortunately, there’s a subtler way of eliminating the duke. Abele employs a body-double. En-route to the palace, Meagan described the double as a “good man”, so perhaps we can arrange a smooth transition of power.

I locate the double in what appears to be a throne room. He’s guarded, but the guards are easily dealt with via a combination of possession and a really tight hug. The double agrees to my plan, stating, “I’ve spent years mimicking this asshole.” All he needs me to do is knock the duke out. I head to the real duke’s chambers and, after a little scuffle, do exactly that. The fake summons the guards, and tells them his body double went mad and tried to stage a coup. Abele is dragged off to Addermire kicking and screaming, compounding his fate with every protestation that he’s the real duke.

Our time at the palace is almost up. But there’s one, sad job left to do. Hidden in the duke’s secret vault is a statue of Delila that contains a piece of her soul, making her effectively invulnerable. Before I can kill Delilah, I need to put her soul back together. To do this, however, I need a vessel—the Heart. In other words, it’s time to say goodbye to the Judge’s most true and faithful sidekick. With Delilah’s soul corrupting it, the Heart can no longer tell me about the souls of others. When I depart Karnaca to make my final judgements, I’ll be making them alone.

Homecoming

We’re back where we started. Delilah’s short yet sharp reign has not been kind to Dunwall. The streets are abandoned, save for prowling Wolfhounds and members of the Hatter gang. I no longer have the Heart to guide me in who’s just and who isn’t, so it’s all down to my eyes and ears. Looking around, I’m not feeling especially merciful. I won’t kill anyone without clear evidence they deserve it, but if I’m attacked unprovoked, all bets are off. 

My journey to Dunwall Tower is largely uneventful. The only notable event occurs when I encounter a couple of Hatters chucking glass bottles across a courtyard. “Nothing to stop us tearing up the city!” yells one gleefully. Are you sure about that, pal? A blast from my pistol sends him sprawling into a barbed-wire fence, while I tranquillise his partner with a sleep-dart. 

As I approach the tower, the city increasingly resembles a warzone. The Overseers recently assaulted the tower, but only succeeded in giving it a bold new paint-job. Moments later, I discover why. The tower is overrun by clockwork soldiers and Delilah’s witches—the bane of my judging career. Most of Dishonored’s factions use violence to further their own ends, but none of them delight in it quite as much as Delilah’s coven. 

I’m feeling extremely stabby, but as I search for an entrance to the tower, I limit my violence to blasting the head off one witch who spots me approaching (not my specific intent, I would add). 

Inside, however, I discover the witches have been up to their old tricks. About a half-dozen of them are sat around a dining table shared with an equal number of corpses. The witches are eating, chatting, laughing—it’s a banquet of depravity. I can’t let this go unpunished, but witches are powerful foes, and there are a lot of them. So I decide to enlist some help. In an adjacent room is a patrolling clockwork soldier. I slow time and blink across to the soldier’s flank, quickly rewiring its circuitry so that it will fight on my side. Immediately, the clockwork clocks the witches in the next room, and marches through the door, arm-blades raised. 

What results is the most spectacular battle I’ve experienced in this entire play-through. A second clockwork soldier that I didn’t spot activates in the dining room, and rushes over to meet my clockwork bot. I don’t get to enjoy the duel, however, as I’m suddenly rushed from all sides by witches. I blast a couple with my pistol, but there are so many that I’m concerned about tipping the balance of Chaos if I kill them all.

Instead, I drop a stun-mine on the floor to knock a few unconscious, and mop up the rest with a combination of sword and crossbow.

Meanwhile, my clockwork soldier has made short work of his doppelganger, and is now carving his way through the last remaining witches. I leave the machine to it, and head to the security room to activate the power, before ascending the elevator to confront Delilah.

Unlike the duke, there’s no tangible benefit to keeping Delilah alive, and I’ve seen what her coven is capable of. It’s a long, tough fight that takes us to an entirely different dimension.

Eventually, however, I tackle her to the ground and put a sword through her heart.

It’s done. Delilah is dead, and Emily is restored to her throne. Now it’s all down to numbers. Eleven dead in Dunwall, most of them in the tower’s dining room. It’s high, but not high enough to undo the work I did last time around. Looks like I’ve squeaked through without ruining the Empire. Huzzah for the Judge! Huzzah!

Before we end, I want to briefly discuss the reason for playing Dishonored 2 in this manner. While it undoubtedly provides an interesting (and sometimes worrying) insight into your personal ethics, the reason I like playing Dishonored in this way is how it encourages you to explore the full extent of the game’s systems.

It’s not so much about choosing who deserves to live or die (although that can be fascinating in its own right). It’s more about how you approach solving each little puzzle the rule set then throws at you. How to slip between three innocent citizens to get to the guilty one. How to fight four guards while only killing two of them. It just makes you much more aware of how broad and deep Dishonored’s mechanics go, while keeping you present and focussed in every moment.

And that’s just with Corvo. Goodness knows how a Judge run plays out with Emily. Heck, maybe you can tell me. After all, Karnaca certainly isn’t short of rotten eggs that need cracking.

I am just on the cusp of diving into Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, so the arrival of a couple of free modes is rather timely. For the price of making a Bethesda.net account, you can get your hands on the new Black and White mode and Mission+ mode, along with the original pre-order bonus for Dishonored 2:  the Imperial Assassin’s Pack. They’re available for both Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider. 

Black and White mode, you’ll be shocked to learn, slaps a black and white filter over the world, aside from blood, which remains red. You can turn it on and off at any time. I chopped this poor man in half to demonstrate and feel pretty bad.

Mission+ gives you access to your full arsenal of weapons and fancy powers and unleashes you on missions you’ve already completed. So you can go all the way back to the start and cause some havoc.

If you don’t already have the Imperial Assassin’s Pack, you can it from your cabin in the Dreadful Wale. Here’s what you’ll get inside: 

• Duelist’s Luck bone charm
• Void Favor bone charm
• In-game Antique Serkonan Guitar for Emily or Corvo to interact with
• In-game book: Goodbye, Karnaca – A Musician’s Farewell 
• 500 bonus coins 

You can grab the lot now.

For a constantly updated list of our favorite games on PC, check out our list of the best PC games right now. 

Every year, the PC Gamer team embarks on an epic quest to choose the top 100 PC games. Where previously we voted for our favourite games, this year we talked: discussing each of our nominations and deciding which games should make the list. The result is a more honest, considered reflection of our conflicting tastes and opinions as PC gamers.

This list represents what we think are the greatest PC games you can play today. We wanted to celebrate the breadth and variety of PC gaming, and so, for the most part, have restricted ourselves to one game per series. You'll also find a selection of personal picks: games we individually love that didn't quite make the cut. Enjoy!

If you're looking for a list of the games that helped shape PC gaming as we know it, try the 50 most important PC games of all time.

100. Path of Exile

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Steven Messner: Path of Exile has quietly become one of the best action RPGs around thanks to its almost incomprehensible depth and wildly different seasonal leagues, where whole new systems are introduced. But the best part is its character customisation and spell crafting system. Path of Exile encourages players to make marauders who let spell totems do all the killing for them, witches who melt hordes with a fiery beam, or duelists that cover every inch of the map in a deadly rain of arrows.

99. Twisted Insurrection

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

John Strike: Tiberian Sun's best mod brazenly shames the original Firestorm expansion in almost every way. It’s bigger and bolder, offering new buildings, a whole fleet of new units and even a new faction. There’s a completely new musical score and dozens of single player missions, some of which are based on the original Command & Conquer. Not only are new missions and units still being added, but, as a standalone free download, it's the most accessible way to play one of C&C's greats.

98. Killing Floor 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 81

Evan Lahti: There are disturbingly few places in video games where I can cut an evil clown in half with a quad-barrelled shotgun. Killing Floor 2 is the world’s greatest gore effects system laid atop an enjoyable skeleton. Hordes of monsters trickle into the map, magnetized to your position, and you mulch them with buzzsaw-spitters, incendiary shotguns, rocket launchers, or a microwave cannon that heats enemies from the inside until they burst. The dynamic slow-mo system adds so much, dampening the chaos just enough—granting extra moments to take aim or take in the sight of an intestine flying across the screen. Tripwire is a skilled digital gunsmith, and the detail lent to particle effects and reload animations holds up wonderfully even under the scrutiny of these plentiful, slowed-down sequences. I also love that KF2 doesn’t simply make these mutants into bullet sponges. On higher difficulties, enemies adopt different behavioral triggers that make them genuinely harder to handle.

Wes Fenlon: The precision and teamwork it takes to play Killing Floor 2 at higher difficulties is especially thrilling. Also, I once played a community map that was monochrome purple and themed after Game Boy-era Pokémon. It was pretty bad, but I appreciated the option.

97. Night in the Woods

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Phil Savage: A coming-of-age platformer starring an anthropomorphic cat returning home to a dead-end town after dropping out of college. On paper, Night in the Woods sounds like it could be intolerable, but its relationships are so well developed—so warm and fraught and human—that it’s impossible not to get drawn into Mae's world, and to want the best for her and her friends. I particularly love the frequent use of minigames as a way to highlight the need to escape the monotony of day-to-day responsibility.

Andy Kelly: A beautiful, heartfelt story brought to life by flawed, nuanced characters who just happen to be talking animals. It says something about life, but always knows when to crack a joke—and always with perfect timing—when things get too heavy.

96. Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Philippa Warr: Deadly Premonition is always a gamble of a recommendation. It's a gamble worth taking, though, because if you get on with its strangeness and its idiosyncrasies, it rewards you with a weird and beautiful experience of a kind you don't often get in gaming. Yes, the cars handle horribly. Yes, the PC version has crashed on me extensively. Yes, it starts off more as an irritating pastiche of Twin Peaks. Yes, it has frustrating quicktime events. And yes, some reveals draw uncomfortably on lazy tropes. But within that is a supernatural-tinged mystery that alternates between survival horror third-person shooter and a horror comedy investigation. None of the game's shortcomings were dealbreakers for me and several of the characters I encountered as I hunted for the Raincoat Killer have stayed with me for the best part of a decade.

Wes: The jank may be part of the charm, but at least make sure you install Durante's DPFix, which lets you select resolutions above 720p and fixes many minor graphical issues—mitigating some of the PC port’s shortcomings.

95. Stick Shift

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Stick Shift is my go-to example of a game which invokes complex subject matter while also being really fun to play. As per developer Robert Yang's description: "Stick Shift is an autoerotic night-driving game about pleasuring a gay car." It's part of a trilogy alongside Hurt Me Plenty and Succulent, and together they explore aspects of eroticism, consent, arousal, politics and more. It's also a game where you move your mouse rhythmically, working your car to a climax.

94. Elite Dangerous

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

Phil: Frontier's galactic sandbox treads a fine line between excitement and tedium. Aliens! Dogfights! Smuggling! Interdictions! Ferrying pesticides to an outpost six lightyears away! However you decide to play, though—whatever amount of excitement you desire—Elite is still a masterfully crafted spaceship simulator. I love the design and feel of its ships, particularly the holographic UI and peerless sci-fi sound design. The thrill of warping to another solar system is never entirely diminished, meaning Elite remains entertaining even if you’ve chosen the life of a glorified space trucker.

Andy: Whether it's a chunky cargo hauler or a nimble fighter, every starship in Elite has its own distinct personality. They're all a delight to fly. Even the most mundane task feels wonderfully tactile.

93. Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Andy: While the original Ni no Kuni was co-designed by Spirited Away creator Studio Ghibli, it wasn't involved in this sequel. But developer Level-5 has done fine on its own, creating a rich fantasy world with a cast of vivid characters worthy of the Ghibli name. This is a sweeping JRPG about an usurped boy king on a quest to rebuild his kingdom and reclaim his throne. It's also one of the most colourful, vibrant games on PC.

Wes: The cutscenes are remarkably Ghibli and full of pep and puns, but what really made me fall for Ni No Kuni 2 is just how many systems it layers atop systems, like a big-budget JRPG of old. The sprawling kingdom builder is the centerpiece, with characters to recruit and buildings to construct and upgrade.

92. Mu Cartographer

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Mu Cartographer is initially obtuse. You'll probably feel utterly lost as to what you’re supposed to do for a while. But once you start tinkering with all the different buttons and dials on the interface you begin to see how to explore the strange map. The peaks and troughs of digital noise on your display suddenly turn into recognisable shapes as you tweak the settings and find the sweet spot. Stepped pyramids rise up where seconds ago all you could see was a fuzzy mess.

91. Guild Wars 2

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 86

Phil: Guild Wars 2 is full of clever quality-of-life features—it's still one of the few MMOs that's figured out how to let you easily play with friends of a different level. The flow and pace of its maps are a thing of beauty, too. Groups expand and contract naturally, as people wander off to explore on their own, before coming together for a small-scale event or organising to complete a single map-wide objective. You get all the joy of cooperation without the need to commit a significant amount of your time. Just turn up and play. Then, when you eventually get tired, go off and do something else. There's also no subscription, and none of the expansions have raised the level cap, so you're free to come and go as you please, playing at your own pace without ever worrying that you're falling behind. You can play for hours every week if you want—ticking off the hardest achievements and earning the rarest loot—but I'm happy to log back in every six months or so, safe in the knowledge that I'm ready for whatever's next.

Tom: I have fought huge dragon bosses and a marionette the size of a skyscraper, and I didn't need to grind for 200 hours for the privilege. Guild Wars 2 earnestly tries to reinvent the MMO by reshaping the bullshit grinding and levelling systems that had become rote in the genre.

90. Super Mega Baseball 2

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Wes: I'm about as bad at this surprisingly deep baseball game as I am at real baseball, but as a lapsed fan of America's pastime I appreciate how good this rendition is. It walks the line between a hyper-detailed sports sim and an arcadey NBA Jam-like, with simple controls but tons of nuance in pitching and hitting.

Chris Livingston: The customization is great, letting you change everything from player abilities to team logos, and its Pennant Race mode makes every online game feel important.

89. The Stanley Parable

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel Roberts: You start in an abandoned office with a narrator telling you what you're supposed to do next. If you obey his instructions it will lead you to an ending. But if you don't, you'll discover many more fascinating, exciting little stories.

Phil: An antagonistic dialogue between a man with no body and another with no voice. Weird, funny and full of ideas.

Pip: Games often struggle with comedy. The Stanley Parable manages to be consistently funny as well as whip smart.

88. Drawful 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Wes: A chill, surprisingly hilarious party game I can play for hours. Everyone joins in on a smartphone and gets a phrase to draw on the touchscreen, then writes their own descriptions of everyone else's drawing to trick the crowd or simply get the most laughs. It's like millennial Pictionary, so inevitably people draw a lot more dicks.

87. Nidhogg 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

James Davenport: The back-and-forth struggles of Nidhogg were already unpredictable, but bows, axes, swords, and daggers transform simple fencing standoffs into tense, sweaty battles for control. Nidhogg 2 is an excellent way to graft friends to the couch. 

Evan: A see-sawing melee mess. No PC game produces more smile-yelling than Nidhogg 2.

86. Stephen's Sausage Roll

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Stephen's Sausage Roll and I are on a break. I can't remember exactly why, but I know that I definitely rage-quit the sausage-grilling puzzler a while ago and haven't become sufficiently not angry to go back. That isn't a criticism, though; this is the puzzle game I recommend to the friends who want a real challenge.

Phil: I managed one level.

85. Battletech

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan: It's turn-based MMA with walking tanks. Unlike XCOM 2, the durability and modular design of mechs makes for drawn out, back-and-forth exchanges that become micro-stories of attrition and mettle. You trade blows with an Atlas, weave and evade it, it cleaves off one of your body segments, you circle around, knock it down and KO it with a face stomp. I love BattleTech's degrees of failure. You might complete all objectives but lose your rare, damage-boosted PPC, put a pilot in a two-month coma, or have to spend every nickel you just earned fixing up your battered Highlander. The campaign wrapped around BattleTech's granular combat is a bottomless well of procedurally generated missions with a heartwarming story of underdog regal revenge at its nucleus.

84. Football Manager 2018

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Joe Donnelly: Following some less comprehensive annual instalments, Football Manager 2018 gives us the most sophisticated soccer management simulation yet, where success is no longer determined by match performance alone. Piss off the wrong combination of players, and you'll risk a dressing room revolt. Suck up to the most popular, and you'll isolate your fringe stars. You need to balance influence and social standings to prevent the beautiful game from turning ugly.

83. Thumper

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 34

Pip: I don't think many people can consciously identify a 'fast-moving rhythm action space beetle combat game with a heady metal album aesthetic' void in their lives. But it exists and Thumper can fix it.

Phil: The dark, grungy synths and unusual time signatures create a fascinatingly ominous soundscape that draws you into the claustrophobic, reactive action. Thumper offers a mesmerising blend of palpable dread and empowering mastery—at least it did for me until the later levels, which required a degree of dexterity I'm not sure I possess.

James: That scarab scrapes down the interdimensional highway at the centre of Thumper with so much speed and ferocity that the game almost literally breaks apart by the end. Nod your head to dull the pain. 

82. Euro Truck Simulator 2

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 89

Andy: The problem with simulators is that they're often badly designed, technically janky or both. But Euro Truck Simulator 2 is neither of these things. This is a deep, polished, and immensely playable driving game set in a vast, mostly accurate replica of Europe. You can drive seamlessly between countries, and there's an understated beauty to the scenery that passes you by. It's also incredibly atmospheric, especially at night or in the rain. There's no better game to play while listening to music or catching up on podcasts, and it's deeply customisable too, meaning you can make each road trip as realistic or accessible as you like, depending on how deep you want the simulation to be.

Phil: In many ways I prefer American Truck Simulator. That's not because I love weigh stations—they're fine, if that's your thing—but because America's vast, terrifying emptiness feels more isolated, more epic, and, dare I say, more romantic. Euro Truck Simulator 2, on the other hand, is dense and busy, but also muted—it's altogether greyer and more moodily atmospheric. Both games are fantastic, and which one you prefer is likely a matter of which style of road trip speaks more to your personality. How many simulation games can you say that of?

81. FTL: Faster Than Light 

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 21

Samuel: It turns out being the captain of your own spaceship is stressful as hell, but you'll take part in some great stories along the way. FTL is a superior mix of roguelike and strategy. While Into The Breach is taking its place in my life, this is still one of the best space-set games around. 

Wes: It can make for a great party game, too. Put someone in the driver's seat and let the crowd make choices. Suddenly half your ship is on fire and you've accidentally vented one of your crew into space.

80. Stalker: Call of Pripyat

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 41

Chris: This grim and unforgiving open world FPS never turns you into an invincible superhero. No matter how much gear and weaponry you scrounge from the irradiated exclusion zone, you're still mortal and fragile, alone in a terrifying world of mutants, monsters, and roaming factions of AI-controlled humans. This lends Stalker an unending tension and fills every encounter with dread. From start to finish, there's a sense that at any moment you could meet your unceremonious end.

79. Doom 2

RELEASED 1994 | LAST POSITION 76

Wes: People are making mods and maps for this game like it was released a year ago. That's awesome. But what really strikes me about Doom 2 is how fun it still is, and how different it feels from decades more advanced shooters. There's a purity in how it moves, how it sounds and the minimum frames of animation it takes to sell firing the super shotgun.

78. Grim Fandango Remastered

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 96

Pip: Twenty years after its initial release it's still a real pleasure to revisit the film noir world of Manny Calavera, travel agent of the afterlife. Nowadays I play purely for the story so I keep online hints at hand for when progress stalls.

Tom Senior: Shout out here to Glottis, the giant orange demon who's too big and happy to quite fit into the world he’s in.

77. Warhammer: Vermintide 2

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: There's a long tail to Vermintide 2 if you're willing to stick with this four-player Left 4 Dead-alike set in the Warhammer universe. It looks prettier than the first game, offers more in-depth character progression, and has much better combat.

Phil: It feels really good to stab up a rat, and if that's not worth a spot on this list, I'd love to know what is.

76. Oxenfree

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: This spooky adventure game has a group of young friends inadvertently unlock a supernatural force on a haunted island. The relationships and various tensions between all the characters feel very real, and the dialogue is funny and poignant. These characters feel like they could've been people I went to school with.

Phil: The snappy, fun dialogue makes Oxenfree feel more theatrical than realistic, but that fits perfectly with the eerie mystery and interpersonal drama.

75. Regency Solitaire

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: I added Grey Alien's card-game-slash-Regency-romance to our Top 100 discussion list, then reinstalled the game and spent three hours of the Top 100 discussion playing this in the background. I'm fighting the urge to play it again now instead of finishing this incredibly short paragraph about why it's good. The solitaire aspect is really strong, it's super easy to play just one more round, and the story is light but charming. Are we done? Can I boot it up again?

74. Metro: Last Light Redux

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 95

Tom: Not many shooters have you frantically pumping up a pneumatic gun before you can fire it, but that’s Metro for you. These ramshackle weapons carry you through a filthy, atmospheric corridor shooter set in the depths of the Moscow undercity. The tunnels hide mutant creatures and nests of horrible spidery things, but the most dangerous enemies are the human clans trying to scrape out a living in the post-apocalypse.

Samuel: A beautiful and grim FPS that's refreshingly bleak for a modern triple-A game. The world building in Metro: Last Light is dazzling to me—the little snapshots of human civilisation that show how there are children in these underground settlements who never knew the world before it got into this bleak, decrepit state. And the story features some unforgettable moments, such as an early flashback that shows—from the perspective of the pilots—how a passenger plane was destroyed in the nuclear blast. It's a chilling world that's hard work just to exist in, but I love that it's a post-apocalyptic setting that doesn’t succumb to the desire to over-stylise anything. It commits to showing the horrors of what a nuclear war would do to the modern world, and I'd recommend it to absolutely anyone.

73. Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 40

Steven: Square Enix's from-the-ashes MMO enjoyed another stellar year following the release of Stormblood, a revolution-themed expansion that whisks players across the sea to Eastern-inspired worlds that add much richness to an already great story. Though its endgame has become a predictable grind at this point, Final Fantasy 14 is still able to keep things exciting thanks to the steady pace of new bosses, dungeons, and raids to clear. Each one is just as memorable as the last thanks to a stunning soundtrack and beautiful world design.

72. The Norwood Suite 

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Cosmo D's first-person jazz hotel exploration has you poking around a converted mansion and uncovering the secrets of its former owner, celebrated pianist, Peter Norwood. Musicality shapes the whole experience, warping the space and affecting the denizens. As you dig around you'll also discover the game's sense of humour via visual gags and surreal chats with guests and visitors. For a related experience you should also check out the developer’s free game, Off-Peak.

71. Mount & Blade: Warband

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan: Mount & Blade: Warband is what we so often clamour for: an RPG where you're not an intergalactic savior or chosen one, but just some dude leading a small army on a sprawling, simulated map filled with other dudes leading other armies. It's sandbox in the truest sense, and the feeling of loosing an arrow into a line of galloping cavalry still holds up.

Phil: You start with nothing: left for dead in a town with few weapons, no supplies and barely any gold. From such inauspicious beginnings, you're free to do just about anything. Hunt bandits, befriend lords, rob pretty much anyone. Or, if you don't fancy leading hundreds of soldiers, just go fight for prestige in the arena. We've been waiting years for Mount & Blade 2, but Warband still has much to offer.

70. StarCraft 2

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

Andy: Across its three campaigns, StarCraft 2 boasts some of the best, most cinematic single-player RTS missions on PC. New challenges are constantly being thrown at you, forcing you to try new units and tactics, and the story isn't bad either. When you're done with all that, you can take your newfound skills online, which still has a huge and dedicated following. There's a bottomless pit of tips, tutorials, and strategies online, meaning new players have a decent chance of catching up.

69. Galactic Civilizations 2

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: Maybe a game like Stellaris will knock this classic spacebound 4X strategy game out of the Top 100, but not this year. It's hard to beat a game that's so smart and complete, and that can generate so much strategic intrigue with every campaign. The AI is so cunning that former PC Gamer staffer-turned-developer Tom Francis once wrote an entire book about one of his attempts to thwart it. Singleplayer games don't get much deeper than this.

68. Prison Architect

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Chris: There's an engrossing amount of depth to the management simulation of Prison Architect, where building a workshop for inmates to make license plates doesn't mean they'll just walk in and begin working. First they'll need training, which requires classrooms, which require instructors, who require work and class schedules and their own facilities. Oh, and metal detectors to make sure the inmates don't smuggle out tools to use as weapons against guards or other inmates, or to tunnel under the walls of your prison. It's not easy building and managing a small city where most of the population is plotting escape.

Andy: I love it when things go to shit in management sims, and Prison Architect is enormously fun to watch (and manage) when disaster inevitably strikes. A streak of black comedy runs through the game, and there's something darkly hilarious about a riot erupting—these cartoonish little characters shivving each other, starting fires and beating up guards. Something as simple as a fight in the canteen can be the flashpoint for a full-scale riot, and trying to suppress it safely and quickly is a real test of skill. But that doesn't mean you can't have some fun observing the chaos before rolling your sleeves up and stepping in to deal with it.

67. Ori and the Blind Forest

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 62

Pip: An adorable Ghibli-esque aesthetic—particularly the opening cutscene—gives way to a rock hard Metroidvania platformer. Your eyes are as likely to tear up with emotion as they are with absolute fury if you fail a boss one too many times. 

Tom: It looks like sugar but tastes like salt. Ori is not the moonlit animal paradise it appears to be at first glance. It’s a game about loss, revenge, and bastard-hard jumping challenges. The art is absolutely gorgeous. It's a hazy, dreamlike world of artfully twisted overgrowth and spike pits. The movement is so quick, precise and responsive I just want to squeeze it, even as it stabs me repeatedly in the heart. Approach with caution and keep some hankies and a swear jar within reach.

66. Frostpunk

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Chris: A survival and crisis management sim about building and sustaining city in a frozen world. In addition to providing food, warmth, and shelter to your citizens, you have to provide them something much trickier: hope for the future. That's immensely difficult when people are starving, freezing, and working themselves to death under your direction, and the choices you face are grim ones that never leave you feeling like a hero, even when things work out. Frostpunk is a game that asks two questions: 'How far are you willing to go to save lives?' And, 'No, really, how far are you willing to go?' It's a masterful exploration of the burden of leadership, the true costs of survival, and the balancing act between guiding your citizens and controlling them.

65. Diablo 3

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 30

Tom: 'Maybe I should start another Crusader run': seven words that could take up 60 hours of my life. Diablo 3 is still a stellar action RPG that has only become more generous year on year after its unsteady and controversial launch. The necromancer is a fantastic addition that calls back to Diablo 2 without nostalgically retreading the same ground. If you want to smash up thousands of monsters for gold and loot, there aren't many games that do it as well as Diablo 3.

64. Bayonetta

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 32

Samuel: A superb hack-and-slash game that rewards mastery with feeling like a badass. It's pretty much the first place I'd send anyone new to this genre of game that has its modern roots in Capcom's Devil May Cry series. This, from that game's creator, is funny, stylish and satisfying to learn. Its sequel, which Nintendo published, doesn't come close to matching the original. The range of weapons here fits together perfectly.

Phil: The fast-paced combat is yet to be bettered, and the world and story are equal parts stylish and absurd.

63. Crypt of the Necrodancer

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: The rhythm combat in this game is so polished that I love it even when it's at its most stressful. You have to move on every beat or risk losing your cash multiplier, which means there's no downtime to plan your next move. Is a multiplier all that important, you ask? "Oh," I reply, "Only if you want to keep being able to afford new items at the shop where the amazingly catchy soundtrack is suddenly given an EVEN MORE AMAZING operatic flavour thanks to a singing shopkeeper called Freddie Merchantry."

Wes: This would be a great roguelike in its own right, but it's almost unfair how cleverly the musical element is threaded through exploration and combat. Try dungeon dancing to your own music for a new challenge.

62. Sunless Sea

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 75

Pip: I bounced off Sunless Sea so hard when it first came out—I remember clunky combat and irritating resource grind as core objections. Returning to the game with the Zubmariner DLC I found myself well and truly suckered in—devoting hours to pottering away in the Unterzee, drinking in Failbetter's expert prose and luxuriating in the art style. Sunless Skies is shaping up to be another step forward so I'm singing Sunless Sea's praises now, lest seas be eclipsed by skies in the near future!

61. Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 48

Tom: Baldur's Gate 2 is still a magnificent achievement. Few RPGs since have been as broad, deep or fully featured as this sprawling classic. Pillars of Eternity and other games are steadily bringing the classic RPG back to prominence, but Baldur's Gate 2 is still very much worth playing today, and is still one of the most faithful videogame interpretations of D&D's Forgotten Realms setting. It's a great party RPG too. Few modern games would be brave enough to implement a morality system that causes party members to fall out with you and leave the party—the closest you might get is Wrex's rebellion in Mass Effect. While we all remember Minsc and his space hamster companion Boo, the roster went much deeper and accurately reflected the spread of D&D classes, from lawful good paladins to chaotic neutral thieves.

Phil: After the slightly too long tutorial dungeon, Baldur's Gate II hits the ground running, setting you loose in the massive city of Athkatla to earn money to fund the next leg of your journey. It’s a great way to encourage you to explore the city, seeking out its stories and adventures.

60. Fez

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 67

Phil: A vast, beautiful mystery that's equal parts intriguing and relaxing, Fez is a puzzle-platformer that forgoes enemies and peril, instead offering a pleasant adventure about a strange world full of questions to answer. At its most basic, you rotate between four 2D planes, shifting the world in order to create a path to the next door. But over the course of the game, you'll solve riddles, uncover secrets, and even decode languages. Fez is a tantalising puzzle box just waiting to be unlocked.

59. 80 Days

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 37

Samuel: Take a journey around a steampunk-infused world as Passepartout, Phileas Fogg's indispensable assistant. Then, whether you succeed or fail, take the journey again and again, and see all the places and stories you missed the first time around. 80 Days is almost entirely dependent on great writing and little bits of art, and it's enough to bring the entire world to life. While it feels made for mobile, you should definitely pick it up on desktop if you've never played it. 

58. Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: This feels like the most PC-friendly Final Fantasy to me. Like the rest of the games in the series, it's a beautiful big RPG with a cast of characters that span from annoying (Vaan) to awesome (Balthier). This entry is the only one with the excellent gambit tactics system, which lets you program your party's AI to blitz dungeons and bosses with satisfying efficiency.

Samuel: You can fast-forward this version of the game, too, giving the combat the pace and catharsis it desperately needed back when it came out on PS2. 

57. Hexcells Infinite

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: This is the third game in Matthew Brown's hex-grid logic puzzler series, and it's the best of the bunch. The 'infinite' part of the title refers to the fact that it can generate infinite puzzles if you want to keep playing. But the real joy, and the reason I keep replaying it, is the set which Brown has hand-crafted. Absolute puzzle bliss.

56. Homeworld Remastered Collection

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: The saddest spaceships in games must travel the galaxy looking for a new home in Relic's classic RTS. If you love brain-scrambling 3D battles then this is the only strategy game that really delivers. Deserts of Kharak is excellent too, but I'd sooner play a game bold enough to deploy Adagio for Strings in a scrap.

55. Dota 2

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 54

Pip: I have spent north of 2,000 hours in this game. You do not need to know how much money I have spent in this game. But that investment, both temporal and financial, was because this MOBA continued to reward me. There's a rich esports scene, a daft and creative community, the ability for friendships to blossom and for groups of players to cross pollinate as friends of friends move in and out of your teammate invite list. I only stop by occasionally now, but Valve continues to offer interesting updates. Turbo mode is my favourite addition in recent times, not least because it affords newbies a space where they can try characters out without as much pressure as a normal match.

54. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 25

Samuel: It's a phenomenon I'd recommend trying to anyone who plays on PC, even if they bounce off it. That tension of landing in this world and seeing what plays out is an experience everyone should have. Evan put it best last year, so allow me to repeat it here: "it compresses the time and space that survival games like DayZ give you, forcing you into contact with other players and out of your comfort zone."

Andy: I play PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds as a stealth game, moving carefully between cover, keeping out of sight, biding my time. But the thrill here is that the 'guards' are real people, which makes sneaking under their noses even more exhilarating.

53. Deus Ex

RELEASED 2000 | LAST POSITION 23

Tom: This one has slipped down the list this year, largely because in recent times we've seen developers pick up the immersive sim baton and run with it—see entry number two in this list for the results. Deus Ex is still a classic, though. Even though the visuals, UI, dialogue and sound design seem more creaky each year, the scope for experimentation and emergent player-authored action is still impressive. 

Phil: It's creaky for sure, but Deus Ex's freedom still feels remarkable, as does its level of respect for the player. Most games feel compelled to clearly flag when you’re about to make a narrative choice that might have a consequence. But Deus Ex thrusts you into a paranoid world where everyone has an agenda and every command should be questioned.

52. Fallout 4

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: I'd recommend all of the modern Fallout games to someone who’s never played them for various reasons, and this, in essence, represents that entire era of the series on our list (we were very close to including the original Fallout, too, but ultimately stuck with our one per series rule). New Vegas is the best for reactive storytelling, Fallout 3 has my favourite side quests, and Fallout 4 feels the most refined when it comes to combat, presentation and world design. Even if the choices towards the end didn't produce outcomes I was happy with, I loved journeying around that world with Nick Valentine and Piper. And taking on the role of pulp-style hero The Silver Shroud represents my favourite superhero experience in any game. 

Evan: There's nothing quite like Fallout's setting. Its cynical, post-apocalyptic, Atomic Age sci-fi is dripping with black humour and absurdity. I'm grateful that something so esoteric continues to get the big-budget treatment.

Phil: We're big fans of immersive sims at PC Gamer, and yet I love Bethesda's RPGs for being practically the opposite. Fallout 4 lets you be a silent stealth killer who wears a giant suit of power armour—not because it makes sense within the world, but because it makes sense within the underlying systems. It's an anti-immersive sim, offering satisfying freedom in how you build your wasteland wanderer.  

51. Stardew Valley

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 22

Andy: A miserable office worker inherits a farm and starts a new life in the idyllic Stardew Valley. This Harvest Moon-inspired farming sim is pleasantly freeform and lets you live the way you want to, whether that's just lazily growing a few crops here and there, or starting a ruthlessly efficient mayonnaise empire.

Bo: Stardew Valley is everything I ever wanted out of Harvest Moon, but unchained from Nintendo's puritanical approach to content.

50. EVE Online

RELEASED 2003 | LAST POSITION 44

Tom: It's obtuse, and it takes a lot of time and effort to become properly mixed up in the corporations that drive EVE Online's greatest dramas, but I have taken a lot of pleasure in hopping into a vessel and mining for a few hours, quietly turning in a small profit and enjoying the vibe of EVE's cosmos. It looks beautiful stretched across two monitors, and if I do find myself yearning for the grand stories of war and betrayal, I can always read about them later in PC Gamer.

49. BioShock

RELEASED 2007 | LAST POSITION 17

Samuel: While as a shooter it's far from best-in-class these days, exploring the different parts of this underwater world and learning its story is an experience no other game has matched for me.

Andy: Rapture is still one of the most atmospheric settings on PC, letting you explore a bizarre, broken society in a state of fascinating decay.

48. Warframe

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Steven: Digital Extremes' cooperative loot shooter quietly became one of the best free-to-play games and people are only just now catching on. In the years since its rocky release, Warframe has grown into a deeply satisfying and complex online game with thousands of hours worth of quests to complete and gear to farm.

47. Darkest Dungeon

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 83

Evan: Even as DLC has made it a bigger experience, I continue to value Darkest Dungeon's focus. It's an intimidating game for all the right reasons: difficulty, uncertainty, risk and reward. The audio and combat camera effects deserve an award for how they make fights between illustrated paper characters feel like Eldritch kung fu.

46. Opus Magnum

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tyler: Solving an Opus Magnum puzzle isn't satisfying the first time. You build an alchemy machine with tracks, rotating arms and flowchart instructions—producing gold from lead, for instance. Your sloppy contraption may look beautiful in motion, but how could you move on to the next challenge when your friend solved the same problem more elegantly? That quest for perfection is deviously engrossing. Few puzzle games feel so good to finally master.

45. Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 60

Andy: The Enhanced Edition of Torment is currently the best way to play this supremely weird RPG on modern PCs. You play as an immortal being with amnesia, trying to piece his past together. The writing is the star here, bringing Dungeons & Dragons' Planescape setting to life in exquisite, wordy detail. Think of any RPG convention and Torment will subvert or twist it in some fascinating way, and the characters who join your party along the way are truly strange.

44. Civilization 5

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tyler: I vacillate between them, but even though I like Civ 6's city districts, Civilization 5 with all the expansions is still the evening destroyer I'd recommend. I wish the series would reexamine its assumptions about the world and make more radical changes in the future, but for now, Civ 5 is still the standard bearer for turn-based empire building: complex enough not to become too rote, but accessible enough for just about anyone who enjoys rewriting history.

Evan: I prefer Civ 6—it's shallow, but I need my 1440p boardgames to look as pretty as possible, and the expressive, animated leaders of Civ 6 add a lot. But the fact that there's still a debate between the two is an endorsement of Firaxis' approach to putting meaningful new spins on one of PC gaming's longest-standing, most celebrated genres.

Andy: In all the time I've played Civ 5, I've never actually won a game. And so it's a testament to just how compelling and accessible its strategy is that I keep coming back, trying new tactics and shaping my civilisation in new and interesting ways. It's the journey—taking my people from humble beginnings to advanced empires—that I really enjoy. The destination ultimately isn't that important.

43. Invisible, Inc.

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 50

Tom: This turn-based tactics game has you controlling a squad of superspies in missions to knock out guards and steal data before the alarms detect you. I love Klei's angular art, and it's miraculous that the team were able to build such a tight and nuanced tactics game with procedurally generated offices. As with Into the Breach, Invisible, Inc. gives you tons of information about what's going on with enemies. You can see their sight lines clearly and judge their intentions. Your main decisions come down to your use of power points to hack systems. You can disable alarms or unlock doors to access tantalisingly placed upgrade terminals. Do you grab your objective and flee before security arrives, or take a gamble for an upgrade that might make future missions a lot easier?

42. Overcooked

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 77

Evan: Pure co-op calamity with a deceptively cheerful art style. You will never yell "I need lettuce!" with more anger and urgency. 

Samuel: So enjoyable to pick up, then appallingly difficult to master as you chase those three star ratings. If only I could take it less seriously—me and my partner had to stop playing because I was treating it like a part-time kitchen job. "Plates, plates, PLATES!"

Phil: It's like if the TV show Hell's Kitchen was a game—swearing and all.

41. Super Hexagon

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION New entry

Jody Macgregor: Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV fame's twitchiest game, Super Hexagon makes you a triangle trapped in pulsing, multicoloured hexagons, dodging through gaps in spinning walls at high speed. It's the definition of easy to learn and bloody impossible to master. I used to think hexagons were fine. Perfectly respectable shapes. Maybe not as fun as parallelograms, which are basically drunk rectangles, but pretty good overall. Now I've played Super Hexagon I hate them. They give me a rash. Terrible shapes. To hell with hexagons.

Phil: Before writing this paragraph I fired up Super Hexagon for the first time in five years, and after only a few tries I was already pushing up near my best times. This is the kind of game that sears itself into your subconscious; burrowing deep down into your muscle memory just waiting for you to return. As a shortform arcade game it's practically perfect—a pulsating, rotating, constantly shifting assault of shapes and sounds with an instant restart that has you back in the action before the voiceover can finish saying "game over".

40. Mass Effect 2

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 7

Samuel: The facial animations really date BioWare games, but Mass Effect 2 is still the best at showing darker, more interesting sides to its dense sci-fi universe. Plus it still has my favourite party of characters from a modern BioWare RPG. Maybe it's time for another trilogy replay.

Andy: The greatest ensemble cast in RPG history. The idea of recruiting the galaxy's most notorious warriors and criminals is a brilliant excuse to gather up a motley crew of weird, flawed, interesting people, and I cared about all of them.

39. Hearthstone

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 45

Tim: Hearthstone is in a funny spot. It's as gigantic as it's ever been, but with the departure of game director Ben Brode and the looming threat of Valve's Artifact, now would be a good time for Blizzard’s CCG to shake things up a little. The arrival of a tournament mode later this year may do that, but despite an atypically diverse meta, I've felt my desire to grind the ladder wane. Regardless, for now Hearthstone remains peerless in terms of the quality and polish of the experience.

38. Grand Theft Auto 5

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 12

Andy: GTA 5 is one of the most lavish singleplayer experiences you can have on PC, with impeccable production values, superb mission variety, and a wonderfully vibrant city. It's massive, but I've finished it three times—that's how much I love being in Los Santos. For me, Michael is Rockstar's best protagonist: a weary, slightly pathetic crook past his prime trying to make it in a world that’s left him behind.

Samuel: I change my mind about GTA Online every few months, but the fidelity of the world is unbeaten. I adore the original heists, and I've had a lot of fun playing the game with other people. I've seen those streets so many times now, though, and am desperate to play whatever comes next in the series. Or, you know, they could bring Red Dead to PC.

Phil: Whatever you think about GTA Online (relationship status: it's complicated), that first set of multiplayer heists are among the best co-op experiences you can have on PC. The way they divide your team of four into smaller groups, each performing a specific task that slowly draws everyone together for a single, action packed finale is—when you successfully pull it off—tense, exciting and memorable.

Joe: GTA Online is a shop window, and few games let you observe other players' wares with such impact. Seeing that new car, aircraft or chopper hurtling towards you makes you want it—which makes grinding to get it less of a chore.

37. Company of Heroes 

RELEASED 2006 | LAST POSITION 56

Tom: It's Relic's best game and frankly still one of the best real-time strategy games ever made. Jumping into a skirmish against the AI, it holds up today as well as it did at launch, which is a testament to the quality of the art and sound direction, and the success of Relic's squad-based take on unit control. The expansions are decent, but I still relish the purity of Company of Heroes' asymmetrical core matchup. The US has a slight numbers advantage in the early infantry stages of a battle but the Axis forces can bring halftracks to the mid-game and elite tanks into the endgame. A few games have tried to imitate Company of Heroes over the years, but none have really come close.

36. Half-Life 2

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION 11

Andy: Gordon Freeman awakes from stasis to find Earth transformed into a dystopian hellscape by an invading alien force. Valve's influential FPS is still fantastic, particularly its eerie, understated atmosphere. The Combine are genuinely unnerving antagonists, but they didn't anticipate going up against a mute physicist who can yank radiators off the wall and launch them at high speeds.

Chris: A linear FPS but one that makes you feel as if you're finding your own path through it, rather than being shoved along rails by the developers. And the gravity gun is still the most enjoyable multitool in games: perfect for solving physics puzzles, playing catch with Dog, using a metal door as a shield, or flinging a toilet into a Metrocop's head.

35. Devil Daggers

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Jody: FPS design often copies the Halo idea of a single, repeatable loop of fun, but Devil Daggers really boils it down. Here the loop is backpedalling in an arc while shooting daggers at nearby enemies, clearing enough room to aim at the weak spot of a distant, tougher enemy, then spinning around to take out the skull-face jerk sneaking up behind you. It's just you and infinite bastards to shoot. Perfect.

Evan: If you die and don't go to heaven or hell, you play Devil Daggers until you win.

34. Forza Horizon 3

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 29

Phil: A gloriously silly arcade playground that takes the Forza Motorsport series' deep love of cars and customisation and transports it into a vibrant, luscious world full of ridiculous races and entertaining off-road mayhem. Forza Horizon 3's best feature is the skill chain system, which transforms an otherwise basic drive between events into a challenge to string together stunts without crashing.

Andy: Driving pretend cars doesn't get any better than the Forza series, and Horizon brilliantly softens the simulation while still maintaining a feeling of weight and realism.

Evan: All racers should be set in Australia.

33. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION 26

Andy: Skyrim remains one of the most evocative settings on PC. It's not as big as some game worlds, but the varied biomes—from the bubbling hot springs of Eastmarch to the snow-battered coastline of Winterhold—make it feel much bigger than it is. The role-playing is shallow and the writing isn't great, but the sense of place and feeling of freedom make up for it. Picking a direction, going for a wander, and seeing what you'll find out there among the snow and ice is The Elder Scrolls at its most captivating.

Chris: You can finish (or completely ignore) the main story and still have a couple hundred hours of self-guided fun—especially by adding mods to the mix. Skyrim gives you a special kind of freedom seen in few RPGs.

32. Proteus

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: If this was Pip's Top 100 Proteus would be in the number one spot. It's a contemplative experience where you wander a procedurally generated island, delighting in what you find. I often find myself drifting back to it in moments of stress, treating myself to a short digital holiday. One time I forgot I'd tweaked the game files and accidentally turned everything red, so that was a surprise. Seas of blood. But if you don’t make seas of blood it's gloriously restful!

31. Crusader Kings 2

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 52

Phil: Crusader Kings 2 isn't just a grand strategy about medieval kingdoms. It's a grand strategy about the people in charge of those kingdoms. You're not the abstract concept of the country of France; you're the King of France, a 60-year-old man who, after a protracted battle against the rebellious Duke of Burgundy, is now on his deathbed, about to leave the fate of his dynasty to an idiot son. You're not the ever-expanding territory of the Holy Roman Empire; you're an increasingly deranged emperor who people think has been possessed by the devil. By generating stories about people, Crusader Kings II is an endlessly fascinating soap opera that's different every time. In my last campaign, I didn't even play. I used the command console to simply observe the action, watching as an epic period drama played out across the map.

Chris: What's most interesting is how your relationships change when you die and continue playing as your heir. Those three children you had don't seem so wonderful once you've assumed the role of the eldest. The other two, while devoted to their father, now hate you and may plot against you. Your entire view of the world changes regularly, not just because the players change but because you yourself do, by dying and playing as someone new.

30. Portal 2

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION 5

Chris: It should have been impossible to top the near-perfect Portal in comedy, storytelling, and physics-bending first-person puzzles, but Portal 2 somehow manages it, and even throws in some fantastic multiplayer on top. 

Andy: Portal 2 brings a funny and sometimes disarmingly poignant story to its mind-bending puzzles, and the results are exceptional. Your journey through the various eras of Aperture Science make the game a constant delight.

29. World of Warcraft

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION 59

Andy: Blizzard's long-running MMORPG simply refuses to die, and in fact seems to be getting better with every expansion. The most recent, 2016's Legion, brought in a swathe of quality-of-life improvements and some of the best questing in World of Warcraft's nearly 14-year history, making it worth playing all over again. It's still pretty grindy, especially compared to the more streamlined Guild Wars 2, but there are few online worlds this rich and storied to spend time in.

Don't miss Steven's Battle For Azeroth review for some more recent WoW words.

28. Undertale

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 61

Tyler: Undertale subverts RPG cliches with constant self-reference, but unlike many 'parody games', it's not cynical or derivative. It plays on expectations without succumbing to them, with characters we’d love even without the metacommentary on game design, fandom, and authorship. Undertale is a great RPG even if you don't get every reference.

27. Fortnite Battle Royale

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

James: Fortnite's battle royale mode started as a weak PUBG imitation, but an unprecedented update cycle has made it not just the best battle royale game, but one of the most fascinating games in development today. With map changes, new items, and one-off world events almost every week, Fortnite is endlessly entertaining to live in.

26. League of Legends

RELEASED 2009 | LAST POSITION New entry

Wes: Regular changes to the meta have kept League alive and on top for years. It’s still the best entry point for the MOBA genre.

Pip: I favour ARAM—a five-vs-five battle where randomly assigned characters let spells and punches fly across a single lane. I visit the pressure of the three lane Summoner’s Rift from a safe distance—as an esports spectator.

25. Cities: Skylines

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 82

Andy: While the most recent SimCity did everything it could to stifle creativity, Cities: Skylines gave players the power to make anything they want—in part thanks to the deep mod support. The result is the best city-builder around.

Samuel: The best game of its kind in a genre that people have enjoyed and will play forever, well supported by compelling expansions. Plus, you can destroy your city with meteors if you're having a dark day—like I did when I was mayor of Pipville several months ago.

24. Arma 3

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 55

Evan: Arma 3 stands alone as the highest-fidelity FPS, the best multiplayer story generator, and a bottomless trough of community missions and mods. You can play it with the utmost seriousness, with an add-on that lets you administer simulated CPR on injured comrades, or as a silly military take on Black & White with its Zeus DLC. It's no coincidence that Arma was the fertile terrain that produced the last two biggest trends in PC gaming: battle royale and survival games.

23. Her Story 

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 19

Phil: You start with a police database open and the word 'MURDER' entered into its search field. Hit enter and you’re given four short video clips from a police interview. In one, the woman being interviewed says, "I didn't murder Simon." OK, let's search 'SIMON'. More video clips—more hints at a tantalising mystery that twists and changes as you unlock more of its parts.

Samuel: Probably the best mystery game ever made, because Her Story is over when you feel you've found the answer (or when you've discovered all the clips, depending on the type of player you are). It truly puts the drama of uncovering the truth in your hands, which is so hard for a game to do in any meaningful way. One of those games I would recommend to someone who has never played games. 

Tyler: A fantastic performance that made FMV, for once, not cheesy.

Andy: A narrative game that really makes use of the medium. The mystery unfolds differently for everyone who plays it, which is a wonderfully original way of telling a story. What you think happened might be different to someone else’s interpretation, turning us all into unreliable narrators.

22. Total War: Warhammer 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: Total War is a complex grand strategy series that fuses turn-based 4X-style empire-building with vast real-time battles. So far we've mostly seen the format used to explore historical scenarios, but it turns out the Warhammer universe is a perfect fit. For fans of the setting it's a joy to see each faction rendered so vividly, but I would recommend Total War: Warhammer 2 to any strategy fan regardless of your Warhammer knowledge. If you want to command a traditional army, the Empire is there for you. If you want something more adventurous, you don't need to know much about the undead Tomb Kings to enjoy sending hordes of skeletons after magical relics. The sequel's campaign is brilliant. Four factions fight for control of a big magic vortex in the middle of the map, which keeps the campaign interesting all the way into the endgame.

Jody: Replay that campaign and eventually you'll see behind the curtain, but what makes it worth replaying is the factions. Warhammer 2 gets its factions right in ways that should please all but the fussiest fans, even though they're a diverse collection of uptight magic elves, dinosaur-riding lizards, sneaky rat bastards, and "we're really into leather" sex dungeon kink elves. That's no easy feat.

21. The Sims 4

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: The latest instalment of the long-running life sim has absorbed many hours of my life as I generate idiotic stories starring my beloved cast of citizens. Four years after release it's at the point where features missing at launch have been patched in (toddlers! pools!) and you can use the glut of expansions, game packs and stuff packs to tailor the game to your playstyle. I'd like to see the pricing model better support people who dip in and out, but overall there's still no other game like it. 

20. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 49

Evan: Valve's half-hearted updates dented its ranking this year, but CS:GO remains the purest team FPS on the planet. Every round is a joust of plays, counters, and outmaneuvering, where a smart flash or reflex AWP pick shifts the balance. You can spend a lifetime improving your grenade technique, your de_inferno mid push, your eco round playcalling. It'll never be enough. Each gun is a wild animal with its own unique spray pattern and tendencies that can take dozens of hours to learn.

19. Rocket League

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 16

Tyler: I've hit a skill plateau in the best and only rocket car soccer game (I play the hockey variant), but I just have to find the next slope. I don't think one can ever stop getting better at Rocket League. There's always a better position I could've been in, an aerial I shouldn't have botched. It hasn't changed much over the years, but I feel like I could play it forever.

18. Hitman

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 14

Phil: This stealth sandbox about a bald assassin features six huge, absurdly detailed maps, each filled with interesting ways to bump off your targets. Hitman's social stealth systems—where disguises are more important than not being seen—gives you the time to plan, experiment and refine your approach. It's now the best game in the series.

17. Kerbal Space Program

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 39

Phil: Build a rocket, launch a rocket, fly a rocket, crash a rocket. And then do it all again—tweaking and experimenting until your design is bona fide spacefaring craft, able to maintain orbit or visit nearby celestial bodies. Kerbal Space Program is a sublime mix of physics and slapstick that makes for the perfect playground for space exploration.

16. Spelunky

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 10

Wes: No one's topped the way Spelunky's pieces play off one another to make its world feel deeply knowable and random at the same time. It's a game you play for hundreds of hours, until getting the key to unlock the chest to find the Udjat Eye to reach the black market to buy the ankh to die and come back to life to fight Anubis to take his sceptre to unlock the City of Gold to find the Book of the Dead to journey through Hell to fight King Yama just feels like another day playing Spelunky.

15. Alien: Isolation 

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 8

Andy: The best horror game on PC, because the thing chasing you has a mind of its own. There's no pattern to predict, no patrol route you can exploit. The alien is intelligent. It will learn your habits and it will fuck with you, and that is terrifying.

Samuel: I replayed it this year, and it's amazing how much mileage they get out of the same two repeated enemies by making clever use of set pieces and different types of environments. Probably the best horror game ever.

14. Overwatch

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 13

Andy: I love Overwatch because, as someone lacking the skill to play most other online shooters competently, I can still make a difference in a match. The sheer variety of brilliantly-designed characters and their wildly varied toolsets means there's something for every kind of player, even if they can't pull off a decent headshot. It's also impressively accessible, cleverly explaining the intricacies of its heroes' abilities without overloading you with information.

Bo: A year ago, Blizzard told me they had "barely scratched the surface" of abilities and character archetypes they'd like to explore in Overwatch. With the newest hero being a giant hamster ball mech with a Spider-Man-style grappling hook piloted by a literal hamster, I'm finally inclined to believe them. Overwatch continues to be one of the most unique and accessible shooters. And on the esports front, the Overwatch League's adoption of a city-based team model has ignited local enthusiasm in a way that no other game, tournament, or organization has been able to thus far.

Phil: We decided this list's order before Wrecking Ball was announced. I'll leave you to speculate whether he would have raised or lowered Overwatch's position.

13. Life is Strange

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Dontnod's episodic, time-rewinding teen drama develops (Look! A photography pun! Because the lead character is into photography!) from a gawky, awkward-but-sweet first episode with slightly clunky dialogue into a story capable of delivering real emotional sucker punches. It's not perfect—some puzzle segments outstay their welcome and the plot often throws subtlety out of the window—but OH MY! The cast of characters and the strength of their relationships elevate the whole thing, and the Instagrammy aesthetic bolsters the teenage intensity. 

Phil: It also features probably the best use of mid-'00s indie boys playing sad acoustic songs about relationships and feelings in all of gaming. Max listening to José González while riding a bus across Arcadia Bay is a beautiful, understated sequence that gives us the time to empathise with the character and her feelings about the town she's returned to.

12. Hollow Knight

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 46

Wes: The best Metroidvania since Super Metroid. Hollow Knight is open-ended almost to a fault, giving you a massive, decaying, interconnected bug kingdom to explore and frequently find yourself lost in. It can be overwhelming at first, but the feeling of discovery ends up being immensely rewarding as a result. The super responsive platforming and combat keep backtracking from ever feeling like a chore, something similar games have struggled with.

11. Doom

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 9

Tom: A modernisation of Doom that puts the focus firmly on speed and sweet guns. The DOOM reboot resists decades of shooter trends that either ape Call of Duty or try to crossbreed the FPS with other genres. There's nothing wrong with that sort of experimentation, but it's so refreshing to boot this game up and blow gooey chunks out of the forces of hell. Bring on the next one, id.

Samuel: The best single-player FPS there is in 2018. A clever update of Doom that turns fights into melee-heavy duels, with a not-overly-serious tone that hits just the right spot.

Wes: And the levels are actually intricate mazes full of secrets, just like classic Doom! I expected good shooting in bland corridors, but this is so much more.

10. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 6

Tom: I loaded back into my MGS5 save a month ago to find Snake decked out head-to-toe in a leopard skin combat suit. I forgot that my dog had a knife and my horse had a face shield, and I forgot that I named my squad TACTICAL OCTOPUS. It’s a terrific open world stealth game, but its quirky sense of fun makes the supernatural military nonsense bearable. 

Samuel: My favourite stealth action game ever, that sits somewhere between immersive sim and Metal Gear of old.

9. Dark Souls Remastered

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION 2 (Prepare to Die Edition)

Tom: Have you met Gravelord Nito? He's a roiling mass of skeletons shrouded in a cape of souls. He lives deep in Dark Souls nightmarish catacombs, and he's just one example of the game's extraordinary art direction, and powerful sense of dark fantasy horror. People go on about Dark Souls' bottomless lore with good reason, but underneath the theatrics it's actually a very simple game. You raid dungeons, chop up monsters, loot chests and level up. Without strong, enduring combat fundamentals I wouldn't have kept playing long enough to uncover the gods' tragic stories.

8. Subnautica

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Subnautica is my game of 2018 so far. I usually tap out pretty fast when it comes to survival games but this one takes place in a gorgeous underwater world, involves a compelling plot, AND I adore tinkering with my little underwater base. It also lets me choose how much survival-ing I care to have as part of the game experience, meaning I can switch off thirst. It's not exactly better down where it’s wetter given the wealth of creatures and situations which can kill you, but it's exactly where I want to be.

Andy: Exploring is genuinely rewarding, both in terms of finding resources to build cooler submarines and environmental detail. It's a world with a story to tell, and it tells it brilliantly.

7. XCOM 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 4

Tom: Strategy games are good at making me care about numbers and systems, but XCOM 2 is one of the few I can name that translate the numberwang into emotional investment. Losing a squad member can feel devastating. You nurture them between fights, gradually upgrading their gear and unlocking sweet new skills, only for an alien to cruelly blast them in a routine mission. When things go wrong in XCOM, they go very wrong indeed, which is all part of the drama in a game that casts humanity as the underdog.

Evan: XCOM's art direction is ridiculously underrated. Its maps are believable, colorful dioramas that shatter into pieces under the heat and intensity of your insurgent combat. 

6. Rainbow Six Siege

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 15

Evan: Sure, you can play Siege as if it's Counter-Strike, pre-firing and out-angling your opponents with snap marksmanship. But the real joy is in outsmarting the other team by poking clever holes in the maps, placing your gadgets in unexpected positions, and careful drone scouting. I also love Siege's tempo: this is a shooter that gives you time and a canvas of breakable space to stop, strategize, and execute a dumb plan with absurd gadgets like an eyeball turret that shoots lasers, invisible poison mines, and a drone that shoots concussions. Ubisoft remains devoted to supporting Siege with meaningful systems renovations and with four annual updates that add new characters and maps.

5. What Remains of Edith Finch

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 27

Samuel: This first-person narrative game is constantly inventive. Edith Finch ventures into the home where her family used to live, before they all died in various tragic circumstances and their rooms were sealed up. You uncover each of their stories. It's the high point of this genre.

Andy: Exploring the abandoned home of the eccentric Finch family and uncovering their history is one of the most satisfying storytelling experiences a game has ever given me. But it's a game I'll never play again, simply because one scene in particular was so emotionally-charged that I can't face it. Any piece of media that holds that kind of power has to be special.

4. Into the Breach

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: Into the Breach is a game about quick turn-based battles between mechs and kaiju-sized bugs, and it's almost perfect. Unlike many turn-based strategy games, Into the Breach doesn't use chance to inject battles with tension—the UI tells you pretty much everything that's going to happen next turn. The pleasure comes from solving the next turn state as efficiently as you can. It's a small game—battles only last a few turns on an eight-by-eight grid—but the varied mech teams and increasingly nefarious bug types create a huge amount of tactical variation. It shows that strategy games don’t have to be long and laborious.

Wes: There's so little randomness that random moments have immense impact. In one run, I had two buildings resist damage at a pivotal point. I've never done a more exaggerated fist pump.

3. Divinity: Original Sin 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tyler: Divinity: Original Sin 2 feels less stodgy than other classic RPG revivals while heightening their best qualities: turn-based combat (I hate real-time, sorry) with physics-based spells and exploding barrels (necessary), great characters, and a commitment to letting players do what they want, even if it breaks everything.

Wes: It offers you an intricate RPG sandbox to play in, and it invites you to break the rules in as many ways as you can imagine. The first game did that, too, but this one marries that freedom with across-the-board great writing and genuinely thoughtful roleplaying. It walks the walk and talks the talk.

2. Dishonored 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 3

Samuel: This is the best stealth game there has ever been. While the high-concept levels like A Crack in the Slab and Clockwork Mansion get a lot of attention for their clever one-off twists, more traditional stages like Royal Conservatory and Dust District are so detailed and fun to explore. There's no sense of repetition, and each level feels like a huge event. It's the precision of Dishonored 2 I love. Every successful takedown or evasion feels like something you've earned. 

Andy: Dishonored 2 has some of the best level design on PC, both in terms of the architecture and aesthetic, and in how the environments are rich playgrounds that let you really flex your creativity. Every location has something interesting about it, whether it's the time-hopping of A Crack in the Slab or the intricate house-sized puzzle box that is the magnificent Clockwork Mansion. And the sheer volume of ways to navigate the levels and complete your objectives really captures the spirit of PC gaming.

Tom: I want to savour every moment in Karnaca, because those levels are so dense and fun to explore. Immersive sims have always been good at creating broad levels like these, full of sandbox opportunity, but I really value that simple acts of moving, shooting and fighting feel great in Dishonored 2. Your regenerating mana bar gives you license to use your traversal powers freely, and I love blink and Emily’s tentacle leap. The introduction of Emily just broadens your toolset further. Domino, which lets you chain NPCs fates together so that one attack affects them all, is an inspired ability, and it's emblematic of the way Dishonored 2 builds on the tenets of immersive sims like Deus Ex, and spins them out in spectacular new ways. Augmented special forces dudes are cool, but warlock assassins are even cooler.

Phil: For me it's the reactivity of the world. Yes, the combat is fluid and satisfying, the level design is intricate and beautifully balanced, and the abilities perfectly tailored for absurd displays of skill and problem solving. But what ties it all together is the lengths Arkane has gone to make it all feel believable and real. Immersive sim is, I will admit, a clunky term, but it’s a useful way to encapsulate a core philosophy: that a game’s systems must work to make you believe in a world, even if that world features magical parkour assassins. I believe in Dishonored 2's world because throughout I encountered ways Arkane had anticipated player behaviour. The most extreme example is found in the standout mission A Crack in the Slab, which features an alternate timeline that only occurs if you do something that’s never asked of you—that most people will probably never try. Arkane knew someone would try, and so made a response. That's amazing dedication to the craft.

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 1

Tom: It's a great execution of the ronin fantasy set in one of the most beautiful worlds on PC. The craggy Skellige isle might be one of my favourite places in games, or is it Novigrad, or the sunlit vineyards of Toussaint? Even the dripping bogs in the early areas are pretty, in their own miserable way. Within these gorgeous places you meet people with interesting problems. Maybe their local well is haunted. Maybe their spouse is haunted. Usually something is haunted, or cursed, or being pursued by a hideous mythical beast. I treated the sidequests as the main quest, to be honest, roleplaying a mutant outcast on a mission to make the world a slightly better place. Oh, and let's not forget Gwent, one of the best games-within-a-game since Final Fantasy VIII's Triple Triad. 

Jody: The fact you play a character with his own place in the world, including allies, enemies, and ex-girlfriends, is a definite strength of The Witcher 3. But it wasn't always this way. In the first Witcher game Geralt was an amnesiac sleazebag and honestly a bit of a tool. He wasn't a fun person to be around, let alone to be. But by The Witcher 3, Geralt's a caring father figure with a heart of gold beneath layers of beard and gruff, and more than that he feels like someone you personalise. How much he cares about getting paid, who he loves, how seriously he takes his creed, that’s all you. The Witcher 3's version of Geralt is the perfect videogame protagonist not because he's more integrated into his world than a character you make from scratch, but because he's a solid outline with room to manoeuvre inside that. He contains multitudes—but not too many. He has well-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

Wes: "Place" really is what makes The Witcher 3 so spectacular, and like no other game I've played. It's not just that the world is gorgeous and detailed, though it is both of those things. The Witcher 3 has this unparalleled combination of artistry and technology that makes its locations and characters feel authentic. Accents and architecture differ between the mainland and Skellige. The characters you encounter out in the world have quests that involve their families or monsters native to their region, and the more of these quests you take, the more you appreciate how natural and human they seem. No one's asking you to go out and slay five wolves because that's a good way to spend ten minutes in an RPG. If you're killing beasts, it’s probably to save a village's flock or get revenge for a grieving father, and even straightforward quests often end with surprising deviations. Depending on how you play Geralt, you can be a mercenary in search of coin, or calmly talk someone out of a decision you know they'll regret. You can haggle with assholes who don't respect the value of a witcher's work, and you’ll have to decide what to do when a poor farmer doesn't actually have the money he promised you. Those touches, along with the motion capture, the voice acting and the wind on a blustery night in Velen, make the whole thing come alive. What a world.

Phil: A thing I hate about most RPG writing is that something as simple as asking to be rewarded for your time and effort is treated as the most evil thing a protagonist can do. But in The Witcher 3, Geralt is a professional doing his job. His haggling with clients over money isn't a deviance or a crime, but the expected cost of hiring a man who is good at what he does for a living. 

Andy: I love The Witcher 3 because it’s a game where almost everything is meaningful. When you pick up a quest, it isn't just some thinly-written excuse to get you to go kill a monster. There's a backstory, a motivation, and often a twist. Quests can spiral, turning an encounter with a peasant in a tavern into a sprawling epic that ends with you fighting some great, mythical beast atop a crumbling tower in a raging storm. The game is heaving with interesting characters and worthwhile things to do, and Geralt is the foundation of it all: a complex lead who makes other videogame characters look like cardboard cutouts.

Personal picks

We love many more games than we can fit onto one list, so here the PC Gamer team has spotlighted a few of their favorites that didn't make the cut. 

Philippa Warr: Cradle

Cradle, like Deadly Premonition, is wonky but fascinating and stays with you for years. It's a transhumanist puzzler where you try to repair a mechanical girl who is also a vase in a yurt on the Mongolian steppe next to an abandoned theme park which dispenses block-based minigames.

Joe Donnelly: Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero is wonderful. Its storylines are weird and interesting. Its minimalist art style is gorgeous. Its sprawling open road and Mark Twain-esque Echo River are a joy to explore. Its cast of characters are quirky and often funny. And it's not even finished. Look for its final act this year.

Bo Moore: Prey

The first 20 minutes of Prey form one of the most inspired sci-fi set pieces of recent memory. An immersive sim that offers fantastic problem solving, enjoyable enough combat (even if the enemies are a bit uninspired), and, true to its pedigree, a level of environmental storytelling that rivals Rapture.

Steven Messner: Slay the Spire

This deckbuilding roguelike isn't out of Early Access and already I've sunk more hours into it than I’d care to admit. It's a deceptively simple game that anyone can easily pick up and play, but learning to build the perfect deck—and getting all the lucky drops to pull it off—can make hours vanish.

Tyler Wilde: Chess Ultra

For online chess, I recommend Chess.com. But if you want to relax with a few AI games, Chess Ultra has many of the features of pro chess software without the complexity. It's for people who just want to play chess, and it works wonderfully. The Twitch integration and VR support are cool, too.

Chris Livingston: Duskers

Issue text commands to drones to steer them around abandoned space stations where terrifying aliens lurk. You can only see what your drones see, giving Duskers a spooky found-footage feel. It's a scary and surprising roguelike where everything going wrong is as much fun as everything going right.

Tom Senior: Thief Gold

It's surprising how well 1998's Thief still holds up. It's tense and atmospheric, and the labyrinthine levels feel huge, substantial and ambitious even today. It's punishing, and the spindly NPCs look kind of ridiculous now, but I still get the fear when I snipe out a torch with a water arrow, hoping that nobody sees it.

Phil Savage: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

A stealth puzzler that's not afraid to make you wait. You embark on missions throughout Edo period Japan, silently breaking into well-guarded strongholds using wits, patience and an adorable raccoon dog. Deep, tactical and rewardingly tricky.

Andy Kelly: Else Heart.Break()

In a digitised world, anything can be hacked. That’s the premise of else Heart.Break(), a unique game about love, freedom, and cybercrime. You can hack objects to change how they behave. Hero Sebastian uses his newfound coding skills to join a gang of hacktivists.

Evan Lahti: Oxygen Not Included

The intricate systems-maths of a sim wrapped in the handmade charm of a Klei game. Within hours of starting a new colony, you're optimizing airflow and figuring out the right number of toilets to fertilize your plants. It's still in Early Access, but this is already my favorite ant farm on PC.

Samuel Roberts: Assassin's Creed Origins

I'm not traditionally a fan of Ubisoft’s series, but almost everything here, from world layout to combat to quest structure, has been revamped. I think everyone should see this open world before they die. It's a staggering creation.

James Davenport: Stories Untold

Using a computer shouldn't be scary, but Stories Untold makes it so. The fidelity of the keys and knobs draws you into its world. Sitting at your computer while the protagonists are tormented by their own makes the events of these four short stories feel more real and unnerving. 

Even though you won't be able to play Fallout 76 on Steam at launch, almost everything else in Bethesda's back catalogue is discounted on Valve's platform this weekend, just in time for QuakeCon 2018. 

While I can't find a dedicated Steam page for the sale just yet, probably because it began very recently and Dead Cells is currently occupying the homepage, you can see the discounts by heading to Bethesda's publisher page on Steam and scrolling down to 'specials'. Some highlights include Prey on-sale for £10/$15, and its roguelite-style DLC Mooncrash for $15/£9.74, which is 25% off. 2016's Doom is just $10/£7.49 (Fanatical has it slightly cheaper), which is reasonable for what's probably the best singleplayer FPS of the modern age. 

Fallout 4's GOTY edition is £20/$30, matching its best Steam price to date if you've somehow not played that yet. And of course, no mention of 3D Fallout games can go without also bringing up New Vegas, the vanilla edition of which is $3.29/£2.63. I paid double that for a chocolate-flavoured beer last weekend. The beer was fantastic, but New Vegas will definitely last longer. The excellent Wolfenstein 2, give or take two annoying final bosses, is $24/£16. The Elder Scrolls Online and its various expansions are also discounted, plus you can get the entire Elder Scrolls series for less, too.

If, like me, you have most of those, you can instead look forward to QuakeCon itself this weekend, where we'll be getting our first look at Doom Eternal gameplay. 

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This month, I played and enjoyed Prey's Mooncrash DLC, where one of the game's objectives is to stash enough food and drink to escape in a supply crate headed for Earth. As I collected the items I needed, I was reminded that the developers put real effort into the types of food and drink found in the Prey universe. The packaging is beautiful. There's fun flavour text for each item. And damn, the food sounds fancy.

What would happen if you had to live on the supplies in places-gone-wrong like Talos I? Below, I rank five of gaming's most notable dystopias, using no criteria other than which consumables I personally find tasty, versus what's likely to make me projectile vomit. I also touch upon the drinks options in some of these worlds, because first-person games love to get you virtual drunk so they can make the screen blurry. 

1. Talos I (Prey)

Consumable food available: Big Bang Candy, Captain Spree's Fish Sticks, crispy frites, Dr. Howard's Superfruit, jellied eels, Methuselah apple, Ossetra caviar, RanDom Dim Sum, Russian blinis, Shaker lemon pie, Siskak Unagi Rollz, Skyking pomegranate, Spiralite cookies, sun-dried tomato jerky, Sunburst banana pudding, veggie blend 

I feel like the food on Talos I says a lot about TranStar, the space station's owners: they have some serious cash, and if you're going to work in space for a private company that's this flush, then hot damn you should eat well. There's even a few decent veggie-friendly options in there, too, and the concept art above shows at some point they planned some crispy tofu bites too. 

Impressive amounts of detail on even simple objects has become something of an Arkane hallmark—the packaging on these products (designed by artist Fred Augus) is beautiful, and effort was even put into bringing the food to life with flavour text. Here's how RanDom Dim Sum is described: "A bowl of randomly selected dim sum by TranStar Kitchens. Every bowl is different." I wish more of my food had the element of surprise.

The drinks options are strong, too, with beer, gin, wine and bourbon. Maybe I'd accidentally unleash a typhon infestation too if I was drunk off my ass. At least they have green tea and coffee for the inevitable hangover.

2. Columbia (BioShock Infinite)

Consumable food available: Apples, bananas, bread, beans, candy bars, cake, cereal, cheese, corn, cotton candy, hot dogs, jar of pickles, oranges, peanuts, pears, pineapples, popcorn, potatoes, potato chips, sandwiches, sardines, spinach, tomato soup, watermelon, white oats

I wouldn't live in Columbia for a few reasons—mostly the beliefs of the citizens and leaders, but also the fear of wandering out of my house in a sleepy daze and accidentally falling to my death. The range of food you can pick up around the flying city is reasonably close to my existing (terrible) diet, however. I mean, I'd better pack my acid reflux tablets before moving there, but hey, I'd eat watermelon and pineapple for breakfast, cake for brunch, sandwiches for lunch then hot dogs and beans for dinner. Admittedly it's not great for veggie options based on this selection, but on the snacks front, Columbia is formidable. 

I'm not sure where they get the sardines from, though. It must be a bit awkward to plan fishing expeditions when you're living above the clouds. Maybe the Luteces just open a portal to another universe's ocean, into which you can sling a fishing net, or perhaps a portal opens into a supermarket, where they load up on hot dogs and pickle jars before the store's baffled manager catches on to what's going on. 

3. Rapture (BioShock)

Consumable food available: Creme-filled bars, pep bars, potato chips, potted meat, sardines

BioShock's Rapture just had creme-filled cakes, pep bars and potato chips, but by BioShock 2, it also had the extra two items above. Another factor that makes BioShock 2 the secret best BioShock game (maybe). Perhaps Sofia Lamb, Rapture's post-Ryan leader, just wanted a little more culinary variety in the underwater city? Or, maybe they just found a supply of potted meat and sardines in Andrew Ryan's office after he was beaten to death with a golf club. In Burial At Sea, at least, Rapture shares most of the same food with Columbia. Perhaps Suchong and Fink were trading snacks across universes.

It's worth saying, that where Rapture disappoints slightly with food consumables, it makes up for it in booze—no surprise given that the player just arrived after a NYE party. Alcohol is probably the only escape from the insufferable intellectuals who live in Rapture. Sometimes you just want to drink in a dystopia where the people have no self worth, you know? 

You've got vodka, gin, absinthe, moonshine, beer, whiskey, brandy and two types of merlot across both games. Hot damn, that sounds like a night out. Let's party like it's 1959!

4. 2027-2072 (Deus Ex)

Consumable food available: soy food, Cyberboost pro energy packs, bread, candy bar

Pretty simple but practical foodstuffs. The item description for soy in Deus Ex: Invisible War makes the utilitarian nature of food 60 years from now extremely clear. "The complete snack! Engineered to provide maximum nutrition—not a single molecule wasted on added flavor or texture." Doesn't sound like the foodie future of my dreams, but hey, at least there's an option everyone can eat (if not enjoy). 

Rewind a little, and the food consumables aren't much better in Human Revolution or Mankind Divided. Adam Jensen is a big fan of cereal and even has boxes of the stuff in his apartment (it's very pure), but you can't eat it in-game, which is a tiny shame. I could just imagine him sitting behind cover, using his cloaking augment while he tops up on Crunchy Pirate cereal. 

Jensen's hoarding of cereal also produces a nice little Easter Egg early on in the game—see the video above. And check out these great fictional designs by artist Manuel Vallelunga from his blog. I particularly love the term 'suspiciously delicious!':

5. Dunwall and Karnaca (Dishonored)

Consumable food available: Apricot Tartlet, Bluejawed hagfish eggs, bread, Gristol apple, Gristol cider, Morley apple, rat skewer, Tycian pears, Serkonan blood sausage, Serkonan grapes, brined hagfish, potted Dabokva whale meat, Pratchett jellied eels, Bastillian fig, Bastillian peach, lettuce, potato, dark bread, dried bough lizard, Saggunto flatbread

A mixed affair, really. In theory I'd eat an apricot tartlet in a second, but I'm less sold on the blood sausage and the hagfish eggs. And don't get me started on the rat skewers. I thought these things carried the plague? By the second game, however, you've got dried lizard and flatbread to choose from—stronger choices, to me, depending on how hungry I was. Like on Talos I, you've got jellied eels available, too, which is surely an Easter Egg to connect the game's universes. 

I'm still not sure I could eat anything here, though. It's not that the food sounds bad in Dunwall—I just don't think I could enjoy eating knowing that I might be surrounded by rats or bloatflies at any time. I won't even eat crisps on the train in real life if someone's sneezed near me. Sorry, Dunwall. Sort out the infestation problem, and I might find the idea of munching down on some potted Dabokva whale meat a little more appetising (although probably not). 

Spoilers follow for Dishonored and Dishonored 2.

Delilah Copperspoon—servant, painter, playmate to a young Empress, then witch, usurper and Empress herself—is first introduced in Dishonored’s two-part DLC, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches. In Dishonored 2, Delilah returns to Dunwall Tower with one mission: take back what’s yours. 

While Dishonored opens with Jessamine’s assassination, and Death of the Outsider ends with the removal of the Outsider from the Void, Dishonored 2 shows that the instigating act of the series’ narrative arc is one child blaming another. In Delilah’s account, a single act of childish cruelty cascades into a lifetime of misery for herself and her mother, as Jessamine’s privileged position as the daughter of an Emperor doesn’t extend to her half-sister. As a child, Delilah did not understand why she was excluded from the honour, prestige and love showered upon Jessamine. As an adult, Delilah continuously attempts to seize these things which Jessamine possessed. Her desire becomes an act of imitation. 

It’s clear that, in The Brigmore Witches and in Dishonored 2, Delilah wants the throne. As a villain, she pursues power with ruthlessness and cunning. But the nature of this desire and its origins are interrogated in both games. The throne and all its power seems to be a natural thing to desire for someone as ambitious as Delilah. Indeed, her first attempt in The Brigmore Witches makes her appear to want it for the sake of it; power and prestige are assumed to be their own reward. But across the games, the throne is shown to be a symbol of social relationships as much as power. It’s familial as much as legal – meshing the machinations of the state with the entanglements of family life. This only becomes clear when confronted by Daud in the final mission; Delilah pleads with him before her magically infused painting of Emily, claiming that the young girl stole her life away. 

This line, once ambiguous, becomes explicit when it’s revealed in Dishonored 2 that Delilah is believed to be the illegitimate half-sister of Jessamine Kaldwin. As daughters born out of wedlock to the ruler of the Empire, Delilah and Emily share an origin. But more than this, Delilah shows that she doesn’t simply desire Emily’s throne for the sake of it, but Emily’s entire life and history. In The Brigmore Witches, Delilah attempts to possess Emily’s body in order to take power. In Delilah’s desire for the throne, her imitation of Emily is so explicit that it leads her to try to become her. This magical possession becomes a literalised metaphor for the events that transpire in Dishonored 2.

Mirrors of desire

In this understanding, Delilah’s attempts at revenge against Jessamine are thinly veiled attempts to imitate her. And when Jessamine is assassinated and that power is handed to Emily, Delilah pursues Emily just as single-mindedly. But in doing so, she recreates the dispossession and misery which led her, long ago, to pursue the throne out of personal revenge. Motivated entirely by envy, Delilah desires the throne not because she desires to rule the land or govern the Empire. Instead, she desires the throne purely because it was denied to her, and she believes that the women who have held it since have stolen her birthright. While Delilah is focused on the injustice done to her, and the stratification of the Empire’s citizens into the haves and have-nots, she is unconcerned with rectifying any of it beyond personal vengeance. Her tragedy is as much her refusal to break the cycle of violence and desire which led to her deprivation as it is the petty, cruel and childish whims which have harmed her. Even Delilah acknowledges this when recounting the events of her life which lead to her deposing Emily. “It’s your turn now,” Delilah spitefully declares, unaware that her actions have merely created someone exactly like her, who will pursue the throne just as she has done.

The other antagonists of Dishonored 2 operate along these same themes, as each of the four coconspirators of Delilah’s coup can be undone by the doubles they use to exert control. Grim Alex, a Jekyll-and-Hyde creation of Hypatia’s own research, is banished by that same method. Jindosh’s machines turn on him and destroy the intellect that created them. Breanna Ashworth has her magical ability torn away by the same effigies she crafted to supernaturally influence others. Duke Abele is replaced by the literal body double he uses to avoid the consequences of his wasteful and thoughtless lifestyle. Even Paolo and Byrne, fighting over a patch of dusty territory in the once-grand Batista District, now stare each other down through a cloud of dust that obscures the mirrored nature of their relationship. In each case, these doubles, all created by a ruthless pursuit of power and used either directly or indirectly to harm others, are easily turned against them all. Delilah, in turn, is undone by the double she creates in Emily. 

Dishonored 2 opens up the nature of this desire for the throne even further by detailing Delilah’s disempowerment and contrasting it with Emily’s own. As an Empress, Emily is at best ambivalent and at worst unconcerned. Her leadership is weak and her political awareness undermined by rooftop jaunts after dark where she dreams of being free of responsibilities. After the coup that rescinds her birthright and encases her father in stone, Emily’s motivations come down to this same tagline: take back what’s yours. Finally free of the burden of her throne, just as she dreamed, her desires are unclear at the game’s opening. But playing as Emily Kaldwin unfolds a narrative concerned with these mechanisms by which our desires are formed. Suddenly thrust into a recreation of Delilah’s story—one of death, deprivation, and disempowerment at the hands of a family member—Emily is forced to confront her reasons for wanting the throne. Before the coup, she was a poor ruler, but a non-lethal, low-Chaos playthrough shows a young woman coming to understand the depths of her obligation to the people she has hitherto ignored. In contrast with the Duke and with Delilah, Emily vows to be a better Empress not because she wants power, but because she cultivates compassion. But in a violent, high-Chaos playthrough, it becomes increasingly clear that a desire for revenge against Delilah eclipses Emily’s pursuit of what she lost. Through this, Emily imitates Delilah to the point of becoming indistinguishable from her murderous aunt.

Emily's choice

Regardless of playstyle, when Emily approaches Dunwall Tower in the final mission she is confronted with the realisation that her position is the same as Delilah’s before the coup: a deposed empress taking back what she believes is rightfully hers. Dunwall is a ruin when Emily returns, with the infrastructure crumbling and the streets littered with the dead. Delilah, unconcerned with the responsibilities which possessing the throne implies, rules over an empire of corpses. Her attempts to become everything that Jessamine was ultimately fail, just as her attempt to become Emily in The Brigmore Witches had been a failure. The land that adored her half-sister does not adore her—therefore she tries to create another through magic. But Emily, set on the path to usurp Delilah, may well simply become her instead. In a high-Chaos playthrough, Emily ends the game by ruling over a land in disarray, filled with the corpses of her own subjects, who she doesn’t hesitate to kill in her destructive desires. 

Dishonored 2 depicts the violent ends of imitative desire. Delilah’s envy of her half-sister for everything she possessed—not just their father’s throne, but also his love—informs her desire more than any notion of ruling the Empire. And while her story is one in which she seeks restitution for a childhood wrong that caused her so much misery and pain, she is unable to see the imitative nature of her desire and, in turn, visits the same misery and pain upon Emily. The object of desire—the throne and all its power—is quickly obscured when the relationships that form around it are based on envy, spite and imitation. And while a high-Chaos playthrough of Dishonored 2 simply replaces one tyrant for another, a conscientious playthrough sees the young Emily Kaldwin resisting the easy urge of imitative desire and instead growing as a ruler and a woman. Delilah, meanwhile, becomes trapped within her own desires of an immortal rule within her painted world, unaware and unconcerned that she lives out a simple imitation.

Which games would make great movies or TV shows? That's the question we've put to the PC Gamer staff in this week's PCG Q&A, and almost all of us preferred the idea of TV series to films (perhaps because game movies are destined to be dumpster fires forever). Let us know your suggestions in the comments, too!

Andy Kelly: a Silent Hill anthology show

The cursed town is different for every sinner who's lured to it, and I think that's a perfect setup for a series of standalone horror/mystery stories. The supernatural nature of the setting would allow the writers to come up with some really twisted, mind-bending plotlines, and the town would provide some loose structure, making all the episodes feel like part of a whole: similar to the brilliant Inside No. 9, in which every episode is set in a house or other indoor setting numbered 9.

With the success of shows like Black Mirror, Electric Dreams, Inside No. 9, and Room 104, the anthology is making a comeback, and I think I prefer them to ongoing narratives that take 80 episodes to wrap up. So I'd love to see Silent Hill, which is basically an anthology series itself, get the same treatment on TV.

Tom Senior: BioShock

The next time Netflix want to embark on an lavish showcase project like Altered Carbon, perhaps they should take a look at the underwater city of Rapture from the BioShock universe. Watching one guy sneaking around firing bees out of his arms isn't going to be good television, but a show set during the fall of Rapture—before the events of the first game—could be great. You've got warring factions, competing philosophies, demented splicers and the oppressive threat of the ocean itself wrenching districts apart. 

It could be a decent horror show, though it will be tricky to find heart and empathetic characters among Rapture's central ideologues. It's nothing a little retcon can't fix. Follow a few good souls as they fight hard to stay sane and escape as society implodes. It might be hard to find room for a second series, but hey, Bioshock 2 turned out pretty well didn't it? 

Chris Livingston: BioShock (but it's a sitcom)

I'm thinking BioShock but as a Friends-style sitcom, set in Rapture just as everything is going to hell. The gang still meets for coffee (if they can scavenge it out of garbage cans) and wrestle with personal relationships but with the backdrop of a ruined and leaking libertarian paradise filled with lunatics where superpowers can be bought from vending machines. Episodes could include "The One Where Phoebe Dates a Splicer", "The One Where Joey's Corpse Is Harvested for ADAM", "The One Where Chandler Kills His Boss With A Swarm of Bees", "The One With All The Thanksgivings", and "The One Where Ross Discovers He Has No Free Will After Caving In Andrew Ryan's Head With a Golf Club". So no one told you Rapture's gonna be this way (clap-clap-clap-clap-clap) Your home's a joke, it broke, your best friend's D.O.A....

Tim Clark: PUBG or Fortnite as reality shows

The obvious answer is a PUBG or, better still, Fortnite reality show. Just a bunch of poor bastards on an island trying to rapidly build log cabins while their neighbours fire at them with sniper rifles from the tree line. In the current climate we’re probably less than 18 months from this show being commissioned by ITV2 in the UK. “C’mon Chad, stop sobbing, the frying pan is actually a pretty sweet piece of...” *BLAM* “...looks like we lost, Chad. GG WP.” 

Jody Macgregor: Team Fortress 2

I'm saying Team Fortress 2 because what I really want to see is more of the shorts Valve have made for it. Expiration Date was 15 minutes long and that was rad, and the Team Fortress 2 comics have been hilarious as well, so I'd love to see what they do with a string of connected half-hour episodes. I only ever reinstall the game to play it when they do their 'Scream Fortress' Halloween events, but I would watch the hell out of that. 

James Davenport: Dishonored

They should make an anime out of Dragon Ball FighterZ.

But I think a Dishonored movie or HBO-quality series is a no-brainer. Frame it as a political drama and leave the assassin stuff in the margins. I'd love to see the world described in all the diaries and notes and books depicted on a massive scale. Season two or three can see the characters off to Pandyssia, the wild continent described in Sokolov's journals, in search of a lost friend or dark truth. Toss in some kissing and I think we'll have a hit on our hands. 

Andy Chalk: The Final Station

I struggled with this, because I'm not really a TV/movies guy, but I think The Final Station would make for a brilliant (if not particularly coherent) film. Action, drama, tears, Brutalism, and a weird future-train that's prone to breakdowns: What's not to love? I doubt very much that it could be pulled off in any kind of satisfying fashion, and if it was it would surely be a tremendous box office flop. But give me a cinematic experience that's equivalent to the game—the desolation, the mystery, the loneliness of survival in the midst of pure existential horror—and you'll get my money in exchange. 

Samuel Roberts: KOTOR

Since they insist on making Star Wars films until I die, why not adapt a decent Star Wars story that already exists? KOTOR is set so long before the Bad Trilogy that you could adapt BioWare's RPG without contradicting anything. You've got a great ensemble, a killer twist and an interesting backdrop. It sounds better to me than this Han Solo movie, anyway. Plus you can make a killer sequel, too. 

God-killing might sound like an ambitious notion for a standalone expansion, but with Death of the Outsider, Arkane Studios promised players the opportunity to do just that. The expansion is also the latest example of a trend where developers experiment with an established series to create something that’s not quite DLC or sequel, but something in between. Refining certain ideas, systems and mechanics present in Dishonored 2 enabled Billie Lurk’s revenge tale to be its own beast. 

“It’s true that we could have told that story through a two or three-part season of DLC,” says Dinga Bakaba, the game’s lead designer. “The push for a standalone was really a choice that benefited the overall quality of the game the most.” Though smaller, more focused and arguably more linear than Dishonored 2, the tale of the Death of the Outsider was the perfect opportunity to give players a satisfying sense of finality. 

Almost everyone at the studio agreed that a separate release was the best route to take if the epilogue was to be done justice. The series’ long-standing director, Harvey Smith, had actually toyed with the idea since the first day of working on Dishonored 2. Though post-release DLC for the original 2012 game was well received, certain restrictions always come when developing additional content in the traditional manner. The plan for Death of the Outsider was to avoid those.

Killing chaos

“The maps, the features, the systems, the art, the narrative design,” says Bakaba. “The amount of polish that comes with not having to meet a shorter deadline and multiple submission processes that are associated with DLC benefits both us and the players.” 

While Death of the Outsider is, in many ways, a game about endings, the standalone offering also marked many firsts for the franchise. The most notable example of these firsts is the absence of the Chaos system, a previous Dishonored calling card where player violence affects things like the number of guards in the game as you progress. As Billie Lurk, you’re no longer punished for taking a more lethal tack when getting in and out of Karnaca’s objective areas.

“It’s a more compact experience, so we wanted players to get the most out of it and encourage them to use the tools at their disposal in our games, stress them, experiment, find solutions and create unique anecdotes and stories,” explains Bakaba. “I’m frustrated when someone says, ‘This is the right way to play Dishonored,’ or, ‘I wish I could play like this, but the game doesn’t want me to.’ I want players to play their own game, not the game that the systems tell them is the best.” 

It’s a difficult balance to strike, but Death of the Outsider largely manages to pull it off successfully. Billie offering the player a grey moral compass—a far cry from the duty-bound personalities of Emily and Corvo—signifies an Arkane willing to trust players more than in previous outings, particularly in terms of pacing and how to best tackle the game’s optional side activities. Also contributing to that attitude is the fact that activities can be approached differently thanks to Death of the Outsider’s big new power: Semblance. This lets players assume the likeness of any available NPC, essentially stealing their faces to open up new solutions to problems. 

“The idea for Semblance came in the first phase of the project where the plan was to rework existing powers,” says Bakaba. “Heavily based on Possession originally, not everybody here originally believed that it would be a good power; some thought it might never work. But as we decided to make the game a standalone product we took the opportunity to invest in making the power more ambitious through mechanics, AI, feedbacks and such. Jérôme Braune, our senior system designer in charge of the feature, did a great job in turning it into a really useful power, but he was the first to be surprised when people mentioned it as one of the best things in the game.”

Everybody wins

Death of the Outsider, then, makes the case for expandalones being the perfect means by which to blend systems and mechanics that are both old and new. They can be an ideal way of placing less strain on developers while still creating a product for new players who want an entry point to the world, or seasoned players aching to spend more time with characters and a setting they’ve grown to love. 

“Returning players will likely enjoy the story more because the plot is about the Outsider, Billie and Daud,” says Bakaba. “The narrative works much better if you are familiar with the characters, you get the biggest payoff that way. But at the same time, in terms of gameplay, it’s a brand-new player character with new powers and gadgets. 

“We added video tutorials for new players, the action can be very unshackled as it ships with features like custom difficulties, and the new Contracts system allow you to plan a shorter play session around more bite-sized objectives. So new players can really enjoy it for the gameplay.” The intention, Bakaba explains, is that “all will have a great time” with the game.

After chatting about Kirin Jindosh's formidable Clockwork Mansion in the PC Gamer office this morning, I've got an urge to revisit Dishonored 2. For the sake of my sanity I probably won't, as the mere thought of its shifting foyers and arc pylons makes me feel uneasy. (Screw the Clockwork Soldiers, I kicked their arses.)

What I might instead do is check out Dishonored 2: The Peeress and the Price, an incoming graphic novel that's set in the aftermath of our Game of the Year 2016 and is due later this month. 

Penned by prolific writer Michael Moreci—alongside artwork and colours by Andrea Olimpieri (Dishonored Volume 1, True Blood) and Mattia Iacono (the Dark Souls comic) respectively—The Peerees and the Price follows Emily and Corvo who've now returned to Dunwall. Here, a "deadly" new enemy is on the loose—"one that could spell doom for them both."

Here's its cover and a selection of its interior art:

Dishonored 2: The Peeress and the Price is due February 20. Expect to pay $16.99/your regional equivalent for its hard cover edition. 

It took our Bitcoin mining rig two weeks to spit out the solution to 'what is the hardest GOTY award to be mad about,' but our unscrupulous power consumption was worth it. Divinity: Original Sin 2 is the first uncontroversial Game of the Year award we've given in years. We finally did it!

Of course it couldn't last, though. After just a few days of basking in positive reinforcement, we also published awards for PUBG and Destiny 2, prompting questions such as: 'Are you drunk?' The answer is: probably. But we must press on. The end of the year is for awarding awards, and no number of incredulous reaction gifs and all caps emails can stop us. So before calling it quits, we grabbed a handful of rejected award ideas from our award box (after paying our office manager $1.99 for the key) to bring you the 2017 Looties, our other GOTY awards.

Best Mass Effect Game

Winner: Mass Effect: Andromeda

However you feel about Mass Effect: Andromeda, you have to admit that it's the best Mass Effect game that released this year, and at least the fourth best Mass Effect game of all time. Not too shabby! —Tyler Wilde

Most Effective Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign 

Winner: EA for Star Wars Battlefront 2

Wow! EA pulled off quite the marketing stunt for Battlefront 2: even politicians are talking about it. To make this word-of-mouth magic happen, the marketing savants at EA constructed a business model that it would be impossible to look at, even on paper, without saying: 'Excellent! Everyone is going to be very mad about this! In fact, even Disney will be mad. We'll definitely make Belgium's Justice Minister mad.' And like clockwork, that's what happened—literally anyone could have predicted it, which goes to show just how airtight the plan was. Nice one, EA! —Tyler Wilde

Most Unexpected Death

Winner: Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider

It was a closely guarded secret all through the production of Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider: The Outsider would die. The efforts taken to hide the death of the Outsider were extreme, with several fake endings to Death of the Outsider, in which the Outsider did not die, being fully produced and animated. The Outsider's voice actor spent days recording dozens of lines of dialogue intended to throw off any suspicions in case of a pre-launch leak, lines like "I am glad I did not die!" and "I, the Outsider, continue to live" and "There sure are a lot of deaths but thankfully none of them are of me, the Outsider." These efforts were completely worth it, because we were completely stunned when we got to the part of Death of the Outsider where we experienced the death of the Outsider. In fact, we feel a little bad not including a spoiler warning before this award, because now you know the Outsider, in Death of the Outsider, dies. —Chris Livingston

Most normal house

Winner: What Remains of Edith Finch

As evocative as the Finch's family home is, it's the realistic slice-of-life details that make it so compelling. For instance, there's the subtle inclusion of secret tunnels that only small people can fit through. We all know where ours are! (Though we must never find out what's behind them.) And rooms with entirely different colour schemes that perfectly show, down to the smallest detail, who lives there? These are the details I expect when I walk into a family home, not the unrealistic detritus you see in most so-called 'true to life' portrayals: mouldy pizza boxes stuffed down the side of a bed, embarrassing Star Trek tie-in novels in people's book collections, dad's copy of Band of Brothers on Blu-ray. As if we're not going to notice that the family dome is missing from that picture? Props to Edith Finch for getting it right. —Samuel Roberts

Wait, a Survival Game Left Early Access? 

Winner: The Long Ark

Wait, what? A survival game left Early Access this year? Wait, again! And what, again? Two of them? Ark: Survival Evolved and The Long Dark both left Early Access? Holy crap. I didn't know that was a thing that could happen. I thought maybe Steam forgot to make a 'Leave Early Access' button for survival game developers to click on, or maybe that they had to cut down a real tree using an axe made from a stick, a stone, and 'plant fiber' before they were allowed to leave Early Access and no one could actually do it. Well, good for Ark 'n Dark! May your stomach meters be full and your supply of firewood be plentiful. —Chris Livingston

Saddest Child

Winner: Little Nightmares

It's never been a better and worse time to be a sad child in a game, what with Inside and Rime showing that kids have it tough in service of entertaining players. Little Nightmares, though, offers the saddest child of 2017, as grotesque people regularly attempt to eat your character on a horror show of a boat while your character slowly starves to death. If it's not that, you have to avoid giant toy men who want to mess you up real bad. Will 2018 be another banner year for sad videogame children? I would expect so. This sub-genre is flourishing right now. —Samuel Roberts

Saddest Robots

Winner: Nier Automata

Have you met the member of the resistance group who reprograms a Yorha android because he's desperate to start a family? And then did you read the email afterwards that explains in cold detail how he and his new robot relations were killed? Nier features some deeply sad robots, all trying to figure themselves out in a box-y world where people no longer reside, but human feelings live on in their creations. Everyone's having a bad time. Except the robots having an orgy—they're loving it. —Samuel Roberts

Corporate Good Guy of the Year

Winner: Yosuke Matsuda, Square-Enix

It's rare to see major publishers behave with magnanimity when the big bucks are involved, so I was moved if not to tears, at least to substantial surprise when Square-Enix decided not to be jerks about the whole not wanting to make more Hitman games thing, and instead let IO Interactive walk away with the rights to their slap-headed, murderous creation. Credit for that has to go to big boss Yosuke Matsuda, who explained: "I believe it wouldn't be Hitman unless it was Hitman made by IO… I love the game, and I believe the fans of Hitman think it's only Hitman if it's made by IO. So I thought that was the best way for the game to continue, and that's why we were supportive of the MBO and of course didn't mind if they continued to use the IP." Imagine, Bobby Kotick at Activision saying something like that. You can't. Because he's buried under that pile of loot boxes. Shhh, Bobby. Let the darkness come. You're safe now. —Tim Clark

Corporate Bad Guy of the Year

Winner: Also Yosuke Matsuda, Square-Enix

Goddamnit. No sooner had I hung the garland on Matsuda-san than I realised he was also responsible for this year's greatest single moment of villainy: Ignoring the noble and righteous campaign led by our own Wesley Fenlon to have Final Fantasy Tactics finally ported to PC. I mean, I can't be sure this is entirely Matsuda's fault, but I also can't be certain he isn't to blame. So here we are. I mean, c'mon Square. You've jammed every other Fantasy onto Steam except that one about the hot boys riding around chasing chocobo tail in a black cadillac, why the hell can't we have Tactics? It's literally one of the best turn-based strategy games ever made, and would be an absolute delight to play with mouse and keyboard. To be honest, if it was between this and letting the Hitman devs families' starve… —Tim Clark

Also, you can literally fight him in Nier: Automata, which makes him a true (but extremely cool, dammit) bad guy. —Wes Fenlon