Back in the 1990s, in that long-ago Pleistocene era when I was at secondary school, we were taken on a trip to the small Peak District village of Cromford. There, aside from pulling strange faces at bemused locals, we were regaled with stories of noted industrialist Richard Arkwright, who in 1771 snapped up a modest section of land in the village and built a cotton mill. People a lot smarter than me argue this was the birthplace of modern manufacturing - triggering a centuries-long chain that led to the creation of... well, pretty much everything we buy today.

But its significance to the industrial revolution is not why I love Cromford. I love it for something much more prosaic: its fabulous little bookshop.

What a place.

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A short while into What Remains of Edith Finch, you come to a beach. It's night, but you can still make out the silhouette of something, half sunk, against the horizon. You'll probably want to check that out, you think, but not now - no boat, no way to get there, too far out - so along the little beach you go. Waves wash and lap, lights from some other town star the stretch of distant coast, the moon lacquers the ocean, and a memory lingers of the last story you saw, grim and only just finished, in a black tunnel from which you've just emerged. Your diary wonders something aloud: maybe it would be better if this all died with you.

It doesn't, and on you go, through some rubble and nonsensical debris - a totem pole? - through lingering memory, to the path off the beach at the other end. A flight of stairs made of stone, which leads to another flight, made of wood, which leads to wherever you must go next. You walk up the stone stairs and wonder aloud again about your family's obsessions, and about being lost, about the reader, your as yet unborn son, being lost too, and maybe you get a little lost there yourself - because it's dark, and it's hard to see, and there's a jetty that looks promising, half-leading back out to the ink but only ending nowhere. And then you find your way up the wooden stairs which must be the right way but climb, at first, into near total black, another tunnel in the open air. At the top of those stairs, at last, at the end of such a short beach, is light - a gate, waist-high and painted white, which you open and walk through and ignore, hearing more of your thoughts and looking forwards for your next path.

That gate caused such an argument at Giant Sparrow, the studio behind Edith Finch and Unfinished Swan, that it almost reduced Ian Dallas and the team to tears.

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Video games are famously awash with death yet disinclined to think it through, to explore what death means beyond failure and a restart or victory and the spoils. What Remains of Edith Finch is among the most powerful exceptions to the rule. Equal parts speculative fiction anthology and dynastic tragedy, it is the tale of a family destined to die prematurely, as retold by the last surviving member. Like Gone Home multiplied by 13, it gives you the run of a vast house apparently constructed by Dr Seuss, each room containing an object that plunges you into the final moments of its owner.

It's not death that overtakes the Finches, mind you, but their fantasies about death. They are carried off as much by their attempts to imagine the approaching end as by illness and mischance. Sometimes these attempts feel like defeats - I think of Lewis the cannery worker, his chopping block a slowly flourishing continent, hands feeding fish to the blade as he follows his own, daydreaming effigy into the hereafter. And sometimes they feel like a kind of triumph, like a transforming and gladdening of the grey details put across by newspaper clippings and doctor's letters.

Molly, whose demise is the first you'll experience, mischievously pictures herself as the monster under her own bed, hungering for herself. Milton, the artist in the turret, paints himself out of the world with a bow (a sequence that charmingly, and poignantly, references Giant Sparrow's previous game The Unfinished Swan). The saddest parts of the game aren't, for me, the deaths, but the mounting desperation of those left behind, and in particular Dawn, Edith's mother, who locks the house's doors in a bid to quarantine the family curse. In reopening those rooms, you are allowing that pent-up devastation to escape into the sunset, putting it behind you even as darkness falls.

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Top-notch narrative adventure What Remains of Edith Finch will be free to download from the Epic Games Store next week.

Giant Sparrow's critically-acclaimed debut is set to be the next game offered free on Epic's marketplace, for two weeks beginning 10th January.

It'll replace the current freebie, Super Meat Boy, which you have six days still to claim.

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Looking at places to live in games, it would be easy for the most magnificent, pompous and elegant palaces and castles to dominate any appreciation. But there is plenty of room to appreciate those residences that are tucked away, perhaps underrated, that are not major hubs or destinations and that are only subtle intrusions. Some draw a curious sense of attachment from players, eliciting a sense of pseudo-topophilia - a close relationship with a virtual land or place. The resulting effect is sometimes enough to cause the sentiment: if this place were real, I would live there.

Right in the corner of the Hinterlands in Dragon Age: Inquisition is the Grand Forest Villa. Its position in the landscape is not obtrusive or jarring, and in turn makes use of the surrounding Hinterlands as its grounds and gardens. Not only does it look fantastic in its geographical context, the residence fits the medieval-fantasy context, oozing grandeur and splendour. But it also serves a purpose: in the Dragon Age lore, it was built for a special friend of the Arl of Redcliffe to allow him to stay near Redcliffe Castle, but far enough away to not raise eyebrows or induce scandal. Designed to be elegant and bold, the Villa - which is a generous term - would have been a beautiful place to live. Even though there are no obvious living spaces on show to relate to they are there - probably within the thick stone walls that add a strange, yet weirdly complete juxtaposition of woodland villa aesthetic next to defensive fortress.

Its semi-open nature permeates its design. Opening up sides and boundaries has the effect of bringing the outside, inside - nowadays, think about homes that have entire walls made of glass to bring their garden 'inside' - blurring the boundary between indoor luxury and the pleasantness of nature, landscapes and plants. It also opens up expansive and brilliant vistas from the Grand Forest Villa, the importance of which is demonstrated by the design of designated viewing decks or points offering fabulous views over the lush and rolling Hinterlands landscape.

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Seeing as it's fresh from winning the Best Game award at this year's Baftas, we thought it might be a nice moment to return to What Remains of Edith Finch and take another look at a few of the things that make it so very special.

Games thrive on curiosity: we become explorers, burning with the need to know how to beat an enemy, how to overcome obstacles and to see what waits for us around the next corner.

What Remains Of Edith Finch, much like Gone Home before it, limits this exploration to one house and manages to feel incredibly intimate. The house is devoid of life in a literal sense, but it's filled with all the things personal spaces can tell us about people. Their stories are in the items we find.

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Ninja Theory's self-published gamble, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, leads the nominations for the BAFTA video game awards 2018, with nine nods including Best Game. It's been a tremendous success for the British studio, with Hellblade winning both critical acclaim and bringing in more than half-a-million sales.

Sony's PlayStation 4 smash hit Horizon: Zero Dawn follows with eight nominations ahead of Eurogamer's number-two game of the year 2018, What Remains of Edith Finch. Our game of the year, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, has five nods, as does wonderful and inspired puzzle game Gorogoa.

On the four-nod tier are old Disney-inspired platformer Cuphead, Night in the Woods and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. On the three-nod tier: Assassin's Creed Oranges, Monument Valley 2, PUBG and Super Mario Odyssey. On the two-nod tier: Snipperclips, Fortnite, NieR: Automata, The Sexy Brutale and Bury Me, My Love.

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You've read Eurogamer's games of 2017 list, but how did we settle on the top 10? A mixture of science and alcohol, it turns out.

Our top 50 games list was compiled via a voting process. Eurogamer staff and contributors were asked to submit their top 10 games of 2017, and points were distributed accordingly. This process provided us with an initial top 50.

Then, we all popped along to our local here in Brighton to thrash it out, with a particular focus on the top 10. We thought it would be fun to let our dear readers in on the chat (complete with all the swearing - apologies for our filthy mouths).

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