It was inevitable, wasn't it? PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds keeps blasting through milestones for concurrent players: in September it was 1 million, in October it was double that and now, following its Early Access exit, it's hit the three million mark. To put that in perspective, the next highest game, Dota 2, has a record of 1.29 million (although it hasn't broken 1 million since February).

I did read a few headlines earlier this month claiming PUBG had already reached three million, but it turns out they were wrong (and that there were a few fake charts floating around). SteamDB confirmed the achievement earlier today on its Twitter account, and Steam's official stats page is also showing today's peak players at 3,106,358.

The question now is: how high can it go? I suppose numbers are likely to be inflated right now because lots of people have time off of work and school. And as you can tell by the time gaps between the million milestones, its growth is definitely slowing. But I'd be surprised if player numbers tailed off anytime soon. What's the ceiling? 3.5 million? 4 million? (Whisper it) 5 million? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Alongside the concurrent player record it's hit another, more worrisome milestone: 1.5 million players banned. Cheating has been a problem for a long time in PUBG and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. Admittedly, I don't see many hackers in game (perhaps I'm not good enough to get matched with them...), but I see a lot of other players posting videos of cheaters slithering around in the prone position faster than you can normally sprint.

The number of bans was confirmed by BattlEye, the game's anti-cheat service.

The development team promised to do more to combat hacking back in November, saying that it was rolling out new methods for catching cheaters. Clearly, whatever it did was not enough, and if there's anything that could hold back the game then constantly coming up against hackers is it.

When I was a kid I read a lot of books that concealed things within expansive and lush illustrations, like Kit Williams' books, Graeme Base's Animalia and The Eleventh Hour, and a series called For Eagle Eyes Only that briefly convinced me I had special powers because my eyesight was so good. I thought I'd get the same enjoyment from hidden object games, but never quite did. The actual find-the-object bits felt completely disconnected from the stories around them, like afterthoughts (although I did enjoy Nightmares From the Deep, which at least had skeleton pirates).

Hidden Folks finally gave me what I wanted. For starters there's no plot, no story vegetables to click through before you're allowed to eat dessert. But more importantly, the art's hand-drawn in a perfect children's book-style, black and white and full of delight. Tiny people wave from windows, monkeys hide in bushes, curly tailed pigs trot about on a farm. Parts of the scenes react as you click on them, so you can roll up tent flaps or chop down bamboo or send a boat down the river to find a certain person or animal or banana or whatever. 

Every action is accompanied by a noise, and the homemade whimsy of the art is mirrored by the sound effects, which were all made by one of the designers using his mouth. A crocodile delivers a rarrr that sounds like an old man, cars honk at each other by going NOOT NOOT, it's all so damn delightful. Once you've uncovered enough of the hidden stuff you get the option to move on to another level or stay behind and keep playing. You can track down the harder things, every last worm or basket of eggs if you want, or jump ahead if you're getting bored.

Each new area is so much bigger than I expected. They make me exhale like a mechanic about to say, "This'll be a big job." There's jungle and city and a desert hippie gathering that looks like Burning Man only fun. New places have been added in updates, and I'm looking forward to trying out the snow levels soon.

Hidden Folks chucks out the mediocre story and adventure-game puzzles that regular hidden object games pad themselves out with like they're one of those crap salads that's 80 percent lettuce. This is just a game about finding things, getting hypnotized and putting your face as close to the screen as you can while you click around on all the interactive bits. It's like a book that reacts to your desire to see what's concealed behind this bus and around the corner of that house.

And when you find that last person tucked away behind a billboard or inside the mouth of a crocodile you feel like the government's about to come and take you away for secret tests, because you're clearly an extraordinary child with a special gift and your country probably needs you.

Valve News Network reported a couple of weeks ago that the venerable online shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive might be getting a battle royale mode at some point in the future. But modder Kinsi wasn't willing to wait for it to happen, so they went ahead and created one of their own. 

Called Go 4 The Kill—or Go4TK, to save time and space—the mod features a map more than four times the size of Overpass, and three to four times larger than the Source engine normally allows. As Kotaku explains, it accomplishes this feat by breaking its map into sections separated by mountain ranges: Crossing the mountains places you into what is effectively another map, but everything is connected so you can move back and forth seamlessly. Despite the size of the playing field, performance should be roughly equivalent to conventional CS:GO maps because there's very little "'unnecessary' detail," aside from what's required to provide cover for players.

While PUBG is commonly cited as the battle royale standard-bearer, Kinsi said the inspiration for Go4TK came from a different game. "With Go4TK my aim was to combine two games that I like: King of the Kill and CS:GO," they wrote. "It was mainly meant to be a challenge for myself to push the boundaries of whats possible with server-side only CS:GO modding. From the ground up I've carefully handcrafted everything, be it the map in itself or the plugin allowing for the actual gameplay to ensure the best possible integration." 

There are some significant gameplay differences between Go4TK and CS:GO. Bullet drop and travel time are modeled, running will not reduce firing accuracy, weapons have randomized inaccuracy but no recoil patterns, ADS (aim down sight) is very important if you want to hit what you're shooting at, and if you get shot yourself, you'll bleed—and if you don't do something about it, you'll keep on bleeding until you die. It is also, despite being much larger than conventional CS:GO experiences, a smaller-scale experience than PUBG: Kotaku says the maximum player count is 20, while the Go4TK site says players per game is "targeted at 49."

Go 4 the Kill was actually released back in August, and work has continued since. There have been setbacks as well, most notably the shutdown of North American servers in November due to lack of interest. Kinsi said on Twitter that they might be brought back online soon, "thanks to a generous Redditor," although how long they'll be kept around will depend on how much use they see.

Pathologic 2 is one of the games I'm most looking forward to in 2018. It's the remake of creepy adventure game Pathologic, which came out in 2005 and is considered one of the major influences on the modern survival horror genre. The remake smashed its Kickstarter target earlier this year before releasing a suitably weird trailer, and now developer Ice-Pick Lodge has put out a gif-heavy progress update and gone in-depth on many of the game's systems, including combat and autopsies.

First, let's recap what the game actually is: you're a medic trying to save a town in which a plague is running riot (hence the need for all the autopsies). You only have 12 days to do it, and you have eat, drink, and sleep as well as avoid the infection yourself.

So, onto the update. Shooting is not going to be central to the game, but the team want to make sure the guns are weighty, and they're "not yet happy with how it feels", they said in the update. The gif below does look like it needs some refinement, but I like some of the detail in the reload animation, such as the character pulling back the hammer before each shot (click the full-screen icon in the top right to see it in action).

I like the look of the game's looting system, too. Lootable containers are split into several compartments, each of which can behave differently. One might require a key, for example, or one might contain the plague infection, introducing an element of risk.

The autopsy system from the original game has been refined as well. There will be "no more looting bodies as if they were cupboards"—instead there's an 'autopsy interface' that you'll interact with, which basically means you're clicking and dragging organs. Lovely.

The game's reputation system has been similarly tweaked. In the original your global reputation went up and down depending on your actions, but now that's specific to neighborhoods within the town. So, as you move round the map people will react to you in different ways.

Lastly, the team gave an update about the progress of the game's setting. The town is fully built, but around a third of it still needs refinement, and they still need to create abandoned 'burnt-out' districts that were destroyed in an attempt to contain the plague. "The sense of place is arguably one of the most crucial elements for a game like Pathologic 2, so we’re making sure every corner of the Town feels right," the team said.

Clearly there's lots of work still to do, but what they have so far would suggest they're still on track for a 2018 release. For the full, gif-heavy update, click here.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' transition to version 1.0, marking its exit from Early Access, added a fair chunk of content. You can now run around the new desert map, Miramar, shoot new weapons, drive different vehicles and experiment with the climbing system. All good stuff. But unfortunately, some players have had their fun ruined by performance issues, with servers plagued by lag and rubber-banding.

The development team discussed those issues in a blog post yesterday, and rolled out a patch—the first since version 1.0 released—to try and address the problems. Lag and rubber-banding (or "character position readjustment issues", if you prefer), were caused partly by the addition of the new content, as well as an upgrade to the game engine that rolled out alongside it, the team explained.

To fix the problems, they have "removed some inefficiencies in server infrastructure and optimized in-game servers". Specifically, they reduced "the bottleneck during the game server launch phase and also resolved some server hitch issues". The upshot is that you should have less lag next time you log on.

But it doesn't sound like the team are confident the problem has completely gone away. Indeed, they are trying to come up with new ways to address the issue on a daily basis. "After today’s update, we will be running some internal tests and deploying more updates to gradually mitigate the problem," they said. 

"We are currently examining several measures including server optimization and server logic modification to address the multitude of causes. On top of this, we will continue our efforts to further investigate remaining causes."

The patch has also addressed a few game bugs, the largest of which was giving players a disproportionately higher chance of landing on a Miramar server over one running the game's original map, Erangel. I can't say many people were complaining (it's new, after all), but the chances are now 50/50. 

Click here for the full patch notes.   

Absolver's 1v1 brawling is a layer cake, each sheet tasty on its own without overpowering the others. At the bottom are individual moves—drunken twirls, powerful taekwondo kicks, all-or-nothing haymakers—that are chained together with one button. Sweet and simple. Above the moves, multiple dodging and parrying styles, and then a savory customization engine, where attacks can be chained across four stances. I've spent hours just trying out new combos that auto-cycle my stances, sometimes reserving one stance that I manually switch to when I think my opponent has my core moveset figured out. Instead of high kick, low punch, spin, they suddenly get sweeping kick, twirly dodge attack, jumpy kick. Delicious.

Then there are the dances around ledges, where opponents can be shoved or sometimes just psychologically pressured into slipping to their demise—also great, except when you get force pushed by one of Absolver's special moves.

Finally, with all the decorative edible bobbles at the top, Absolver is about fashion. I haven't concerned myself with style in any other game this year as much as I have in Absolver. Though I find the world drab, the characters are sharp dressers, and using masks to express personality without the need for eyebrow sliders is clever and effective. What's more, Absolver has tactical fashion. Clothes have stats, and affect how much damage you take and how much damage you can deliver depending on your fighting style. They tell you about the player you're up against, and what sort of moves they'll bring. Light, airy dress implies a speedy, dodging style. Or does it?

It's vital to time moves to chain them most effectively, but tricky button presses aren't Absolver's primary focus. Absolver is about misdirection and deceit through and through, from how you design your moveset, to which stances you prefer, to how you dress. Fighting games like Street Fighter deal in trickery, too, but more subtly and with more conditions—namely, perfect input execution—and I've rarely felt capable enough in them to compete against good players in a fun way.

In Absolver, on the other hand, I may have gotten my ass kicked regularly (and after some time away, I'm sure my play is now dreadful), but I was always keen to return with a redesigned fighting style and new plan—to adapt as a player but also as a character. It is perhaps in my head. A better player will beat me most of the time, but feeling like I have the opportunity to surprise them or fool them without perfecting inputs as a prerequisite kept me trying again and again. I only stopped playing Absolver because I had so many other games to get to this year. When a quiet moment presents itself, I will be back in the ring, trying out my drunken spins again.

Twitch Plays is a category on Twitch.tv born from the Twitch community's love of chaos and frustration—a love even more powerful than nostalgia for the soothing painting of Bob Ross. In February of 2014, a channel called TwitchPlaysPokémon allowed viewers to enter commands in the chat room that determined buttons pressed in Pokémon Red. It exploded in popularity, pulling in over 100,000 simultaneous viewers and an estimated 10 percent viewer participation rate. The number of total viewers and participants flew above 55 million and 1.16 million respectively over the course of the Pokémon Red playthrough, which took 255 hours of playtime. As you can imagine, a chat room full of thousands of people calling out commands was insane. It was hectic. It created ridiculous mishaps, poorly-named Pokémon, and was completely mesmerizing to those of us that watched. And it worked, agonizing step by agonizing step.

TwitchPlaysPokémon continues to livestream chat playing Pokémon games of every generation to this day. After its success, other channels devoted to chat playing games have cropped up. Twitch chats have played Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Dark Souls, and even chess, overcoming seemingly impossible challenges. These are the best (though not always most successful) times that Twitch chat has collectively played games.

TwitchPlaysPokémon takes down the Elite Four and rival Champion 

Skip to 2 hours, 38 minutes and 47 seconds.

As the original success story, it’s only right to mention TwitchPlaysPokémon first. During the run’s almost 300 hours, TwitchPlaysPokémon sampled every flavor of frustration, failure, and fanaticism. The entire struggle, fraught with scores of unintentionally released Pokémon and navigational woes, leads up to the final battles. After a couple losses, the chat managed to coach Red through defeating every member of the Elite Four. The last challenge, taking on Red’s rival Blue, is anxiety-inducing to watch even now. Commands fly by the right side of the screen too quickly to be read. Chat vacillates between attempting to change Pokémon and use one of the two remaining items in Red’s pockets. Professor Oak, for what may actually be the hundredth time, yells, “Red! This isn’t the time to use that!” Blue’s final Pokémon is his Blastoise. If Red can manage to get his Zapados “AA-j” back in the fight, it will be no contest. After cycling through several other Pokemon, AA-j finally appears on the scene, taking out Blastoise with a single Thundershock.

TwitchPlaysPokémon releases Abby and Jay Leno 

Skip to 4 minutes and 49 seconds

In the early days of TwitchPlaysPokémon, the game was controlled by what was referred to as the anarchy system. In anarchy, every input entered in chat would be executed in order. It was a fast-paced but accident-prone system for getting through the game. Democracy was added later in the initial playthrough, allowing viewers to vote on each input over a number of seconds before an action would be taken. Anarchy, before being tamed by democracy, resulted in some of the worst mistakes and best stories.

While trying to remove a Pokémon from the storage PC, the chat inadvertently released two of its staple party members—known by their nicknames Abby and Jay Leno—into the wild, never to be seen again. Several days later, even after the implementation of democracy, a coordinated group of trolls took over by flooding chat with their own votes and forcing Red to release twelve Pokémon into the wild.This event, referred to (hyperbolically) as Bloody Sunday, was believed to have been caused by the False Prophet Flareon, usurper of Bird Jesus. The False Prophet and Bird Jesus are only the beginning of the shocking amount of lore TwitchPlaysPokémon fans invented to make sense of the utter chaos wrought by the anarchy system. It’s almost inexplicably weird, which is what makes it so fantastic.

TwitchPlaysDark executes Ornstein and Smough

Skip to 3 hours, 43 minutes and 29 seconds.

Succeeding in Dark Souls relies so heavily on timing that TwitchPlaysDark made an important modification to the way its chat-controlled game works. TwitchPlaysDark forces the game to pause after each action while the chat queues up votes for the next one. It makes watching a bit slow at times, but boss fights can still be nail-biting. Near the end of a fight with Ornstein and Smough, TwitchPlaysDark finds itself directly in the path of Smough’s next attack. Chat has depleted its stamina and the next strike from Smough will mean death. Half the chat panics while the other half screams “just walk forward!” With no remaining stamina, TwitchPlaysDark walks straight into Smough’s killing blow, narrowly evading the effective area of attack and recovering just enough stamina in that one moment to swing a killing blow of its own. Seven hundred and six deaths led up to that moment.

TwitchPlaysBattlegrounds earns a first kill with its bare hands

Unlike Dark Souls, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds isn’t a game where the action can be paused for an indecisive hive-mind. The PUBG-playing chat is prone to accidentally dodging bullets and walking itself straight out of the safe zone. Predictably, chat chooses to pick on the only target it can reliably beat. TwitchPlaysBattlegrounds takes out an inactive player with its bare fists. A cheap move, but if single players can get away with it, so should a player controlled by an uncoordinated horde of viewers. Even if unsporting, this was the first kill that TwitchPlaysBattlegrounds pulled off.

TwitchPlaysDark chugs estus in the face of the Asylum Demon

The Asylum Demon is another narrow boss victory for TwitchPlaysDark. Near the end of the fight, the chat chooses to chug its last Estus Flask even as the hammer heads for its face. It rolls back immediately after, evading most of the damage. Heaving a pyromancy flame at the demon just out of range of the following sweep but not far enough to avoid the second swing of the attack, chat finds itself in another sudden death situation. Prone on the ground, the third swing lands just beyond its feet, literal inches from death. Chat throws another flame that should finish off the Asylum Demon. It misses. The hammer is coming down again. They have no Estus Flasks. Chat decides to pull out a hand axe and stand directly in the path of the boss’s swing. It lands, TwitchPlaysDark is flattened, but manages to keep a sliver of health. Chat plants the axe in the Asylum Demon’s gut, claiming a victory it may not have deserved.

I was robbed by the claw machine in clawarcade 

Clawarcade is more unorthodox than the rest of the Twitch Plays category (a high bar to clear) but so addicting. A guy actually bought a claw machine, filled it with stuffed toys, and rigged it up for chat to play with. Unlike other Twitch Plays channels, the claw machine (as of now) accepts each input, rather than polling a group to vote. It’s a small little place where I spent time taking turns with other viewers at snagging prizes. I have yet to win.

Twitch beats a chess grandmaster 

Skip to 1 hour, 17 minutes and 19 seconds.

As part of a promotion for Pure Chess, Ripstone Games pitted Twitch chat against chess grandmaster Simon Williams. Unlike other Twitch Plays streams, moves were carried out manually by Ripstone after chat voted for moves, rather than relying on a chat bot. Although Simon took the first game and won a second game by keeping track of pieces in his head while blindfolded, the chat managed a collective win in the third match, much to everyone’s surprise.

TwitchPlaysBattlegrounds takes out its frustration on the nearest targets

I genuinely thought that TwitchPlaysBattlegrounds wouldn’t manage to pull off kills against any players present at their keyboards. I’ve been proven wrong. All it needed was a team of lemmings willing to take a beating. After initially playing solo, the TwitchPlaysBattlegrounds chat bot started taking on squad matches with other players. Teammates, it turns out, are great targets. In what may be played off as an accident, the PUBG chat (with frying pan in hand) takes a swing at a teammate running in front of it as the whole squad run towards the safe zone together. It’s an instant knockout. The rest of the team, likely believing it was an unintended attack, rallies around to pick up the fallen member. After realizing what it has done, chat mercilessly turns on the rest of the team. It takes out first one teammate, then the other. The initial victim, who the others did manage to revive, runs off before they get another smacking.

Honorable mention: a fish plays Pokémon 

FishPlaysPokémon, though now inactive, originally followed on the heels of TwitchPlaysPokémon’s success. One fish (His name is Grayson, thank you for asking) spent days playing Pokémon Red. Though equally unpredictable, Grayson was ultimately less successful than a chat room full of viewers. Despite repeated false fish death alarms, Grayson soldiered on. Though he does not quite qualify as “Twitch Plays”, his dedication deserves mention.

Clichés dominate visual novels, but there’s so much more to this genre than just steamy romance or mundane slices of Japanese students’ lives. Over the past few years, more and more talented developers are creating experimental games, shorter novella-like experiences, and clever subversions of the anime tropes that started it all. Visual novels are finally cool.

Choosing where to start can be intimidating, however. If you’ve missed the boat up until this point and want to catch up, we’ve put together a list of the best visual novels on PC, from the traditional Japanese games that kickstarted the genre to the more ambitious and unique takes on the format. 

It’s by no means a comprehensive list of every visual novel you should play, and we heartily recommend you scour through itch.io for its hidden indie gems under the visual novel tag. But if you’re looking to get started, these are the best visual novels on PC.

Clannad 

Developer: KeyRelease date: November 23, 2015Link: Steam page

Only released on PC in the West just a couple of years ago, Clannad is one of the most popular visual novels ever—spawning an anime, a film, manga, and even an audio drama. It tells the story of Tomoya Okazaki, a “delinquent” (Clannad’s words, not mine) struggling with an existential crisis. He meets Nagisa Furukawa, another “delinquent” who he resonates with, and they begin working together to restart the school drama club, enlisting other students along the way. 

Clannad is the place to go if you like the stereotypes of visual novels. It was originally released in 2004, and perfectly shows the merits of the genre even if it feels like familiar territory at this point. Where visual novels shine is in strong writing, interesting characters, and a perspective that can draw you in. Even without the bells and whistles of modern visual novels, Clannad does exactly that.

It’s a story about a young man learning how making his own happiness. Tomoya’s story can be seen as analogous to depression, and yet it doesn’t quite fall into the trap of manic pixie dream girls, but of finding something in a life marked by tragedy. It may seem cliché, but that’s not because it’s unoriginal: it’s because people have been copying Clannad for over a decade.

The Nonary Games/Zero Time Dilemma (the Zero Escape series) 

Developer: Spike ChunsoftRelease date: March 24, 2017Link: Steam page 

If you enjoy getting your hands dirty with puzzles, the Zero Escape series is perhaps your best bet. There are three games in this series: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Virtue’s Last Reward; and Zero Time Dilemma. The first two were only ported to PC in 2017 (with remastered visuals and new voice acting), as a pack called The Nonary Games, while Zero Time Dilemma stands on its own.

In each game, nine people are locked in a place by a mysterious figure using the name Zero. They’re each fitted with watches that each display a number, and told that they must escape whatever place they’re in by working through puzzles contained by nine doors. It all gets a bit Saw-like when people start dying in gruesome ways, such as acid showers and bombs inserted into people’s stomachs.

You’re not just reading the whole time, either. Point-and-click segments challenge you to solve puzzles to escape through each door. Some of these puzzles get pretty difficult as you go on, like having to decipher an unknown language made of symbols. They never feel like a cop-out, there’s rarely anything as simple as having to solve a Tower of Hanoi puzzle for the umpteenth time.

Zero Escape is grim, but the story is fascinating and well told. Choices you make result in different endings, and the games play into it in a way no other visual novel really has. The way that you, the player (as opposed to you, the character), can have knowledge that characters don’t, in a form of dramatic irony, is executed brilliantly when you have different timelines and endings to consider.

Ladykiller in a Bind 

Developer: Love Conquers All GamesRelease date: October 10, 2016Link: Steam page

The full title of Ladykiller in a Bind is ‘My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress as Him and Now I Have to Deal with a Geeky Stalker and a Domme Beauty Who Want Me in a Bind!!’ But try to forget that. As a somewhat traditionally styled visual novel, Ladykiller in a Bind is about socially manipulating a bunch of lusty teenagers. The setting is what rich kids might call a school trip and the rest of us might call a once-in-a-lifetime holiday on a cruise. You’re The Beast, a lesbian who isn’t shy from flirting or going back to the bedroom. The Beast has been forced by her twin brother, a manipulative asshole, to pretend to be him for mysterious reasons on this cruise where she wants to be sleeping around, but must keep up appearances so as not to arouse suspicion.

Social manipulation is the name of the game, choosing the rights words and phrases in the midst of conversation to maintain your disguise as your twin brother while also trying to get with every woman on the cruise. This mix of social manipulation and playing an asshole (who is, in herself, pretending to be even more of an asshole) is executed brilliantly, and, if you choose to, results in more than a few steamy scenes with other students.

Ladykiller in a Bind is an unquestionably adult game. Although you can turn sex scenes off and hide nudity, you get to know those characters much more intimately in what are genuinely well-written sex scenes—none of the fluff you found knocking about your aunt’s bookcase.

Steins;Gate

Developer: 5pb.Release date: September 8, 2016Link: Steam page

Steins;Gate is a tale of time travel that explores the complicated web of cause and effect. Rintarō Okabe, a mad scientist who acts as the protagonist, has created a time machine where he can send text messages into the past. Using it, he and others begin to work towards improving the future by influencing past actions.

Twisting, branching paths are a staple of the visual novel genre—the Zero Escape series explores how it can be used to great effect too—but Steins;Gate’s use of time travel gets wild. Cause and effect become tangled, the actions of the future affect the past and plunge characters into totally unforseen situations. All sorts of major things can change depending on if you just answer your phone.

The story never becomes too confusing, thankfully, and Steins;Gate makes every ending count, even the ones where you royally screwed up. Because of that, you see all the characters in a variety of ways, from their best to their worst. Afterwards, they feel fleshed out in a way that would otherwise be impossible.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc 

Developer: Spike ChunsoftRelease date: February 18, 2016Link: Steam page

It’s likely that Danganronpa is at least partially responsible for the growing popularity of visual novels outside of Japan. Similarly to Zero Escape, it combines visual novel elements with puzzle solving as a group of students realize that Japan’s most prestigious private school is actually a murderous battle royale of wits. 

To escape, a student must murder another and then survive a courtroom trial held by their peers. Once other students begin murdering each other, as protagonist Makoto Naegi it’s your job to gather clues, question suspects, present your case, and find the culprit. 

The court cases aren’t just a series of dialogue choices but literal shootouts. Armed with truth bullets, each of which represent a bit of evidence you’ve found, you can back up or refute claims from other students. If you find the murder weapon, for example, you can refute a student who says there’s no weapon by shooting the text as it crosses the screen. You’ve got to pay attention, watching for gaps in logic and working out which piece of evidence proves you’re right.

All of the writing and character designs are funny, a contrast to the grim atmosphere of a game about students murdering each other in fits of desperation, with the mysterious and antagonistic Monobear egging them on in crueler and crueler ways. It’s an utterly absurd cast, but sitting them next to such a dark setting highlights how well they’re all written.

Simulacra 

Developer: Kaigan GamesRelease date: October 26, 2017Link: Steam page 

The visual novel genre isn’t quite as limiting as it may seem, and Simulacra is one of the best examples of how it doesn’t quite have to fit the style you might expect. It’s described as a “found phone” game, a genre that has recently become somewhat popular with games like Bury Me, My Love and A Normal Lost Phone. 

You find a phone on your doorstep, which you soon discover was owned by a woman called Anna, who has gone missing. A short video which she filmed shortly before her disappearance implies something evil is afoot, with glitches and jumpcuts in the video designed to unsettle you. All of the videos and images have these subtle touches. From interface to the selfie perspective videos, the attention to detail is amazing.

Over time, you get to text her friends, go through her social media profiles, even speak to the people she was flirting with on a dating app. It’s all incredibly upsetting. Simulacra will constantly push you further into the realm of voyeurism, asking how far you’re willing to go into this woman’s life to maybe, just maybe, save her life. 

The story is only a few hours long, and there’s multiple endings depending on if you succeed in your goals. You can pretend to be Anna, questioning her friends while trying to emulate what personality you can gleam from her texts, or be open, an honest voice in trying to search for Anna. Turn down the lights, turn off your phone, and settle in for a night of amateur voyeuristic detective work for this one, because it’s worth that added atmosphere. 

Long Live The Queen 

Developer: Hanako GamesRelease date: November 8, 2013Link: Steam page

While this slot could have been taken by a number of games from Hanako, Long Live The Queen is by far their most successful in every sense of the word. It puts you in control of a princess soon to be coronated and become the queen. Oh, and she's just a kid. 

It sounds cute, but other people want that throne for themselves, and are willing to do anything to obtain it—including murder a 14-year-old girl. With her coronation 40 weeks away, it's your job to guide her through day-to-day life and make sure she survives.

Through the game, you’ll pick her studies and control aspects of her life, molding this princess into a queen, giving her the skills to rule both with grace and bravery. Like Crusader Kings 2 or Dwarf Fortress, Love Live the Queen is a wonderful game for creating anecdotes as your run will almost certainly come to an end with a grisly but funny fate. It's not necessarily about surviving the 40 weeks as much as it is filling in the pockets of subtext with your own imagination. There’s plenty of depth to it, too. As whether your live or die is not quite as simple as a random roll of the dice, and there’s all sorts of stats to manage and micromanage as the weeks pass.

VA-11 Hall-A

Developer: Sukeban GamesRelease date: June 21, 2016Link: Steam page

VA-11 Hall-A takes the perspective of a bartender in a dystopian future, giving you a unique view on life as you see people at both their best and their worst, their highs and lows.

There’s a lot to the world of VA-11 Hall-A (which is further revealed in 2064: Read Only Memories, a phenomenal point-and-click game from a different developer but in the same world), but VA-11 Hall-A focuses purely on the stories of your various patrons. In Glitch City, corporations and the White Knights impose law through nanomachines and violence, a constant surveillance state where the mythologized independence of a virtual future left a long time ago.

Of course, as the bartender, you’re hearing the voices of the people when they’re not under surveillance. The gossip, the personal stories, the fears and dreams and desires of the people. Where Simulacra is voyeuristic, VA-11 Hall-A makes you feel privileged that these people are opening up to you over a cocktail you’ve made from cyberpunk alcohol.

Because of this quite candid approach to storytelling, VA-11 Hall-A isn't a singular narrative rather than a series of vignettes into the lives of dystopian dwellers. That window is impermanent, however, as each visit will always be overshadowed by the real possibility that they might never return.

The Yawhg

Developer: Damian Sommer, Emily CarrollRelease date: May 30, 2013Link: Steam page

Sometimes a game half fits a genre and half doesn’t. The Yawhg is one such game. It's a choose-your-own-adventure for up to four local players, each of which plays a character in a town that, in six weeks, will be destroyed by the Yawhg. 

The townsfolk and your characters don’t know that the Yawhg is coming, but you, the player, do. Will you go about your day to day life normally? Or will you ring the bell, calling for the people of this town to flee as a prophet? Each decision can have dramatically different consequences.

The Yawhg bends the conventions of visual novels but still shares the same heart for storytelling, which is why it's on this list. You’re offered scenes that act more as prompts for you and friends than paragraphs of text, with both gorgeous art and a fantastic soundtrack to act as your backdrop.

That makes The Yawhg unique here, as all of the other games push you into a persona that’s already been made while The Yawhg calls you to create your own. There’s 50 endings in total, and none of them are the ‘true’ ending, just one of many options depending on the choices you and your friends make. The situations created by the game are interesting, surprising, and leave the perfect amount of room for players to add their own spin on things. The Yawhg is a prime example of how a visual novel can do wild things, and perhaps also the place to go for a tabletop RPG-like experience.

Dishonored 2 was easily my favourite game of last year, and so it's little surprise that I enjoyed this standalone expansion so much. In many ways it's a similar prospect—a bunch of new Dishonored 2-style levels (and even a returning old one), offering more opportunities to stalk through Karnaca, offing jerks. Good, but not revelatory. And yet, it goes further, switching up exactly the right things to make the action feel meaningfully different. It's a great example of an efficient expansion: more of the same, but also something new.

Billie Lurk is the perfect character to lead this epilogue. The main Dishonored games centre around fundamentally sheltered people coming into the squalor of common life—experiencing it in some cases for the first time. Focusing on the murkier characters of Dishonored's story—primarily Daud and Billie—gives the expansion stories a new context, making them an important tool for fleshing out the world. To Emily, for instance, the witches are a threat—an enemy to overcome. But Billie has history with the faction, which lets Arkane reframe your sympathies as more insidious forces take control.

My play style in Death of the Outsider was more lethal than in any previous Dishonored game, and for what I perceived as justifiable story reasons. The expansion facilitated that switch by doing away with the Chaos system. It made sense to do: Billie's influence in the world is less obvious than Corvo or Emily, and her personality has already been forged in betrayal and bloodshed. Again: a small systemic tweak, but one that's rooted in the story being told, that encourages you to try something different.

That's also achieved through Billie's powers. She has fewer options than Corvo or Emily, but her power recharges without the need for vials of blue magic juice. The resource management element is clearly something Arkane felt was important for the main game. But for this shorter, more focused story, it's nice to be set free. To see a space and have the freedom to attempt whatever tactic your toolset allows, without the worry of its consequences down the road.

It's not all clever tweaks, though. Death of the Outsider also features some brilliant environments—missions that, in some instances, rival Dishonored 2's. The bank heist is a standout. After spending a huge chunk of time in the surrounding environment during the day, you return at night to break into Karnaca's most secure bank. It's a brilliant sequence, full of ingenious infiltration methods and different options depending on what strands of the space you pick away at. It's easily my favourite level from anything this year.

It was a toss up whether my personal pick this year would be Death of the Outsider or Prey. Each offered a different take on the immersive sim concept—Prey taking the System Shock approach, while Death of the Outsider built from Dishonored's more Thief-style systems. And each had some significant problems—for Outsider, the last mission's new enemy type made working through that space a chore. But, in both cases, the positives outweigh the negatives. I think Death of the Outsider is marginally my favourite, right here, right now. But Prey is the one I'm more likely to replay—and will doubtless enjoy more on a second go through. In a year when pure singleplayer experiences have struggled commercially, both deserve your attention and time.

Disclaimer: One of the writers for Death of the Outsider, Hazel Monforton, is a contributor to PC Gamer.

Our Best Open World Game 2017 is Assassin's Creed Origins. Find the rest of our GOTY awards and personal picks here. 

Chris Livingston: I initially had reservations about how the world is divided up into level-appropriate areas that mean you'll get instakilled if you stray across the wrong border. It has a very MMO feel to it, where a common soldier in one part of the world is an easily-killable goon, and the same soldier in a different region is a nigh-invulnerable war machine. The splendor of Origins' Egypt, however, and the staggering breadth of its world, is enough to overcome the limitations of this kind of design. At any given time there are plenty of level-appropriate areas to explore, and even if you blunder into a zone where you're outmatched, with a bit of caution you can usually still see all the sights and visit the landmarks you're after.

Tom Senior: I'm still playing Assassin’s Creed Origins even though there’s so much in it that I actually dislike. I don't like the fighting; I find the levelling constraints restrictive outside of the fast-moving opening ares; the crafting system is wearying and familiar. But I happily put up with it all because Egypt is a huge, gorgeous space to explore, even on a horse that loves to ram pedestrians as it tries to auto-path through the game’s dusty little villages.

Fly over the realm with your eagle and you see deserts, farms, mountains, and Egypt’s extraordinary historical monuments scattered across the horizon. What other Assassin's Creed game has this variety? Then with a button press you drop back into Bayek and realise that every inch of it is packed with detail, right down to the flaking painted designs on every pillar.

Andy Kelly: It was clever of Ubisoft to set Origins in the twilight years of Ancient Egypt, rather than the romantic golden age we all imagine when we think of pyramids and pharaohs. This is arguably a more interesting period of history, with Greek and Roman influence sweeping in and changing the culture. And it makes for a stunning open world, with fading Egyptian cities like Memphis contrasting with the gleaming, statue-lined streets of newer settlements such as Alexandria. Origins' world is vast, offering a greater sense of adventure and exploration than the closed-in cities of other Assassin's Creed games, and it never stopped amazing me across the 30 hours it took me to finish it.

Samuel Roberts: I've always felt Assassin's Creed has had impressive settings, but not particularly distinctive ones—they trailed far behind the likes of Rockstar and Bethesda's open worlds for me, with streets that felt like they were repeating themselves. Like Andy says, maybe it's the closed in cities of previous games that created this impression, but by comparison, Origins' setting is staggering—the variety across the world, and that feeling of vastness, is unlike anything Ubisoft has brought to life before. It's so rare to find games that have a real sense of journey to them. While the series' trademark busywork remains in Origins, it's worth playing just to experience this setting.

Check out Chris's review of Assassin's Creed Origins.