Lothric is our favourite game setting of the year. GOTY gongs are chosen by PC Gamer staff through voting and debate. We'll be posting an award a day leading to Christmas, along with personal picks from the PCG team. Keep up with all the awards so far here.   

Andy Kelly: No one makes evocative fantasy worlds quite like From Software, and Lothric is one of its most haunting, beautiful creations yet. It's a bleak, broken place, like a faded memory of an idyllic fairytale world. Lothric Castle, which looms impressively in the distance, gives you a fleeting glimpse of the beauty and grandeur this world once had before it was overrun by demons, dragons, and the undead. From are also masters at telling stories through the worlds they build, and Lothric is rich with an arcane history that's revealed through its statues, architecture, and shrines. The evil-tainted Cathedral of the Deep, with its sinister sculptures of weeping women, is a highlight, and every step you take into it is more intimidating than the last. And the unforgettable introduction to the eerie, desolate Irithyll of the Boreal Valley is one of the best moments in the Souls series.

James Davenport: Irithyll’s introduction is unforgettable. One of the most gorgeous vistas in games, peaceful and shimmering under a soft moon. Then a giant ratdog chases you across a bridge. But if you survive, ghosts walk the streets, elegant warriors and witches from a bygone era lash out, and as you venture further into the city, the architecture begins to feel familiar. It should. Dark Souls has always done this, foregoing generic environmental design in favor of building out the history of entire civilizations in how a building looks and the posture and dress of statuary. Where most games fill out their world with light set decoration, it’s rare to encounter anything in Dark Souls 3’s world that doesn’t carry meaning.

Tim Clark: I finally popped my Souls cherry this year. Having spent a ridiculous amount of time reading about the games, I was already fascinated by From Software’s esoteric approach to world building, and diving into Dark Souls 3 didn’t disappoint. As James noted around release, all the talk of how hard the series is actually does it a disservice, but one welcome side-effect of the harshness is that it opens up your synapses to the decrepit beauty of the environments. If you’re expecting death by spectacular evisceration around every corner, then you inevitably start paying closer attention to what those corners look like. Lothric is a world that feels left behind. It’s the fantasy equivalent of a seaside tourist town out of season—faded grandeur, now abandoned by all but the mad and the bad. I don’t pretend to understand the lore and its implications, but you absorb the Dark Souls vibe by osmosis regardless. It was definitely the setting I most enjoyed inhabiting this year. If enjoyed is really the right word.

Wes Fenlon: We know what Dark Souls looks like now, after three games. There will be a sprawling city of the undead, an incredible, towering castle, a swamp of puke and pus. These are familiar sights, and Dark Souls 3 isn't as varied as its predecessor Dark Souls 2. But it feels so much more like a cohesive vision, and much of its familiarity is actually intentional, imbued with meaning connected back to the vague history of this place fans know from playing Dark Souls 1. There's an intentional cycle at play here, blurring sights new and old. You can almost feel the creator of this world saying this is the last time I will return to this place, with all the weight and passion that entails. There's some melancholy, but mostly a team liberated from the confines of old technology making a world as exactly as majestic—and disturbing and disgusting—as they've always wanted it to be.

For more Dark Souls 3 coverage, here's our review, and here are the reasons why this game pulled Andy Kelly into the series properly for the first time.

Day of Infamy, the Second World War-based standalone expansion to the 2014 FPS Insurgency, is now in "Early Access beta." That means new features including stats and rankings, the unit system, air support, new game modes, visual updates, a whole mess of bug fixes, and a fresh new trailer to mark the moment. 

It seems like something of an arbitrary step, since Day of Infamy was, and is, available for purchase as an Early Access release. Regardless of what it's called, this update is a big step forward: The introduction of rankings means that players will now earn cosmetic Unit items when they rank up, and character models will display the appropriate rank patches on their arms. All factions now have access to the "Carpet Bombing" option, while the US can call in Mustang strafing runs, and the Germans can deploy Stuka dive bomber attacks. 

Developer New World Interactive has also rolled out "First Wave" Units, one per faction, that will be available exclusively to Early Access players: The Gordon Highlanders for the Commonwealth, the 1st Ranger Battalion for the US, and the 1.Infanterie Division for Germany. Fallschirmjäger, 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions, and the 92nd "Buffalo Soldiers" Infantry Division are in development, and Canadian, Australian, and Indian regiments are also planned. 

Day of Infamy looked quite promising when we got our hands on it over the summer, and hopefully the move to beta will continue to carry it in the right direction. A full breakdown of changes and new content in the beta release is available here, although a few changes have been made since then in a hotfix that came out today. Day of Infamy is currently 25 percent off as part of the Steam Winter Sale, dropping it to $15/£11/€14 until January 2.

Blue Yeti, our pick as the best microphone, normally sells for $129. However, we spotted it on sale at Amazon for a low $89, and it comes with a download code for Watch Dogs 2 to boot.

We like the Blue Yeti for several reasons, not the least of which is that it offers excellent audio quality, even under less-than-ideal conditions. The foam padding on the bottom doesn't do much to deafen desk vibrations, but the shape makes it generally easy to find a place to plop it with little hassle.

One of the best aspects of the Blue Yeti is that it is great at picking up audio as you jostle around. Who wants to sit perfectly still while podcasting? Compared to other mics we tested, the Blue Yeti does a superior job at recording great sounding audio without having to speak directly into it.

The Blue Yeti isn't the best microphone out there, but for the price, it's an excellent choice. That's especially true now that it's on sale and comes with a free game.

Go here to grab the Blue Yeti microphone and Watch Dogs 2 bundle.

There's no place like home for the holidays, and if you've made a home on Ark: Survival Evolved's incredibly dangerous dinosaur-filled island, here's a present for you. Patch 253 has arrived, and with it some new dinosaurs, some new locations, and a new item: the camera. Plus, you might catch a glimpse of Raptor Claus as he flies above the island dropping presents for the next week as part of Ark's second annual Winter Wonderland event.

The patch, which is now live, adds two new underwater caves containing artifacts and challenges. You may find an additional peril in visiting them, however, due to some dangerous new sea creatures like the Cnidaria Omnimorph (a large glowing jellyfish) and the fearsome Tusoteuthis Vampyrus, a giant squid capable of grabbing you with its crushing tentacles and sucking the blood out of you.

There are a few new land-based dinos as well, such as a T-Rex-sized herbivore called Therizinosaurus Multiensis that promises to be useful for harvesting greens, and the Troodon Magnanimus, which may be a bit smaller than a raptor but is reportedly much smarter.

If you spot one of the new dinos (or Santa), you can now snap a photo. A camera has been added to Ark, allowing you to take pictures and apply the image to an in-game canvas, for a lovely keepsake of your adventures.

In less joyful news, Studio Wildcard has confirmed that the sci-fi themed TEK Tier update has been delayed until patch 254, which is currently planned for January. So those lasers you were planning to mount on your T-Rex's head? You're gonna have to wait a little longer for 'em.

For those who aren't playing but want to, though, there is good news in that Ark is currently part of the Steam Winter sale and can be had for $12.

When trying to come up with a game to play for a holiday feature, Cities: Skylines seemed a natural choice. With February's Snowfall DLC, my city can be blanketed with frost and dusted by blizzards. With a few custom assets, some of my city's houses will have Christmas lights. There's a player-created map called Christmas Island and a theme called The North Pole.

Best of all, since Skylines let you rename things, I can pick a citizen, rename him Santa, rename his house The North Pole, and rename his workplace Santa's Workshop. And, with the Natural Disasters DLC installed and cranked as high as it will go, I can see if I can protect my new Santa from dying as the result of earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and meteor strikes! It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, provided Christmas explodes a lot.

My rules are to only use a single square of map: it would be easy to mitigate disaster by buying additional map tiles and leaving them empty, increasing the chances of disasters hitting unpopulated areas. I'm not using any money cheats, and I'll play until my city reaches a population of 20,000 residents, otherwise known as a Capital City, or until Santa is killed in a natural disaster. (If Santa dies of natural causes, I'll replace him with an heir.) 

I begin my game. Before long, houses begin springing up, and before longer, I spot one of the modded homes with holiday decorations. Living within are a family of five, so I name one adult Santa Claus and one Mrs. Claus, before noticing both of the adults are men. So, I change Mrs. Claus to Mr. Claus.

My chosen Santa is 33, uneducated, and works at a factory called Garments Unlimited, which I quickly rename to Santa's Workshop. I watch him drive to and from work in a red sports car—I guess Santa is doing OK for himself—then set about my task: protecting him from natural disasters at all costs. I build an emergency shelter right next door to his house, and lay out an evacuation route that will ensure a bus will pick him and his family up (at the expense of everyone else in the city) and bring him to the nearby shelter when disaster strikes. 

Roughly fifteen seconds after I've got the shelter in place, the town's first disaster occurs. I'm notified that a sinkhole is "about to happen." It's alarming, really. I'd been thinking about fires and storms and earthquakes, but a sinkhole? That could swallow up Santa, his family, and his house in one gulp.

Thankfully, it only swallows up some commercial properties about eight blocks away. Three buildings succumb, and 22 people are killed. None of them are magical toy-delivering elves, however, just non-enchanted normals. Whew!

As I continue building my city, I check in on Santa periodically, at one point finding him sitting outside a convenience store looking at his phone. See, Santa is just like us.

Sadly, I've paid so much attention to Santa's happiness and preservation by building parks, a doctor's office, a fire station, and police station all within a block of him, that his home levels up. That means it no longer has Christmas lights all over it, which feels quite a bit less festive. On the plus side, I build the massive Disaster Response Unit right behind his house. I also make a tiny district just for Santa's home, so I can assign it—and thus him—rescue chopper priority. With all these protective services surrounding St. Nick, I feel confident that I'm poised to whisk him to safety when something goes wrong.

There's one thing I can't protect against, however: Santa is getting older due to the curse of time. Years have passed while I've been growing my city, and he's already 65 and retired from the Workshop. I choose Piper, his eldest child, to serve as Santa Jr.

Another disaster strikes. This time it's an earthquake. Again, it's a good distance away from Santa's house, but it causes several fires throughout the city, a few buildings collapse, and a great chasm scars the earth. A few minutes later, observant mayor that I am, I notice that every single house in town has raw sewage backing up into it: the quake broke the pipes leading to the river where I festively dump the town's collective poop water. It's a quick fix. The earthquake, by the way, destroyed 12 buildings and killed 35 people.

Just as I've got everyone's toilets working properly again, a house catches fire. It's right outside the Disaster Response Unit building, directly across the street from Santa's house. The fire department is still putting out fires from the earthquake, and I don't want to take chances, so I activate the emergency shelter. Santa himself is visiting a convenience store at the time so he misses the bus, but at least this gives me a chance to see how his children react in a crisis.

Piper, Santa's heir, reacts by moving completely out of town. I quickly assign Santa's son Charles as the new heir by changing his name to Santa Jr. 2, but I notice he stays home during the emergency, rather than walking thirty feet to the shelter. That won't do. I rename him Idiot Santa Failure Jr., and instead tap Santa's other son, 20-year-old Raymond, the duties of heir, since he is wise enough to head to the shelter. 

So far, I'm feeling pretty confident. Santa is aging, but safe, and I've got a backup with a good head on his shoulders. My town is steadily growing and I'm doing well with my buget. I feel like I've reached 'not a creature is stirring' levels of comfort in my city.

That's when the meteor hits.

Ho-ho-oh-no. Tomorrow, in Part 2, we'll dig through the rubble to see just how bad things suddenly got for Santa City.

It took almost ten years for D-Pad Studio to make Owlboy, "the retro-styled sidescroller you didn’t realize you needed." That's a hefty investment of time and effort by any measure. But D-Pad programmer Jo-Remi Madsen said in a recent AMA on Reddit that he doesn't mind too much if people pirate the game rather than pay for it, because sometimes that's the only way they can get their hands on it at all. 

"When it comes to piracy, we're certainly not cracking down on anything, we're very happy people get the chance to play the game. Through torrent, the game has a chance to become available to people who, say, live in countries where it isn't easy to even buy games (maybe Steam doesn't support their currency, or they just don't carry credit cards)," Madsen wrote. "I'd still wish for those to be able to experience Owlboy. Right now, pirating the game is the best alternative they have, as it's totally open to anyone with a sturdy internet connection. Since we're not a big company, it doesn't impact us in the way it would AAA." 

Steam is the undisputed king of digital platforms, he said in a separate post, but GOG's DRM-free approach has some upsides too. "I don't have any numbers when it comes to piracy, but I do know that some people who did pirate it, went on to become die-hard fans, spreading the word on the game, which leads to more sales," he wrote. "I've never pirated myself, but situations sure can vary from country to country during hard economic times. My only wish is for people to continue playing and enjoying the game, through whatever means necessary." 

D-Pad isn't an especially well-heeled studio: Madsen said that half of the team stayed as his parents' house, rent-free, for more than half of the game's lengthy development period. "We've had VERY few expenses, most businesses would not be able to run at a normal pace with the assets that we've maintained," he explained. "Most of our trips have been covered because we've held presentations, or we've simply applied for funding (my country, Norway, is awesome like that)." 

But now, with Owlboy successfully released—and quite good—the studio has "enough funding now to continue making games, and we owe it to no-one but ourselves, my folks and our fans." Piracy or not, you really can't ask for a better outcome than that.

Owlboy is currently on sale for $20/£15/€18 on Steam and GOG. 

Maybe you've heard of our tiny piece of Counter-Strike history: a map called de_dust_pcg. It was released back in 2005 as a collaboration between Dave Johnston, the creator of the original Dust, and PC Gamer—thus the title, right? As Johnston explains in this blog post, it was originally created as a tutorial for the mag, and so "it never quite got the attention and iteration that Dust and Dust 2 benefited from." But now it's getting a second chance, as 3kliksphilip has ported it from Counter-Strike: Source to CS:GO, and also put up a nice video overview of its history and the changes that were required to make the new version work.

"Retrospectively I’m surprised at some of the choices I made, and the choices the layout exposes to players," Johnston wrote. "The map clearly doesn’t have the same depth of gameplay as Dust 2, sitting closer to the original Dust in terms of size and complexity—perhaps it could be considered Dust 0.8 if these things were numbered in such a way. I’m still unsure if the dropped bomb spot was a good idea, but it was certainly fun to try it." 

As a tutorial in a magazine, the map didn't get the iteration that Dust and Dust 2 did, but it also reflects the different priorities of that era, when the focus was on lowering the barriers to entry rather than "the all-important metagames that help enshrine longevity." Gamers these days are more tolerant of complex map layouts, Johnston said, while modern game engines are better equipped to "recreate and then exploit properties of [the] real world to guide players around the virtual world." Because of that, he concluded, de_dust_pcg "will probably leave most CS:GO players wanting a little... well, more." 

Maybe so, but it's free, which is a big selling point, and an interesting piece of videogame history to boot. It's available via the Steam Workshop, and 3klikphilip's own site lists some servers running it. And if you want to play around with the original de_dust_pcg files in the Hammer editor, you can grab them up here. 

I came late to the Kentucky Route Zero party. So late, in fact, that I was only barely aware of it until the summer of 2014. My inauguration was a long time coming—I'd lost count of the number of glowing reviews I'd read for the first three of a proposed five acts, and while I reckoned it sounded like my cup of tea on a cursory level, I'd decided its narrative-leaning nature would echo that of Gone Home, Dear Esther, and The Stanley Parable. 

These were (and still are) some of my favourite games, therefore I can't really tell you why it take me quite so long to join Conrad, Blue and old-timer Joseph in the forecourt of the Equus Oils station, but that it just did. It turns out Kentucky Route Zero is nothing like Fullbright, The Chinese Room or Galactic Cafe's seminal works. Kentucky Route Zero is like no other game I've ever played. 

Which feels like a strange thing to say about a game whose story isn't finished. Of those five planned acts, developer Cardboard Computer released its first three between January 2013 and May 2014. It wasn't until July of this year that Act 4 landed, and its fifth and final chapter is without a due date entirely. This year has been a questionable one for a number of reasons, yet it's been a very good 12 months for videogames. Nevertheless, my favourite game of 2016 is Kentucky Route Zero's penultimate episode—a small portion of a game which on its own makes little sense, but against what's come before it is arguably the most important.

In a sense, KRZ's fourth act is the runt of its litter. It tells a similarly disparate tale which pays no less deference to storytelling, self-reflection, and the series' Americana lineage; but its structure, tone and outlook is distinctly less overwrought compared to its forerunners. It feels like the calm before the storm as it swaps the open road for life at sea—yet how it turns itself inward to better examine the quirks of its idiosyncratic cast is nothing short of wonderful.  

Choices again govern the direction of the story, yet, this time more than ever, outline its past. Every decision carries weight, and can vastly alter you and the character you've vouched for's outlook. Likewise, interlacing narratives is a series staple among its cast of interchangeable and equally playable characters, yet number four spends much of its time exploring these networks further still. This in turn prompts a shift in tone: one which eschews the familiar dread of previous installments to instead focus on the minutiae of each scenario—the personalities, the foibles, the less obvious imperfections of this broadly dysfunctional, or, at the very least, disjointed, crew. 

It's difficult to dwell on what Kentucky Route Zero does best because it's how you play it that matters. While each game will typically wind up with similar conclusions, how you get there is what makes it interesting—something which is interminably subject to change. Sidestepping the open road, the gospel churches, the bureaucracy of the Big City, and replacing it with the Mark Twain-esque story-focussed lazy Echo river is a masterstroke which sets the stage for the series' fifth and closing act. By dwelling on its specifics, its relatable vignettes, and its whimsical anecdotes and metaphors, Act 4 is perhaps the least developed of the lot as far as overarching narrative in concerned, but is nonetheless crucial to the story's progression.       

The indie renaissance, for want of a less hackneyed term, of the last several years has opened the door to games like Kentucky Route Zero—yet at the same time KRZ is a game which recaptures the text-heavy, parser-reliant classics of yesteryear. With a stunning, minimalist art style, Kentucky Route Zero is a story-heavy game whereby you're as much the author as you are the reader and the player. Act 4 not only serves to frame its curtain call, but also celebrates all that's come before it.

Recently pushed back from this year to next, Watch Dogs 2's T-Bone DLC now has its very own trailer ahead of its January 24 PC release. 

As the name likely suggests, the hack 'em up's first portion of added material is centred around Raymond 'T-Bone' Kenney—a supporting character who starred in the first game. It comes with his outfit, a new Mayhem co-op challenge mode, a new Grenadier enemy type and, um, a school bus customised with a bulldozer blade that our star man has seemingly misplaced. Look, see:

"Watch Dogs 2’s 1.06 title update has just been released across all platforms. This and previous patches were an important step towards stabilizing Watch Dogs 2’s seamless multiplayer functionality, and other core online features, before releasing any new multiplayer content," Ubisoft explained earlier this month in relation to the DLC's delay. "Since these updates required additional development resources, we’ve made the decision to adjust our release schedule for that new content." 

If the above tickles your fancy, it's included with the £30/$40 Watch Dogs 2 season pass, but will also be available for purchase separately. As of right now, Ubisoft is running a month-long T-Bone Chaos Event with weekly themed challenges whereby players can grab in-game currency and rewards. More information on that can be found this way. 

Beamdog, the studio behind the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, and more recently Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, apparently has something new on the go. It's not ready to reveal the name just yet (or anything else about the game, for that matter) but it is in the market for beta testers.   

It sounds like this will be a proper beta test, rather than merely a couple of weeks of pre-release publicity. Applicants chosen to take part will have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which will (technically, at least) bar them from talking about the game. Once the requisite paperwork is taken care of, information about the new project and access to the "super-secret forum" will be passed along. 

"When testing our game you will be able to give all the feedback you want, file bug reports, and make feature requests," Beamdog said. "It will be invaluable to us and will help to make the final product as good as possible." 

And the recruitment message does actually contain a little bit of a hint as to what might be in store: It says Beamdog is looking for "adventurers, warriors, rogues, wizards, druids, clerics, rangers, monks, and shamans" who want to take part. Another journey through the Sword Coast, maybe—or perhaps even points further north? You can sign up to find out before everyone else at the Beamdog forums.