It’s been a long time since you could judge the quality of a game on the size of its budget—particularly in PC gaming, where the democratisation of tools and resources mean that better results are more available to more developers. Yet the notion persists that the advancement of games as a medium is inherently technological, that better technology leads to better experiences, and that better games means bigger budgets.This is the legacy of an arms race that—truth be told—was already becoming irrelevant a decade ago. Once, you’d say that studios like id, Ion Storm, Epic and Valve held the future in their hands because the future looked like a better FPS engine. That hasn’t been the case for a very long time.Even so, there’s a temptation to look to the most expensively-wrought games for leadership—for a sense of what can be achieved with the vast resources wielded by the biggest publishers. Disappointment necessarily follows when those publishers aren’t investing in traditional experiences like singleplayer campaigns, because these are how the forward march of progress was traditionally judged. 'Triple-A' game development took a step sideways when it became about the curation of better and more effective services, leaving players frustrated that the aspirations of the developers wielding the biggest budgets no longer aligned with their own.

That frustration takes the form of blanket statements—‘singleplayer games are dead’—that aren’t true in any measurable sense but importantly feel true to the people who think them or type them into comments boxes. The business of games has a tendency to dominate the conversation, with outrage outpacing curiosity when it comes to assessing the actions of the largest publishers. EA did, for example, respond to complaints about the absence of singleplayer from their Battlefront reboot by ensuring that it was present in the sequel: but that point has become a footnote in Battlefront 2’s public record, dominated as it is by microtransaction grief and 11th hour interventions by concerned Disney execs.I don’t think players are at fault for being distracted by the business of games. In fact, I think it’s a reflection of the way that the attention of big publishers has shifted. The games-as-service gold rush has dominated the thinking of the biggest studios for years. These are companies that, in most cases, have shareholders to appease—and suddenly one day this industry of one-off $60 purchases gained the potential to yield millions more in microtransactions and season passes. Of course they went for it. Of course these were the kinds of conversations that were happening in publisher offices throughout triple-A development; it was where the money was.It follows that the conversation around games would follow suit, that it would become concerned not with how something is designed or what it looks like but what it costs, how much it asks of you and how frequently. Spare a thought for the developers who work as part of this apparatus—the artists and programmers and designers who pour years of work into experiences that are ultimately undermined by the profit-boosting scaffold that gets thrown up around them. Another good example of this in 2017 was Shadow of War: an ambitious sequel and follow-up to a true surprise hit hamstrung by the inappropriate insertion of modern monetisation.

Of course, not all triple-A games are like this. A distinction is forming in the upper echelons of game development between ‘big business’ games and ‘big budget’ games—of course the former often implies the latter, but a gulf is forming between the proposition made by a company like Activision or EA and that of a publisher like, say, Bethesda. Games like FIFA, Call of Duty, Battlefield and most recently Battlefront 2 represent the speartip of triple-A-as-service design, studios bent to the dual purpose of creating more compelling things for players to do and more compelling things for them to buy.Then alongside this you have publishers like Bethesda, who must certainly be counted among the ranks of ‘triple-A’ publishers but whose resources have consistently been invested differently. Dishonored, Prey, Doom, and Wolfenstein are evidence that there’s still interest in big budget singleplayer experiences. It’s telling that all of these games all throw back in some way to a previous conception of what ‘big budget’ meant—that they all gesture at the future with at least one foot planted squarely in nostalgia.To me, this suggests that the landscape of game development as we used to understand it hasn’t actually changed all that much. Instead, a stratification has occurred in triple-A between games-as-services and games-as-products: skim off that top layer, with all of its microtransaction controversies and loot crate gambling, and you're left with a picture of a medium that is looking increasingly hale.

Developers are still making, and profiting from, singleplayer games made with substantial resources. A healthy middle tier of studios and publishers has emerged—companies like Larian who are making the year's best games on a more modest budget. Lavishly-produced singleplayer experiences like Hellblade, What Remains of Edith Finch and Tacoma attest to the talent of independent developers and the quality of the tools available to them. We have seen the striking return of the traditional CRPG and the steady emergence of new experiences.

As far as PC games go, in fact, it's only that noisy end of triple-A that reliably disturbs this picture of an industry that is providing more (and better) traditional singleplayer experiences than it ever has. Equally, it's this extreme that bears the most risk. When legislation or simply changing public attitudes move against games-as-service design—which they have begun to do this year—then games whose design has been led by these phenomena will necessarily have to adapt or die. Or they'll find their own market and survive on their own terms: but that doesn't mean you have to invest your money in them, or even pay them any mind, as long as reliably excellent work is being done elsewhere in the industry.

You have an unlimited amount of time. And you're almost out of time. Somehow, both of those statements are true, thanks to the clever structure of The Sexy Brutale, the extremely stylish adventure from Cavalier Game Studios and Tequila Works.

In one of those ornate and creepy mansions people always seem to get murdered in, people are getting murdered. Filled with hidden passages, dark secrets, and supernatural intrigue, the mansion is host to a costume ball where by the end of the evening every single guest will meet a grisly death. Your job is to prevent those deaths, one by one, while unraveling the mystery of how and why they happen, and why you yourself are at the party.

There's a catch: you can't interfere directly in the murders. You can't even be seen by anyone in the mansion, even the guests you're trying to save: walk into an occupied room and you'll be chased out by hostile spirits. Instead, you sneak your way around, peeping through keyholes, finding secret entrances and exits, hiding from guests and the murderous staff alike, until you've pinpointed the time and place of a murder, then the circumstances of how the murder takes place. Then, you begin working your way backward through the events leading up to it, looking for a place to indirectly intervene to save a party-goer's life.

The murder might be a straightforward one, where a guest is simply shot, but as you work your way through the guests, saving them one by one, they'll get more elaborate and bizarre, and enjoyably grim.

Time is on your side: while there's a ticking clock counting down the minutes until the end of the evening, the clock rewinds to the beginning of the party and the events play out all over again (you can also rewind the clock yourself at any point). This gives you, basically, an infinite amount of times to prevent the murders. 

And yet, you're racing against the clock. If preventing a murder requires collecting one item, bringing it to another location, flipping a switch, unlocking a door, or other tasks you need to complete in a specific order, often based around dodging staff and the timing of guests' movements. You'll eventually learn the patterns of everyone along the route you'll take, when it's safe to move through doors or collect certain necessary items, the codes that allow you to unlock doors. The end result is what feels like a speed run of an adventure game, a tense, fast-paced series of actions that need to be performed quickly and efficiently in order to stop the murder before it happens.

When you successfully prevent a murder,  you are given the mask of the guest you saved, and each mask gives you a new ability you'll need to explore the new section of the mansion that becomes available. One mask enhances your hearing, allowing you to eavesdrop on conversations that may give you some crucial information. Another way will allow you to shatter glass, one will allow you to see ghosts, and with each new power your investigative abilities will grow.

The Sexy Brutale is both fresh and familiar. In most adventure games you wander around, having the same conversations, visiting the same areas repeatedly until you figure what what you're supposed to do to advance. You do that in The Sexy Brutale, too, but in a way it feels more appropriate. You're reliving the same night over and over again, so of course you're going to see the same people, hear the same conversations, and visit the same locations repeatedly. The time travel hook isn't just a system to solve murders but a clever deconstruction of the adventure game genre.

Ad if you're gonna be stuck in a time loop, The Sexy Brutale a great place for it, oozing with lovely sights and loads of style. The mansion is a weird and beautiful one, filled with secrets and bizarre supernatural sights, and it's an wonderful environment just to poke around in, to absorb the history and odd nature of the place, to read every last item description even if it doesn't help you solve any particular murder. You'll have to rush to prevent those murders, but you've got the chance to dawdle as well.

Our Ongoing Game award goes to No Man's Sky. After a rocky 2016 launch, the game's in better shape after this year's updates. Check out our other GOTY awards here.

Phil Savage: Here's a new category for this year's awards, designed to recognise an older game that had a great 2017 through patches and free updates. And whatever you originally thought of No Man's Sky when it released last year, this year marked a period of significant growth and improvement.

Andy Kelly: At launch No Man's Sky felt like a shell of a game. I squeezed 20 hours out of it, which is not insignificant, but in that time I felt like I'd experienced everything this supposedly infinite universe had to offer. But over time, thanks to a procession of hefty free updates, the game has evolved into something much deeper and ultimately much better. Whether it's base-building, vehicles, new biomes, or the story's clearer, more hand-crafted structure, Hello has slowly been transforming the game into something approaching the grand promise of those early demonstrations. I still think there's a lot of room for improvement, including more varied planet surfaces, but the developer's efforts to expand, deepen, and improve its colourful space simulator is something I think we should celebrate.

Philippa Warr: I was one of those people who actually loved No Man’s Sky when it came out. Not in an all-encompassing passionate frenzy which blinded me to its shortcomings, nor the differences between marketing and game, but there was so much in that ambitious universe which already gave me joy. It was built for pottering in a way that reminded me of meandering along country trails with my camera, investigating pleasing views and tailing odd creatures. 

The first big update to the game—Foundation—came towards the end of 2016 bringing things like base building, freighters and farming. In terms of how that made the game feel, it didn't specifically impact how I played it because I wasn't interested in commerce or on settling down. I was content to drift along in normal mode.

But, taking a more general view, the update felt like a statement from developers, Hello Games, about how they would be approaching the game post-release. The update implied a willingness to be more flexible over what the game could be—instead of forcing players to keep moving, never settling, base-building was a specifically supported element of the game. There were also a couple of modes to tweak the difficulty should you fancy it. 

Foundation ended up being exactly that—a support structure and a statement of intent for 2017’s set of updates. Path Finder was the first and offered up vehicles, vehicle racing, base sharing, photo mode, permadeath mode, a whole bundle of quality of life improvements and more. It was photo mode which absolutely blew me away and either ruined or perfected the game for my purposes, depending on which way you approach it.

Photo mode was developed in collaboration with Dead End Thrills’s Duncan Harris. It lets you pause the game in the middle of what you're doing and switch into a free-ish camera mode. At that point you can line up your shots, apply filters as you might on Instagram, fiddle with FOV and depth-of-field, change the position of the sun in order to get the perfect shadows or the exact right time of day and more. Where I used to spend minutes on shots, I can now spend hours. I have previously spent entire sessions within the same five foot radius captivated by different light effects on a group of trees. 

I believe Chris Livingston rather liked photo mode too, but the big draw for him in that update was the ability to ram wildlife with his new space car. Perhaps we should have combined our interests for some kind of artsy inverse Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. 

Atlas Rises came in August and, along with terrain editing and ancient portals, it seemed to sow seeds for co-op play. Multiplayer, or rather the ability to "see" other people in your game is one of the big sticking points from launch—the reality of the game didn’t match what had been described during development. The ability still isn't exactly in the game but there's a version of the idea in that you can see other players as floaty orbs with proximity-based chat, and Hello Games are billing that as a precursor to some kind of synchronous co-op. 

These updates don't erase launch criticisms but they do reframe the game. Hello Games are using the process of post-release patches to respond to those criticisms and flesh out the game in ways that reflect and expand how people play it. More specific to my own interests is the fact that the game just keeps getting more beautiful through a multitude of changes both big and small. In my current game I’ve discovered a planet populated with trees that sprout octopus-like tentacles. Finally I’m ready to call somewhere home. I just have to stop taking pictures of it long enough to find a habitable base and claim the world as my own...

For more recent No Man's Sky words, check out Chris's experiences with the game's synthetic planets and other varied environments.

Crowbar Collective moved another baby step towards the release of the long-awaited Xen portion of its Half-Life remake Black Mesa yesterday. A graphical update makes it look a whole lot fancier, with real-time dynamic lights, lens flares, god rays and more texture detail. 

It also brings the release version more in line with the developer's internal build and means that when Xen is ready it can be added as a "simple map drop, with less potential for engine and code issues affecting players on their first time playing Xen".

The team also updated fans on the progress of the Xen levels—in its current form that section of the game is made up of 14 maps across five chapters, "with each map alone being significantly larger than the originals". The team is still working up the gameplay for three of the five stages, and tweaking the art for the final two.

There's still no definite release date for the Xen levels: in June the team set December as a "do-or-die deadline", but that's now been pushed back (and, thankfully, nobody has died). "We are putting our full effort into completing Xen in a timely manner so that everyone can have the complete Black Mesa experience", it said in the latest update.

The update also fixes a host of bugs, changes the way that long jumping works (you now double tap space) and adds a new crossbow scope. Click here for the full patch notes, and scroll down for some new screens from the update.

If you want to know more about Black Mesa, here's Andy's interview with the project lead from last month. Oh, and the game is available at its biggest ever discount at the moment. It costs $4.99/£3.74 on Steam.

This year's best mod is Fallout 4's Sim Settlements. Below, our writers share their thoughts on why it made such a meaningful difference to the game. To see the rest of our 2017 GOTY Awards, head here. 

Chris Livingston: Sim Settlements is sort of astounding to me. It gives Fallout 4 players an entirely new way to build settlements by, essentially, allowing NPCs to build their own. Designate zones for residential, commercial, or industrial buildings, and then sit back and watch your settlers erect their own buildings, randomly pulling from pools of assets so each building is a unique. As your settlement grows the NPCs will add on to their buildings, adding more props and features and even second stories. Each time you visit a settlement, you'll be able to see their progress, which gives your settlements a feeling of real life, and gives your settlers some agency. They aren't just standing around waiting for you to place every last door, bed, or stick of furniture.

The really great thing is, you can still use the vanilla settlement system at the same time, even inside the same settlement. Zone some areas for NPCs to develop, build some areas yourself. You can decide how hands-on you want to be. It's an amazingly thoughtful and well-made mod that could easily be incorporated into the game itself.

Joe Donnelly: Fallout 4's settlement system confused me at launch. With so many other things to get on with in The Commonwealth, who could be arsed piecing together makeshift HQs with rickety bed frames, recycled cinder blocks and filthy old toilet bowls? Not me, which is why I paid the Sim Settlements mod little mind when I first caught wind of it. Seriously, if I’m to be dropped into a brutal post apocalyptic world with a shed load of firearms and melee weapons at my disposal, I want to take the scores of weird, hostile and irradiated beasts knocking around to task—not playing interior designer. I get that rebuilding the world is a big part of survival, but I'd rather leave all that to someone else. Enter Sim Settlements.

To quote the mod's ModDB description: "It also feels bizarre that you have to micromanage all these people, and personally plant seeds and decide where people sleep—you're their leader, not their mother! You're supplying these people with security and tons of resources, why can't they kick in and help out with building up the city?"

To this end, my otherwise useless Sanctuary Hills-dwelling comrades were suddenly crafting buildings by their own volition in some sort of nuclear war-ravaged edition of 60 Minute Makeover. The tedium was removed from base building and it was great. And the joy of returning from several hours of roving the Wasteland to find one of my settlers' projects completed, as they toiled and moiled on their next venture was second to none. I mean, who'd have guessed Preston Garvey had such a creative streak? 

In doing so, Sim Settlements helps make Fallout 4's settlement system feel more connected to the rest of the game. Moreover, an adjustable needs system allows the basic needs of your settlers to change over time, meaning maintaining base happiness is more challenging and raid less predictable.

Phil Savage: It's such a great idea for a mod that the main game feels bereft without it. Fallout 4 is a game about communities, and Sim Settlements lets those communities work towards their own recovery.

Read Chris's impressions of Sim Settlements here.

Prison Architect's latest update lets you control your prison warden, and that small change has a massive impact on the way you play. Rather than the normal all-seeing viewpoint, the whole map is covered by a fog of war, save for whatever your warden would be able to see with their own two eyes. Anything around a corner is hidden and can't be interacted with, so if you want to upgrade your maximum security wing you're going to have to walk there first. Gulp.

You WASD around the prison and can pick up objects, including weapons and body armour to protect yourself from inmate attack, which seems almost inevitable. If you don't want to get your hands dirty then you can recruit guards to your personal protection squad. They'll keep you safe but cost more money. 

I think it's a really clever addition. It will inevitably lead to slower expansion because you'll be constantly wary of getting injured, and you can turn on permadeath mode if you want to ramp up the difficulty even higher.

Elsewhere, the update adds floor signage, which is a handy way to direct prisoners and staff down particular paths and control foot traffic. They'll follow the directions unless there's a much quicker way to get where they're going.

You can read the full change log, including lists of bug fixes and balance updates, here.

And if you haven't yet bought the game but like the look of it, it's discounted heavily for the Christmas sales: pick it up for £5/$7.50 on Steam and GOG.

It's been a bumper year (apologies) for Rocket League, and now more than 38 million people are playing football on wheels. But developer Psyonix knows there's still a long road ahead, and has released details of how the game will change in 2018, with a major focus on online performance improvements.

The developer says it's going to start acting on player concerns about wonky game servers, firstly by adding a tool that makes it easier to understand and report bad connections. 

"We’ll be rolling out improved connection quality status information in the game client in 2018 that will tell you if you’re experiencing packet loss, latency variance, or legitimate game server performance issues," it said. "We’re looking into how we can allow the community to report servers they think are performing poorly to help us identify and resolve problems more quickly."

So, it sounds like the developer doesn't yet have all the answers—but getting more concrete information on what's going wrong could be the first step. It's also planning to add new servers to the matchmaking system, like US-Central, which should help some players without affecting the quality of West or East coast servers.

A Tournament Mode is definitely inbound and a beta will start early next year, which is later than the team initially hoped.  It also plans to "revamp the progression system to make XP meaningful again", which means you'll unlock banners, titles, and free Decryptors as you level up.

Lastly, cross-platform play is definitely incoming next year, following a series of successful Steam server tests this year. "We’ll begin rolling it out to all of our players sometime next year," Psyonix said.

For the full blog post, click here. What would you like to see added to Rocket League in 2018? 

It's the PC Gamer Q&A! Every week, our panel of PC Gamer writers ponders a question about PC gaming, before providing a short and informative response. This week: which game did you miss in 2017 that you're saving for the holidays? We'd love to hear your answers in the comments below, too. 

Jody Macgregor: Shadowhand

I enjoyed Regency Solitaire, which was Grey Alien's previous reskinning of solitaire as a Jane Austen-style period drama. And I liked Faerie Solitaire too, which was a different studio called Subsoap basically reimagining solitaire as a cute Popcap game. What I'm saying is, if you can turn playing cards by yourself into some kind of saga then I am your audience. But I didn't even get past the tutorial of Shadowhand before I had to put it aside and play other things I needed to write about more urgently.

From what I saw it's a more thorough twist on solitaire than they've tried before, one that uses it as the randomizing factor for RPG combat in the same way other games use dice. You play a highwaywoman, and there's swashbuckling, romance, and pirates involved. In a way it reminds me of a tabletop RPG called Castle Falkenstein, which also used cards instead of dice and a period setting where people said "indubitably" with a straight face. I'm looking forward to giving it a proper chance when I can play it on a laptop balanced on my stomach which will be full of Christmas ham.

Wes Fenlon: Night In The Woods

I've been trying to find the time to play Night in the Woods all year. I definitely have some pent-up feelings about small town America (and maybe a latent fear of having to return to it one day), and a smart, funny game built around that setting is something I know I'll love. Earlier this year my girlfriend and I played Oxenfree together and had a great time, so I've had Night in the Woods pegged for our next game. We just never got to it, and in October the developers announced an expanded version was in the pipe, so that felt like a good reason to wait. Weird Autumn edition is out just in time for the holidays, so I've got Night in the Woods pegged for a post-Christmas game. I can't wait to laugh, and also probably be a bit depressed.

Chris Livingston: The Long Dark

When it comes to survival games I tend to overdo it, playing a bunch of them in a short period of time before getting so sick of chopping down trees and cooking at campfires that I can't bear to play another one for months. Then, eventually, I get back into them again for a while. The first time I played The Long Dark, then in Early Access, I was at the tail end of storm of survival games and I bounced right off it, unwilling to mope around freezing and starving and wondering where my next meal would come from. It left Early Access this year, and I would like to finally give it a proper look. Maybe when my belly is full of Christmas ham and my feet warm in new socks, I'll finally be in the right mood to put some real time in it.

Philippa Warr: Okami HD

I didn't exactly miss it—I was actually down to review it at one point—but various other features conspired to move Okami out of my grasp when the HD version came to PC. I actually played it on console back in 2007 but hit a bug over halfway through rendering progress impossible but being unable to reset to a point before it had bugged. Faced with losing more than a dozen hours of progress, I couldn't face going back. About a decade later the irritation of that bug has abated just enough for me to consider returning to the inky world and trying all over again. Fail me again, though, wolf, and I'll be ditching you for Slime Rancher quicker than you can whip out a paintbrush.

Andy Kelly: Wolfenstein 2

Since it was released, Wolfenstein II has been sitting unplayed in my Steam library, staring at me, wondering why I don't want to load it up and kill Nazis. So I reckon the holidays, when I have an abundance of spare time, is when I'll finally give Blazkowicz the attention he probably deserves. I didn't love the original, though, so I'm a little wary of this one. I hear it's difficult, and I don't have the patience for hard games these days. So we'll see how that pans out. If I can't get on with it, there are a dozen other games I didn't get around to playing.

Evan Lahti: The Elder Scrolls Legends

I've been abstaining entirely from digital cards for the past four or five months so I could dive elbows-deep into the new Elder Scrolls: Legends set, Return to Clockwork City. Thematically, it's focused on the mechanical creations of the Dwemer (and those who'd hope to steal from their ancient vaults), with a new singleplayer campaign and a bunch of new cards. Competitively its impact has apparently been a bit underwhelming, but I'm still looking forward to reacquainting myself with the meta. Unlike the FPSes I play, one of the things I've always loved about Magic: TG and other card games is that their landscapes can shift so quickly and dramatically, even as players simply discover new synergies. I mean, that's part of the business strategy. I like observing the shifts in "what's in style" on sites like betweenthelanes.net (co-run by the excellent TESL streamer CVH), picking out a new deck that suits me, building it, then modding it further based on my preferences.

Bo Moore: Nier: Automata

I'm not sure if this counts, since technically I've already put many hours into it this year, but Nier: Automata. I finished my first playthrough of the awesome action-RPG about robots with feelings earlier this year, but as (most) people know, the game has multiple (26, to be exact) endings and is meant to be replayed several times. I'm looking forward to starting my "route B" playthrough, but I've been holding off for the last few weeks, saving it for holiday time when I can really dive in. 

Steven Messner: Cuphead

I'm one of the shameful few who never touched Cuphead on launch. It's not that I don't find the game appealing (I do), just that when everyone praised it at release I felt like I was at a breaking point in how many games I was trying to juggle and complete. Adding a excruciatingly tough boss brawler to that pile would have surely driven me to madness. But what are the holidays for if not bashing your head against something repeatedly, sinking into the depths of despair as you realize you can't succeed, and then drinking in the dark until the wee hours of the AM? Oh, I'll probably boot up the new Path of Exile expansion too because the new league sounds like fun.

Tim Clark: Assassin's Creed Origins

I've theoretically earmarked Assassin's Creed Origins as this year's 'big' Christmas game to wallow in. My worry here is that 1) each time I've tried to run it, it's had some pretty wild performance dips, and 2) I will almost certainly use these as an excuse to go back to Destiny 2 and grind for Masterworks weapons while watching old British detective shows. Last Christmas I ploughed through every Inspector Morse episode on the ITV Hub. That's a lot of dead professors. A question I can more confidently answer is what will I be drinking. And the answer is sweet sherry.

Chicago-based artist Winslow Dumaine (who you might remember from his excellent Dark Souls 3 jailer costume) channels his experiences with pain and suffering into his work, whether it's photography or a dark stand up comedy album. His latest work is directly inspired by the Souls series, including Dark Souls and Bloodborne: The Tarot Restless, a tarot deck and book set in a strange fantasy universe. 

Take a quick look at the art and you'll see the connections immediately. Emaciated kings and queens, horrifying monsters, and characters with names as evocative as their appearance—each card looks like someone (or thing) that would fit right into a Souls game. It almost as if From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki consulted on the project himself.  

But the Souls inspiration isn't just visual. Dumaine wrote short stories for each of the 78 cards, all set in the same fantasy universe. With nothing but a few paragraphs and card art to go on, Dark Souls lore-sters might enjoy the deck for its storytelling alone, even if they never use it to read into their fortunes. 

Here's the project synopsis from the Kickstarter page:

"The Tarot Restless is a total overhaul of the classic deck of tarot cards. Each of the hand-drawn cards is accompanied by a short story set in a consistent fantasy universe. The artwork is inspired by video games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Hand of Fate, and Silent Hill, authors like H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson, and other artists like Wayne Barlowe, Guillermo del Toro, Zdzisław Beksiński, and Francis Bacon. The deck is guided by themes of infertility, betrayal, abuse, manipulation, and revenge, as well as camaraderie, loyalty, and forgiveness."

I collected a few card images that especially remind me of the Souls games. If you play them a decent amount, you'll likely spot the similarities too. 

Dark Souls is known first for being difficult, but I'd argue its lasting power is in the somber art and the tragic, fragmented history of its world. Empty ruins and the strange monsters that reside in them have plenty to say about our reflexes and timing, but more to say about the vices and desires of mankind, and how our very existence is sort of a guarantee that we're doomed. It's not exactly chipper stuff and no surprise Dumaine found them inspiring.

The decks aren't immediately available though. You'll have to wait for the Kickstarter campaign to wrap up (or contribute now) to get your own set, though so far the campaign has been very successful, making over five times its $1000 goal with a few weeks remaining. 

The internet is full of strangers, and many of them are playing games right now. And that's what you want to be doing, too. Convenient, right? They're out there waiting for you to show 'em how it's done, and the fastest, easiest way to do that is with a multiplayer browser game. Bonus: this is also the best way to sneak in some gaming time at work when you should be sending emails.

Browser games require almost no effort to get going, and some of the best multiplayer browser games don’t even require you to set up or host anything. This list is all about those no-hassle games. If you're ready to get out there and kill some time, these are the games you should play.

Vikings Village: Party Hard

Manly pixel vikings punch each other over being called a ginger (despite all of them having ginger hair) in this deadly battle of the beards. You get to play one of these vikings, kicking ass now and taking names later. There might be up to seven other vikings at the folk concert level, all equally mad and throwing punches as well. The nerve of some people! Your goal is simple: kill enough of these inferior vikings to stay at the top of the leaderboard. 

Punching isn’t the only way to bring about a swift viking funeral. You can also hurl objects scattered around the arena straight at your opponent's head—that will teach them to describe your appearance! You have a selection of abilities that unlock over time, which can set fire to the objects you pick up, or make you move faster. You can combo the deaths of enemies for extra points, collect beers for additional health, and discover ways to gain more powers. There are also achievements in Vikings Village: Party Hard and hats you can purchase with the coins found on the floor. This game is currently in development with more modes coming soon.

Blast Arena

Blast Arena is a voxel version of Bomberman, which you can play in your browser against anonymous opponents on the internet. You and three other players try to survive and destroy each other in a maze-esque area full of walls and rocks that can be broken. You start off with just one bomb to place down, which will explode within a few seconds, destroying rocks (and players) in its path. 

Sometimes the destruction of these rocks will yield power-ups, which either increase your bomb’s explosion radius, make you run faster, or allow you to carry more than one bomb. Once enough of the rocks are cleared away, you can reach the other players and hopefully catch them in your bomb’s explosion without getting singed instead. The last player standing wins. You can also say ‘hi’ to other players in the game, flashing a wave emoji above your head. Blast Arena is still in development as a beta.

LaserSharks.io 

In this game you play a shark with a laser attached to your head, swimming around the ocean. Since you have a laser attached to your head, you can zap other sharks to kill them, putting an end to their hunting in your waters. The only problem? Using your laser prevents movement and you aren’t given a particularly long time to aim. If you miss, an enemy shark can easily zap you straight back.

There are also fish swimming around in the water, which you can eat to acquire energy. You can then use this energy to swim faster and gain more XP to level up. You may also find health packs in the water, which are very useful when it comes to survival. The longer you stay alive (and the more sharks you eliminate) the higher you get your name on the ol' leaderboard.

Isleward 

Isleward doesn't look like a multiplayer game at first. It's a low-res roguelike that has you choosing what character you want to play before dumping you on your own into the city of Strathford. In Strathford you get your bearings, learn how to queue up actions and explore. There are also a few low-level monsters that you can find and kill to level up. 

Eventually you'll run into other people and hopefully convince them to adventure with you. A party of different characters is much stronger than one player alone, and significantly more fun. There's a whole world to explore, loads of islands, and lots of loot to find. Isleward is still in development and the community around is quite active and friendly.

Agar.io 

Though Agar.io looks simplistic, with graphics of colored circles on a checker-lined background, it's surprisingly challenging. Your circle starts off very small, but when you eat all of the little colored dots around you, you become bigger. As a small circle, you move quickly and are able to dodge the bigger circles trying to eat you. When you get bigger, you need larger portions of food. To grow even more than these puny dots are allowing you to, you must eat the other players.

Since smaller players move faster, you can split your circle into two different circles of equal mass. When splitting your circle, the new one will shoot out, which is useful for enveloping the smaller player running away from you. These circles grow depending on what they eat and do not stay the same size or move at the same speed. There are multiple modes, including team games. Once a bigger player gobbles you up, you have to restart as the smallest possible dot. The circle of life is brutal.

Slither.io 

Much like Agar.io, Slither.io has you hungry for small dots (this time ones that glow) to grow bigger. The twist: you're a snake. Your body gets longer as well as slightly wider as you eat the various dots that are littered around. You aren’t able to eat your enemies, but if you time it well, you can force another snake to run into your body.

This will cause them to vanish, leaving behind loads of body dots to collect. Slither.io does also allow you to customize the skin of your snake, and there are some awesome options. Consider pimping out your snake with a necklace that dangles as they slither. 

War Brokers 

War Brokers, currently in open beta, is a first-person voxel team shooter. There are sometimes missions that theme combat rounds beyond straight deathmatch, like stopping the enemy launching their missiles.

War Brokers has plenty of different guns and machines for you to unlock and use. Guns unlock over time, but you do start off with a pistol and a rifle to defend yourself with. Vehicles such as helicopters and tanks can be found around the map, which you can of course get into and control. If you log into an account, there are tons of little missions and rewards you can claim for playing. And the competition can be brutal—it's especially good if you want a challenging experience.

Skyarena.io 

If you prefer flying around planes and attacking from inside of them, Skyarena.io has you covered. This aircraft shooter is pretty straightforward to be honest: You fly a large aeroplane, desperately trying to shoot down various other craft in the sky and the players piloting them. Flying your plane around is very easy to do with your mouse, gliding over islands, water, and through clouds as you go. 

Transformice

A browser classic. It's the idiocy of the crowd, in a pure and distilled form. You are a mouse. You want cheese. Cheese is unobtainable, unless you work together with your other mice friends, and your mouse shaman, to get it. Naturally, you act completely selfishly and the entire group plummet to their deaths within ten seconds.

The only way I've ever seen a level be properly completed is when self preservation keeps the mice in line, such as being on a single platform, with no possible way to bridge the gap between it and the cheese without the shaman's help. Even then, the instant there's the slightest chance, the mob surges forward, and they (mostly) plummet to squeaky deaths.

Oh, and the best thing about it? Completely, unreservedly hilarious.

Town of Salem

If you've ever played the party game Mafia or Werewolf, Town of Salem should feel familiar. This roleplaying game challenges you to be a conniving liar and mislead other players. Depending on who you are randomly cast as, you might be a townsperson (good), the mafia (bad) or neutrals.

If you're a townsperson, you need to track down mafia members and stop them before they kill everyone in your town. There are many different roles for each category of player. Each of these different roles will give you a unique ability that you can use in the night phase of the game. At night, players plan out their moves and make notes in their will. If they die in the night, the remaining players can use their wills to, hopefully, achieve the goals you were meant to do! Town of Salem is quite complex to explain, but you'll get the hang of it soon enough.

MS Paint Adventures

There seems to be a bit of an undercurrent of collective futility going on here, but I promise that it'll clear up soon. MS Paint Adventures is a text adventure/web comic hybrid that essentially allows the audience (players) to vote by democracy on what they want to happen next. In text adventure style.

Each 'scene' is presented with an image and a description, labelling the items in the room and such, before allowing people to suggest a course of action, and then selecting the best one. Ok, not really democracy, but you get the idea.

The main issue with this one is that, while it's a great concept, if it's not one that you were with from the beginning, then you're going to either have to do a lot of homework, or have a perpetually bemused look on your face.

Gartic.io 

Think Pictionary or Drawful. One player is chosen to draw a random word while the others must watch and guess what the word is. There is a timer ticking down as everyone tries to guess what is being drawn.

The interface for Gartic.io is very easy to use, giving you a variety of tools to create the image you’d like. There is a simple chat box to input your guesses into while another player is drawing. If you guess something close to the word, the chat box tells you that you were close. The game is very simple but fun to play, especially when you have some skilled artists drawing for you.

Kingdom of Loathing

You're probably familiar with the style of Kingdom of Loathing, which has been going strong for years. It's that sort of pseudo-mmo kind of thing, firmly embedded in the web interface, with drop down menus letting you select your attacks, and page refreshes for every new area. It's a little ugly, but Kingdom of Loathing isn't trying to be pretty. It's succeeding at being funny. Really, really funny.

Take, for instance, the classes. They make absolutely no sense, but they're funny because they're pun based. So I'm a Sauceror. I fling hot sauce in people's faces, and they get damaged, because hot sauce really hurts when it gets in your face. Making even less sense, they're Disco Bandits, who dance at their enemies, fuelled by moxie. And this is all before you end up in the Haiku Dungeon, where not only are all the descriptions of your enemies in Haiku, but so are your attacks.

The whole game is consistently absurd and amusing, from the enemy types, to the genre conventions it apes so cleverly. And while you can't directly play with other people, you can steal their stuff, join guilds and interact with them. So that's something.

Wilds.io 

This hack and slash follows the core principle of killing people you don’t like the look of, and finding loot spread around the map. There are a bunch of different game modes but the most popular is Ruins, the default when you run the game.

Ruins gives you the chance to explore an area as a member of one of three teams. You can kill other players on different teams, break boxes, and find loot. Let’s be honest—who doesn’t like more loot? Armor, potions, and new weapons will help you survive longer in this desert wasteland. Your main objective is to gain bones which appear when people die. If you get enough bones you become the king of the ruins. There are a bunch of other modes, some with shorter times and easier objectives, including soccer. Yes, soccer.

Realm of the Mad God

Realm of the Mad God doesn't look that advanced, but don't let its pixelated aesthetics fool you. It's actually running in a rudimentary 3D engine, and it's a hard as nails shmup, if you head into the wrong neck of the woods. It's based in a medieval setting, but you're very much spamming whatever the attack of your chosen class is, firing out in all directions as you try and avoid the incoming projectiles.

It's an odd blend, what with having a proper inventory with potions and armor and rings and different weapons, not to mention on-the-fly quests popping up all over the place, getting you to kill this goblin wizard, slaughter that dwarven king, but the game has more in common with classic arcade titles than something like Oblivion. It could be seen as a Diablo-alike, but that's a likeness born more out of atmosphere and tone than how you play it.

You can have almost a hundred people in a zone at one time, all off in their own part of the woods, killing their own bad dudes. Sometimes you stumble upon a few, sometimes you're left alone for hours at a time, but you're constantly stumbling upon the detritus of their passing, in abandoned loot, or just the eerie silence where there once was guys who wanted to kill you.

Pokemon Showdown 

If battling trainers is the part of Pokemon games you enjoy, Pokemon Showdown is for you. You can jump straight into matches against other players without having to level up or care for your pokemon beforehand. If you die, you don’t need to go back to the pokemon center and rest up either—you can jump straight into a new battle. 

Pokemon Showdown lets you to battle using either a random team, or a custom team if you want to define which pokemon you’d like to work with. You can then quickly go through a match, selecting moves and countering the other trainer. This fast-paced game takes all of the work out of raising pokemon, leaving just gratuitous pokemon takedowns.

Squadd.io 

An isometric shooter in which you can battle with your friends against an opposing team, or fight in a free-for-all with everyone. Power-up stations placed in the arena grant different weapons. There are a couple characters to choose from off the bat, and plenty more to unlock as you bump off your enemies.

The main goal of the game is simply to stay alive and earn enough points to reach the top of the scoreboard. The more points you earn the more you level up and the more weapons you can unlock. It's very quick to get into, perfect if you are looking for fast-paced matches.

Mechar.io 

Another shooter, Mechar.io is more complex than Squadd.io, allowing you to control a giant mech that can hold various different guns and pickups simultaneously. It has the same main goal, though: be at the top of the leaderboard. 

Since you are a high-tech mech, you can easily carry around a few different weapons as you explore what seems to be an abandoned laboratory. There are a few different power-ups in Mechar.io, two of which are smaller machines that hunt enemies, looking to hinder or destroy them. Though the map seems quite small, it is a very well laid-out space where you can quickly find and destroy your enemies. 

Everybody Edits

From blind, ignorant cooperation to an actively malicious form of it,  Everybody Edits is a multiplayer platformer. The catch is that, while  the other players can't directly effect you in any way, by progressing  through the levels, they screw with you in the most frustrating way.

Key platforms into the game are tied to a key. Green key toggles green bricks, red key toggles red bricks, etc. And by 'toggle', I mean toggles their existence. So you might be running down a long, presumably safe line of green bricks,  before suddenly someone ahead of you in the level hits the green key,  and bam, you're back to square one. It's horrendous. And brilliant.

This  is all added to the fact that each level is made by a player, and then  either locked, for it to be played, or left open, for it to be played  with. There are some masochists out there.

Little War Game 

This pixelated strategy game has you building your own kingdom while trying to fight and take down others. You can construct buildings, manage units, and collect resources, all in the name of survival. At first, you need to focus on gathering resources and building up your base. Your ultimate goal is to have the best army and destroy anything in your path—you can do this on your own or with a friend (even an AI) to grow your base together.

There are quite a few different upgrades and weapons to help you fight back against attacks. You can even research different spells to make some of your units (specifically mages) stronger, or sway some dragons on your side. If you're good enough, you can even start to fight in ranked battles of Little War Game, taking on some seriously challenging competition.

Brutes.io 

What do brutes do? They punch people in the face over and over again. In Brutes.io, it's you against other muscled monsters who are enthusiastic about boxing. You can charge up your punch or rapidly flail your fists of fury to try to knock them down, and once an enemy is down you can continue to punch their bodies until their health runs out and they die in a burst of colorful orbs. 

These orbs can be picked up and count as XP, helping you grow larger and become more muscled as you increase your level. If punching isn’t enough for you, you can grab power-ups that turn you into pumpkins or birds which lets you pull off surprise attacks, because what else are birds good for?

Neptune's Pride

Neptune's Pride is the epitome of backstabbing, two-faced, genuine human nastiness. It's a real time strategy game in the same way that glaciers move in  real time, set in space and all about galactic expansion. Up to eight players start with a few star systems, and then expand outwards, until they meet someone else, and either decide to not kill each other  immediately, or have at it.

Because the fleets take hours, and  sometimes days, to get from star to star, that leaves you with a good  deal of time to play the diplomacy game, trying to cement alliances and  crumble the foundations of those of your enemies. You try to get them  alone, when you know one party is out, and just start to gently wear  away at their trust, until they're a human shaped receptacle for  suspicion, and before you know it you've got galactic civil war on your  hands, and you can mop up the pieces.

Or, I suppose, you could play it like an honourable, decent human being. But where's the fun in that?

NoBrakes.io 

Taking a break from talking about destroying your enemies, NoBrakes.io instead is a racing game where you are trying to beat other players to checkpoints along the track. If you make it across the checkpoint, you get a power-up that can boost your speed or fire a bullet that will give an enemy a little shove.

Sometimes, though, moving forwards is not the right way to go. Depending on where the next checkpoint spawns, you may need to turn around and continue in the opposite direction. No matter where you're headed, make sure you avoid the wall or else you will suffer instant death and have to respawn in a new match. NoBreaks.io is very simplistic, but has a polished and clean look complete with upbeat music as you race along.

Powerline.io 

A version of Snake... but with a twist. Powerline.io has you attempting to dominate the board with your neon snake body. Like the traditional game of Snake, you control a lone, elongated body that can move around the field on a grid. You eat cubes that appear whenever a snake is killed, lengthening your own snake’s body.

This all sounds very basic, much like any other snake-remake. Snamake? However, your snake can move faster by moving alongside enemies, causing an electrical pulse to appear between you both. With this additional speed you can move faster and avoid death. Be warned: if you charge up too much, you'll become too fast to control. The high risk/high reward mechanics of Powerline.io make it unique and challenging compared to its much simpler inspiration.

Hexar.io 

Hexar.io also takes some slight inspiration from Snake, but instead of growing your tail, you are capturing parts of the screen and expanding your color’s dominance. The floor is made of hexes, each one white to begin with. You convert as many tiles as possible to your color, selecting tiles by moving over them, before linking back to tiles that are already the correct color. All of the tiles circled will then change to your color. While you are exploring blank tiles or tiles that are not your color, a tail appears where you have traveled. Other players can collide with this tail to kill you, causing your tiles disappear and forcing you to restart.

This forces you to be careful when you leave the relative safety of your colored area, picking and choosing when to take the leap out to gain more ground. There are green circles that float around the area—if eaten, they will help you to go much faster. You can expand the area your color occupies and help eliminate other colors, but if your tail gets hit once, it's all whisked away.

Slaim.io 

In Slaim.io you play a colorful pixel slime that can wield a gun. Use it to bring ruination to other slimes, though shooting will kill them slowly and is the least effective way to destroy enemies. Never fear: like any good dual-wielding slime, you also have a sword that you can use to slash enemy slimes in close range, killing them entirely in one swoop of your body. You can also hide in the bushes, disappearing from the map completely, and observe the carnage covertly.

When you destroy a slime, they leave behind colorful splats of their body to decorate the floor, as well as some DNA that can be collected to level yourself up. The game runs on a timer, and  you must aim to kill as many slimes as you can before time runs out and resets the arena.

Foes.io 

Foes is a sleek arena shooter that pits you against enemies as the arena gradually gets smaller and smaller. Everyone starts off exactly the same, without any weapons, and you have to scavenge to find them. Once the timer is exhausted and the round begins, you will notice that the edges of the area are filled with some kind of poison, forcing everyone closer to the center. This prevents you and your enemies from hiding out on the edges of the maps, or avoiding each other for too long. Foes.io has a variety of weapons to use and a really nice map to explore before you end up killing your foes. 

Lordz.io 

The aim of Lordz is to become the dominant kingdom in the land. To do that you need coins, collected from around the map, to spend on warriors who march around with you. Archers have a ranged attack, cheaper warriors are small and easily killed, and larger warriors have axes and can take a few hits. Over time, if you don’t die too much, you can end up with a huge number of people and even dragons following you around as you explore the lands.

Though Lordz becomes challenging if you die a few times while everyone else is busy growing their force, keep trying anyway, growing your circle of warriors and then buying buildings and castles to protect them.

Treasure Arena 

This 16-bit adventure game has you battling in a dungeon over valuable treasure. There are three other players looking to get a piece of the pie, too. You can respawn as long as the time is ticking away, but once you die you lose some of your gold. The aim of the game is to have the most gold when the time is up.

Various power-ups also appear around the dungeon and can be used to keep yourself alive. You and other online players aren’t the only people hanging out in this dungeon—NPCs also guard the treasure and will attack on sight if you go near them. You have to locate more powerful weapons to even have a chance against them.

Snowfight.io 

You throw snowballs and freeze enemies until they become snow-people instead of shooting each other in Snowfight.io. Wrapped in a humongous jacket, you're looking to have the ultimate snowball fight in the middle of winter. You can quickly fire off snowballs or charge up to unleash a massive one, hitting other players and slowly turning them into snow.  Massive snowballs can do some serious damage, however, if you hold charge for too long the snowball will turn into a square and not fly very far. 

Once you turned another player into a snow-person, they drop loads of goodies like cupcakes and, um, dinosaurs? Additionally you level up over time and choose some traits for your snowballs, such as ice shards or ‘yellow’ snow.