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.

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.